(April 10, 2014 at 12:31 pm)Kitanetos Wrote:Quote:Scholars at the Harvard Theological Review announced Thursday that they see no evidence of forgery in an ancient text mentioning “Jesus’ wife.” The fragment of parchment made waves 18 months ago when scholars first made its discovery public. But before jumping to any conclusions, here’s what’s most important to keep in mind.
Carbon dating of the “Jesus Wife” fragment dates the text to the 8th century in Egypt. That is some five hundred years after the official Biblical text was already agreed upon, even by the latest dating estimates. The point of the fragment has never been to prove that Jesus was or wasn’t married—the gospels themselves, written within a hundred or so years of Jesus’ death, are silent on that point.
Today it is easy to imagine that the Bible has always been one cohesive book. But it actually took centuries for early church leaders and theologians to agree on what letters, gospels, and writings counted as “canonical,” allowed to be counted as the official Word of God. Hundreds of different gospel writers and authors wrote hundreds of texts about God and Jesus. Today we have fragments upon fragments of these documents, some are quite long, some are no more than a word, or a half a word.
While not all of them were accepted as Scripture, they do tell us something about how communities worshiped and what was important to them. So, if the parchment fragment is indeed authentic, it tells us that there was at least one community of believers that imagined that Jesus did have a wife, and it meant enough to how they lived their spiritual lives that they recorded it in a parchment. Without more information, we are left to imagine what that meant for how they allowed women to work in churches or what role they gave women in society.
It also tells us something about our own contemporary views about God. We are fascinated with the idea that maybe, a God made human could have married. We wonder what implications that has for how we should view women, especially in a time when Pope Francis seems to be nudging the door open for women in the Catholic Church.
And, one thing is for certain: everyone wishes the fragment could have been bigger.
http://time.com/57705/jesus-wife-parchme...en-church/
If Jesus had a wife, and was not without sin, because he enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh, then he was not the perfect sacrifice. It is one of the reasons that any scripture mentioning Jesus as less than the perfect divinity was left out of the final compilation of the bible.
The christ is a historical figure - as real as Hercules and Zeus - IE - a religious MYTH.
And it is in the way that the current xtian sect fail to understand the laws and traditions of the Jewish religion - which the christ is claimed to have been born into - that exposes LOTS of problems.
1 - The messiah was to be of the Blood Line of King David (himself likely a myth as well) At the supposed time of the christ - it was thought that the man supplied the "seed" and the woman was only the dirt the seed was planted in and grew - but had no direct BLOOD relation to. So - the claim that the christ had NO human father - also means he could not have been of a human blood line based on that belief.
2 - The most holy commandment to the jews from their god was to go and populated the world. Teachers were men and were are required to be married - in order to teach in the temples. (Or widowed - but that of course would not apply as well). The christ - unless he was married - would not have been allowed near the temples without a wife. And remember - based on the Prophecies of the messiah - the christ could not actually have been the Jewush messiah - so to claim to be the actual son of Yahweh would have had him stoned to death - IF he actually had survived that far to begin with.
However - the story of the wedding in Canaan - if a person really looks at it - was clearly the story of the wedding of the christ. IT is/was tradition that the brides family pay for the wedding dinner - and the groom pay for the "drinks" - which then would have been wine. Think about it - WHY would anyone go to Mary - to complain that they were running out of wine - unless one of her sons was getting married - since that is the only connection she would have to the drinks. And she referred the questioners to the christ -identifying the person supplying the wine - the groom at the wedding. It was likely LATER that sex became taboo - and therefore beneath the claim of the god - so the simply pushed away from it. But there are lots of writings that would appear to indicate that the christ myth included a wife.
As far as claiming the bible to be "one cohesive book' - that is comical. The bible has never been cohesive in any way - has lots of contradictions - lots of errors in reality - and it is clearly the result of the writings of LOTS of different people. Writing style analysis has shown - for instance - that the book of John - was written by three different people.
