According to Harvard University professor Karen King, who discovered the so-called "Gospel of the Wife of Jesus", this document is most likely a fake. According to Live Science, King blames the falsification of the former owner of the "Gospel", a certain Walter Fritz, who allegedly deliberately misled the learned lady.
The mysterious name Maria
This apocryphal text was first published in 2012 at the X International Congress of Coptic Studies in the Vatican. On one side of a piece of ancient papyrus, about 4 by 8 centimeters in size, several words and letters have survived, on the other - eight fragments of text in Coptic. You can make out the phrases: "… she can become my follower …", "I live with her for that …" and "… Jesus said to them:" My wife … ". The name Mary is also mentioned here: "… Mary is worthy of this …". Presumably, we are talking either about the mother of Jesus, or about Mary Magdalene …
If we assume that Christ was married, then there is a very high probability that it was on Mary Magdalene. The fact is that the apocryphal Gospel of Philip says the following: “And the faithful friend of Jesus was Mary Magdalene. And Christ loved her more than the rest of His disciples, and kissed her more than once on her lips. The rest of the disciples, offended by this, condemned Him, They said to Him: Why do You greet her more than we? The Savior answered them, and said thus: why should I not love her more than you? The sacrament of marriage is great, for without it there would be no world."
A widow's story
According to the apocryphal version, Mary Magdalene was by no means a woman of easy virtue in the past. Both of them - Christ and Magdalene - belonged to the royal family: Jesus was a descendant of King David, and Mary Magdalene (Mary of Magdala) came from the "tribe of Benjamin" and traced her lineage from the first Israelite ruler Saul …
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Another confirmation of the marriage of Christ and Mary Magdalene is the evangelical mention of the fact that this woman washed Christ's feet. “Mary… was the one who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped His feet with her hair,” says the Gospel of John (11: 2). According to Hebrew canons, only the wife or bride of a man could do this, and not an outsider. By the way, according to the apocryphal Gospel, it was at his own wedding that Jesus turned water into wine …
This Gospel also mentions that Mary Magdalene visited the grave of Christ on the third day. And it was the widows of the deceased who were obliged to do this.
Another circumstance: the Hebrew tradition ordered men to marry at an early age. So it is unlikely that Christ remained single until the age of 33 …
Original or fake?
Ever since Karen King presented the document at the conference, discussions about its authenticity have continued. In 2014, by radiocarbon analysis, it was determined that the date of creation of the papyrus was II-IV centuries AD. That is, it was created just at the dawn of Christianity.
On June 15, The Atlantic's Ariel Sabar said that he was approached by a man named Walter Fritz, who said that he had previously owned the Gospel and that he, in turn, had acquired it in 1999 from American businessman Hans-Ulrich Laukamp, as if engaged in collecting antiquities.
After conducting a journalistic investigation, Sabar found out that Laucamp is a real person, but he was never fond of collecting ancient papyri. In addition, the businessman had only a secondary education and was unlikely to have sufficient qualifications to evaluate the artifact … Moreover, an independent analysis of the typefaces showed that a letter from a Berlin Egyptologist attached to the papyrus, allegedly written in 1982 and confirming the authenticity of the document, was also forged. At one time, Fritz presented it to Professor King as proof that the papyrus was real …
In 1995, Walter Fritz founded Nefer Art, a company offering ancient art for sale. However, the examination recognized all the manuscripts in Arabic and Greek presented on the company's website as falsification. This fact caused Karen King to question the origin of The Gospel of the Wife of Jesus.
Even experts can not always immediately determine whether the document is genuine or a forgery. The fact is that falsifiers often use really ancient papyri and ink, and only a very experienced and corrosive specialist can reveal the fact of a hoax.
Perhaps, in this case, the exposure of the hoaxer plays a rather positive role. After all, if there is no "Gospel of the Wife of Jesus", then it means that we will not have to redraw the biblical story.
