In September this year, Harvard professor Karen King discovered a piece of the gospel that she called "the gospel of the wife of Jesus."
This piece of papyrus made a lot of noise, and again the question arose about what we know about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and whether the gospels not included in the New Testament could be sources of valuable information. It is difficult to find more appropriate questions in time, as the period comes when we celebrate the Nativity of Christ.
This fragment is just a small piece of papyrus - the size of a credit card - and the inscription on it is in Coptic, the language of ancient Egypt. It contains only eight incomplete lines, and in one of them Jesus says the words "my wife."
Conspiracy theorists immediately became interested in the find, as if it were a revelation from above, and began to say that the discovered papyrus confirms the views regarding the matrimonial status of Jesus, set out in an invaluable source - in the book by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code Code).
Conservative Christians actively oppose this approach and insist that such an insignificant fragment of papyrus proves nothing. King and her colleagues took a position somewhere in the middle, and they believe that this document is dated to the 4th century after the birth of Christ, that is, it appeared about 300 years after Jesus, when all his relatives had already left the scene, and therefore the found papyrus is capable just tell us what later Christians thought about Jesus, and not about what actually happened during his life.
It turned out that most experts on early Christianity consider the fragment found to be a hoax, a fake recently produced by some amateur who, unlike King and other scholars of her level, is not very familiar with the features of the grammar of the Coptic language, and therefore he could not hide traces of your deception. The final verdict has not yet been delivered - we have yet to learn about the results of scientific analysis of ink and understand whether the discovered papyrus is ancient or modern.
But even in the case - which seems very likely - if this text is a forgery, we nevertheless receive a reminder that the Gospels of Christ have come down to us from the ancient world, which contain information that does not coincide with the widespread representations.
Nowadays, as Christians around the world are preparing to celebrate the Nativity of Christ, it makes sense to think that most of what is "generally known" about a child born in Bethlehem cannot be found in officially recognized sources, and the evidence is either part of modern myth, or based on evangelical testimonies outside the sacred boundaries of the Holy Scriptures of Christians. A few obvious examples: Nowhere in the Bible is there any indication of what year Jesus was born, or that he was born on December 25; they do not indicate that an ox and a donkey were next to Jesus' manger; it does not say that exactly three wise men (not 7 or 12) visited the place of His birth.
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For many centuries, most Christians drew information about the birth of Christ not from the New Testament, but from popular writings that were not officially recognized by the Holy Scriptures. One of the most famous books of this kind is called "The Proto Gospel of Jacob", which was written, apparently, at the end of the second century, a century after the canonical Gospels, and therefore, accordingly, it is much less likely that such a work contains a more accurate historical information.
However, Christians during the Middle Ages had little interest in historical accuracy - they loved all sorts of stories and enjoyed their content, and this was especially true of those writings in which something was said about the appearance of the Son of God in the world below.
In many ways, the appearance of the Proto-Gospel of James is associated with a desire to learn more about the life of Jesus' mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. First of all, everyone was interested in the question of why exactly she was chosen in order to give birth to the Son of God? And it is from this story that we first learn about the miraculous birth of Mary herself. It says that her mother Anna was barren, but the Lord graciously allowed her to conceive.
When Mary was born, her mother dedicated her newborn daughter to God and turned the girl's bedroom into a real sanctuary, where she lived away from the corrupting worldly influences for the first three years of her life. Her parents took Mary to the Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem, where priests were involved in her upbringing, and an angel sent from heaven fed her every day.
As she approached puberty, the priests found a guardian for her through a sort of God-inspired lottery, and the job went to the elderly widower Joseph, who at first refused to take responsibility, but then the priests were able to convince him by telling him that God did not will take no for an answer. To this day, millions of Christians consider Joseph to be an old man, and Mary - a young girl (remember all these pictures about the journey of the holy family to Bethlehem or about Christmas).
They also believe that the “brothers” of Jesus (including James, the alleged author of the apocryphal text) were in fact the sons of Joseph from a previous marriage. All this information is not from the Bible, but from the Proto Gospel of Jacob.