While we were working on this book, an incredible discovery that impacts on our Bride of God gospel made front pages around the world. It was the discovery of a papyrus fragment, probably dated to the 4th century, of a Coptic gospel in which Jesus refers to someone as his “wife”—most probably Mary the Magdalene. It’s instructive to look at the reaction to this revelation, because it probably foreshadows what awaits our book.
Let’s take a step back. Until now, one of the main objections to our thesis would have been that there is not a shred of textual evidence from antiquity linking Jesus to marriage. As we have shown, this is not true. The canonical Gospels hint at this marriage, at least one Nag Hammadi Gospel and various other Coptic fragments found in Egypt are explicit about it, and there is even archaeology (e.g., the Jesus Family Tomb) that is consistent with a married Jesus. The only way there is no evidence is if you keep ignoring the evidence. Nonetheless, the mantra has always been the same: there is no early incontrovertible textual evidence of a marriage between Jesus and anyone.
Then, on September 18, 2012, everything changed. At the 10th International Congress of Coptic Studies, hosted by the Vatican’s Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome, Karen King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, announced the existence of an ancient text with four earth-shattering Coptic words inscribed on them, which in translation read: “Jesus said to them, my wife.” The words written in Coptic, a language of ancient Egyptian Christians, are on a papyrus fragment of about one and a half inches by three inches. While King tentatively dated the papyrus to the 4th century, she said that it may be preserving 2nd-century traditions. Meaning, it was even closer to the time of Jesus than originally thought. The complete text is as follows:
Translation—side 1
1] not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe . . .
2] The disciples said to Jesus, .[
3] deny. Mary is n[ot] worthy of it [
4] . . . Jesus said to them, My wife . . .[
5] . . . she will be able to be my disciple . . .[
6] Let wicked people swell up . . .[
7] As for me, I dwell with her in order to. [
8] an image [
On the back it says:
Translation—side 2
1] my moth[er
2] three [
3] . . . [
4] forth which . . .[
5] (illegible ink traces)
6] (illegible ink traces)1
When we look closely at the text, we see that lines #2 and #3 of side #1 are reminiscent of the Gnostic Gospel of Mary, where Peter expresses hostility against Mary the Magdalene. There, he states, “did he really speak with a woman in private without our knowledge? Should we all turn and listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?”2 In The Gospel of Thomas (114), Peter is also hostile to Mary the Magdalene. There, he states, “Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life.”3 In this instance, Peter is probably not saying that Mary should die, but that she is not worthy of immortality. For his part, Jesus comes to Mary the Magdalene’s defense saying, “I shall guide her to make her male.” What he’s really saying is that he shall elevate her so that she too becomes worthy of becoming “a living spirit.”4 In The Gospel of Philip, the disciples also oppose Mary the Magdalene. They bluntly ask Jesus, “why do you love her more than all of us?” Again Jesus comes to her defense, comparing her to light in the midst of darkness.5
Put simply, when we look at the content of the Jesus Wife papyrus, we see that it fits perfectly within a Gnostic context. More than this, like the Gnostic gospels, the papyrus was found in Egypt. Like the Gnostic gospels, it survived in Coptic. But, as we have said, there is a big difference between the previously discovered Gnostic gospels and the newly published Jesus Wife papyrus. In The Gospel of Philip, for example, Mary the Magdalene is called Jesus’ koinonos, which can be translated as wife but also as companion. Those who have been denying that Jesus had a wife have preferred, obviously, the “companion” translation. In the most recent find, however, Jesus not only states that he dwells (lives) with the Magdalene, but the word he uses to describe her is the Coptic word taàime, which can only mean wife.
Karen King understood the potency of this discovery. An anonymous, private collector had approached her, and her first reaction was to ignore the document as a possible fake. But the collector also had two letters from the late 1970s or early 80s. One was written by Free University of Berlin Egyptologist Peter Munro (who died in 2008), and the other was penned by his colleague at the university, Egyptologist Gerhard Fecht (who died in 2006). Fecht states, in an unsigned letter that forms part of this collection, that the papyrus is the “sole example” of a text in which Jesus uses direct speech with reference to having a “wife.” Fecht was also of the opinion that this could be evidence for a possible historical marriage. The two scholars authenticated the find. And yet, both Munro and Fecht went to their graves without publicizing their discovery. Why? Perhaps they feared personal attacks from theological bullies who would attempt to delegitimize them and their find.6
Armed with the fragment and the letters, King decided not to ignore the papyrus. Rather, she involved a leading papyrologist from Princeton University, Anne Marie Luijendijk, another leading papyrologist from New York University, Roger Bagnall, and Ariel Shisha-Halevy, a professor of linguistics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a leading expert on the Coptic language. All three world-class academics authenticated the find. In other words, by this point, counting King, Munro, and Fecht, we had six international experts declaring the find “kosher.”
When she satisfied herself that the text was real and important, King decided to reveal her find at a very prestigious congress sponsored by the Vatican and to submit a paper on the find to the prestigious Harvard Theological Review (HTR) for a January 2013 issue. The story immediately hit front pages around the world. King was very careful to say that although the text was important, it did not throw any light on the historical Jesus, coming as it did centuries after the crucifixion. She said that all it shows is that there were groups that maintained that Jesus was married and groups that maintained that he was not. According to King, all this was theology. To avoid controversy, she stated that neither of these positions is historical. Obviously, this is a logical impossibility. One of these positions must be historical. Jesus was either married or not married.
King’s disclaimers aside, the reaction was vicious and one-sided. King’s reputation and the reputation of her colleagues did not help. Within days, the text was declared a forgery by a chorus of scholars. The Vatican dismissed the papyrus without examining it, and Internet bloggers with degrees from various Christian institutions manned their computer stations night and day to spread the good word that the inscription was no good. Suddenly, nobody was talking about the implications of Jesus’ marriage. Nobody was talking about the uniqueness of the find. Rather, they were talking about the angles of Coptic letters and discussing who might have forged them.
Fortunately for King, nobody was suggesting that she had forged the papyrus, as they had with Morton Smith when he found Secret Mark. Everyone agreed that she was not a forger. Rather, according to this view, she was a naïve scholar who got duped by a money-starved, very clever, anonymous forger. We don’t want to go into detail with respect to the forgery allegations. Suffice it to say that they never made any sense. Who is the forger? How did he make money when the object was never sold? If it’s a fake, why were six world-class scholars authenticating it? What was wrong with their analysis?
The most interesting aspect of the forgery charge was that the forgery supposedly took place in the late 1990s or early 21st century. This would make the forger not only a world-class deceiver but a time traveler. Otherwise, how did Munro and Fecht see this document at least twenty years before it was produced? No one addressed this little matter. In fact, there wasn’t much interest in the content of the papyrus at all. As with the Jesus Family Tomb, it’s incredible how people can just ignore findings that are not consistent with their dogmas. Anyway, the damage was done. Professor Karen King and her colleagues disappeared from the debate for over a year and a half. The papyrus was tainted by the controversy. As a result, the Smithsonian Channel, which was poised to broadcast a documentary on the subject, cancelled the airdate, and the HTR withdrew King’s article from its publication schedule. The issue dropped off the public radar. The historical Jesus and his wife were pushed back into the shadows. A new find was delegitimized.
Then an amazing thing happened. Professor King stepped back into the limelight. She hadn’t been wasting her time. She had recruited a veritable dream team of scientists to check the papyrus from every angle. After nearly two years of studies, the verdict was finally in, the documentary aired, and the long-awaited paper by Professor King was published. The conclusion: “the scientific testing completed thus far consistently provides positive evidence of the antiquity of the papyrus and ink, including radiocarbon, spectroscopic, and oxidation characteristics, with no evidence of modern fabrication.”7 There was no doubt about it: the papyrus was authentic.
All this didn’t stop the nay-sayers. They now claimed that the Jesus Wife papyrus was found in the same collection as another papyrus that they deem a forgery. According to this logic, the Jesus Wife papyrus is a forgery by implication. Once again, Professor King retreated from the academic battlefield. She had presented the facts; she could not deal with the spin.
But this heartbreaking scenario is not new. It’s part of an ongoing campaign to keep the Jesus of history away from the Jesus of theology. As you read this, we’re sure that the theological bloggers are at their stations doing their best to delegitimize, marginalize, and ridicule our find. But consider this: the fact is that when we started writing this book, there was no explicit reference to a wife of Jesus in any early Christian text. Now, as a result of Professor King’s find, there is.
To understand how myth becomes fact and fact becomes controversy, we have to look for a moment at how Christian orthodoxy mobilizes to delegitimize new discoveries because it will explain some of the inevitable reactions to our thesis. Morton Smith put it this way: “few public figures from the Greco-Roman world are so well documented, but none is so widely disputed [as Jesus]. This suggests that there’s something strange about the documents or about the scholars who have studied them, or both.” He goes on to state, “most of the scholars have not been historians, but theologians determined to make the documents justify their own theological position.”8 In other words, there is much talk about Jesus, but very little clarity. Why?
Jesus of Nazareth is arguably the most famous individual to ever have lived, and yet we hardly have any original insights from him. Over a billion people worship him as God and, except for a few parables about mustard seeds9 and such, we have nothing from him. No philosophy, no theology, no legal doctrine. What’s more, from the little we have, we can draw totally contradictory conclusions. In Matthew, as quoted before, he states, “do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Later in the Gospels, Jesus states, “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” (Matthew 5:39). Which is it? Is Jesus a warrior or a pacifist? The fact is that nobody knows. There seems to be a policy to fudge Jesus’ teachings and his short life. Was he for or against paying taxes? This is an important issue because it would define if he was a warrior or a pacifist (was he willing to stand up to the Roman regime or give in to it?). His famous line “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Matthew 22:21) leaves us as confused today as it left people confused in his own day.
Was Jesus an orthodox rabbi, or a paganizing libertine? In one place he states, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” By fulfilling the laws, he seems to suggest that they have come to an end. He then fudges the message by stating, “I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17–18). What does he mean by “until everything is accomplished”? According to the church, everything was accomplished and therefore the Mosaic law does not apply. But if he came to destroy it (i.e., no Sabbath observance, no kosher observance, no circumcision, etc.), why did Jesus say “not the smallest letter . . . will by any means disappear from the law?” Some early followers of Jesus such as James and his community, the Ebionites and, at times, the Apostle Peter, held on to the Mosaic law. Others, like Paul, jettisoned the law. Which teaching was closer to the historical Jesus?
Until now, it seemed that we would never know. After all, one group of Jesus followers managed to become the official religion of the Roman Empire, and they had a policy of murdering their opposition and burning their books. That’s why we only hear the official voices. The book-burning policy was explicitly articulated. In 333 C.E., for example, the Emperor Constantine issued the following edict against Arius, a leader of the early church: “. . . if any book written by Arius be found, it is to be consigned to the fire, so that not only his corrupt teachings may vanish, but no memory of him at all may remain.”10 This policy of destroying all versions of Christianity except one almost worked.
But a funny thing happened on the way to historical oblivion: some books survived. Some were hidden in jars; others were hidden in plain sight. Only the names were changed to protect the innocent. After two thousand years, they are starting to come to light. More than this, with the rebirth of the Jewish state in 1948 and the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem as the capital of modern Israel, bulldozers engaged in building the new country have smashed into hundreds of archaeological sites just below the surface. Suddenly, we have access to the bones, bone boxes, inscriptions and, now, writings of those first followers of Jesus. We are finally in a position to begin to retrieve the history behind the theology. And in the midst of all this, we find what appears to be an actual Gnostic narrative—a veritable lost gospel—telling the story of the Bride of God. Our gospel tells her story and it’s a very, very different story from the one we are used to. It’s a story of love and marriage, interfaith coupling, sacred sex, power grabs, plots and counterplots, children, and a theology that is both secret and public—thus accounting for two thousand years of built-in contradictions surrounding the person of Jesus.
It is important to note what is new and what is not new in our study. We say that Joseph and Aseneth may very well date to Jesus’ time, in the 1st century. From a scholarly point of view, this is an acceptable statement. It’s not even new. In fact, there are scholars like Gideon Bohak who believe this story dates to the 1st century before Jesus. The dates range from the 1st century B.C.E. to the 4th century C.E. Anywhere in there is acceptable from the point of view of mainstream scholarship. The Talmudic scholar Victor Aptowitzer, in 1924, conjectured that there was a now-lost Hebrew version of Joseph and Aseneth that was originally written in the land of Israel. This would coincide with the idea that the text originates in a place preserving the very first traditions associated with Jesus and his movement. Kraemer, too, has no problem with Aptowitzer’s suggestions, stating, “the land of Israel . . . is not an impossible choice” for the origin of the text.11 So our lost gospel may very well have originated in Israel as far back as the 1st century—the time of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene.
We say that this is a Christian text. The monks who dutifully copied our manuscript for hundreds and hundreds of years also believed that this story was an important Christian story. As for the scholars, the idea that Joseph and Aseneth is a Christian text has a proud tradition, ranging from Pierre Batiffol at the end of the 19th century to Rivka Nir at the beginning of the 21st century. Even Professor Richard Bauckham, a New Testament scholar and member of the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, who is bound to have theological problems with our decoding of Joseph and Aseneth, states that “I strongly suspect that Joseph and Asenath is not a Jewish work, at least not in the form we have it, but a Christian work with allegorical meaning.”12
We say that the Joseph figure in the text can be identified with Jesus. Again, it’s not unique to us to link the Joseph of our text with the Jesus of the Gospels. From Batiffol through Brooks to Kraemer and Nir, this is a totally acceptable point of view. So what’s new? The novelty of our interpretation involves identifying Aseneth with Mary the Magdalene. This is not to say that no one previously had given Aseneth a Christian interpretation. Even Ephrem in the 4th century gave her a similar interpretation. But the majority of scholars who read Aseneth typologically identify her with the church, rather than a real-life female. In this reading, Jesus marries the church, not Mary the Magdalene. But does this make any sense? After all, our text says that Joseph and Aseneth had “intercourse” and children resulted from this union. Traditionally, this kind of language is interpreted as a reference to the many proselytes to the Christian faith. Does this really make sense? Would anyone refer to conversions being the consequence of intercourse? More than this, what do we make of the entire last chapter of Joseph and Aseneth where “Pharaoh’s son” wants to rape Aseneth and kill her children? Is this too a metaphor concerning the Church? Clearly, once we read the text typologically, if Joseph is a human being it makes sense to say that Aseneth is also a human being—not an institution. Basically, if Joseph is Jesus, Aseneth must be Mary the Magdalene. The text was probably encoded some time after the 4th-century victory of Pauline Christianity over all other forms of Christian belief.
As for the idea that this text is encoded, again, we didn’t invent this notion—nor, for that matter, did Dan Brown. We’ve now translated the letter of the anonymous man who commissioned the Syriac version of the text 1,460 years ago. In his letter, this man clearly states that the reason he wants the text translated is because of the “secret messages” embedded in it. For his part, the ancient translator also agrees that there are encoded teachings in this text. He adds that these teachings are very dangerous. But that’s not all. By definition, Gnostic texts are encoded. Theologically, they involve portraying historical characters in mythological terms. It is a genre, and it is a genre that is consistent with our newly rediscovered text. More than this, Syriac texts are also encoded. They use typology. We did not invent Syriac typology. In this tradition, Ephrem and Aphrahat explicitly tell us that Joseph is a stand-in for Jesus. So encoding heretical texts is a fact of life in the ancient world. It is not an unknown phenomenon. What we’ve done is restore this gospel to its original form.
And what do we learn? When we read the lost gospel in the way it was meant to be read, we see that the idea that Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were married is not a modern invention. It is at least as old as Valentinian Gnosticism and, as it now appears, older. It is echoed in many passages in the canonical Gospels themselves. Furthermore, when we uncover a sexual theology in our manuscript, this too is not original. It is at least as old as Gnosticism and it is echoed in the texts of pagans such as Celsus and in the Rabbinic literature as well. Even the church fathers attest to the fact that some of the earliest followers of Jesus turned his life into a theology of sexuality.
With the New Testament’s silence regarding Jesus’ marital status—especially Paul’s failure to mention a non-married Jesus when arguing for the celibacy of his followers—various Coptic papyri, Gnostic gospels, assorted archaeology, and our manuscript showing he was married, the burden of proof now switches to those who’d deny Jesus’ marriage. Show us a text that says he was not married. We now have a narrative that confirms what has been rumored for millennia: namely, that Jesus and Mary the Magdalene were married and that they had children. Gnostic Christianity kept this tradition alive. It was then preserved in the Syriac church and brought back to life with the rediscovery of the Syriac Joseph and Aseneth. We now have a very different Jesus than the one depicted by Pauline Christianity and a very, very different Mary the Magdalene.
Once we see Mary the Magdalene for who she is—once we stop reading Christian texts through the eyes of Pauline orthodoxy—a whole new world opens up. Suddenly, we realize that Mary the Magdalene was Jesus’ wife and that she was not Jewish. We further realize that she was the original Virgin Mary and the original “lady” (as in “our lady”), not Jesus’ mother. More than this, because of the suspected adultery, it was probably Mary the mother who was the object of scorn, no doubt called a prostitute behind her back. It seems that Pauline orthodoxy simply switched titles, calling the mother a virgin and the wife a prostitute.
We also realize that the Gentile church does not start with Paul, but with Mary the Magdalene. Suddenly we realize that Gnosticism does not begin with Valentinus, but with Jesus himself. We realize that the founders of Christianity were Jesus and Mary the Magdalene, not Paul. They taught a message that grew out of the margins of Judaism and blended with the margins of Artemis worship. It was this syncretic fusion that swept the Roman Empire. But it was a dangerous theology. It was adopted by Rome only after it was emasculated. Pauline Christianity took Mary the Magdalene out of the story and the sex out of the theology. In David Friedman’s words, Christianity became “a culture where the virgin symbolized all that was pure, the penis stood for all that was evil. What defined Mary’s sanctity was her lack of contact with a penis.”13 Put differently, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire only after the sexuality that was central to Jesus and Mary the Magdalene’s “ministry” was removed and substituted with Paul’s Attis-based asceticism.
Finally, when it comes to the plots and counterplots involving Jesus, Mary, and the ruling regime, this is not a story. It is reconstructed history that fits nicely with what we already know from the historical record. For example, Josephus relates that Jesus’ brother, James, fell victim to a plot: he relates that a high priest named Hanan (in English, another Annas) used the transition between one Roman governor and another to murder James. In the aftermath, James’ allies lobbied the new governor and Hanan was ousted from his position. In other words, what we read in Joseph and Aseneth with respect to Jesus, we also find in Josephus with respect to James.14
When we read the ancient story of Joseph and Aseneth, if we substitute Jesus for Joseph, Mary the Magdalene for Aseneth, and then go one step further and substitute Germanicus for “Pharaoh’s son,” a lost gospel emerges whose voice has not been heard in nearly two thousand years. This gospel provides us with hitherto-suppressed information. As a result of our lost gospel, we can now begin the process of understanding the impact that Jesus and Mary the Magdalene had on events that led up to the destruction of Jerusalem only thirty-eight years after the crucifixion.
Of course there is room for legitimate debate concerning our research and conclusions. But we know what happened in the past when scholars and journalists presented facts that did not support Pauline Christian dogma. Immediately those individuals who masquerade as disinterested scholars, while taking oaths to defend their churches and their theologies, reached for their keyboards and started a campaign whose goal was to discredit the new findings and the people who brought them to the world.
With respect to our book, sadly if the past is an indicator, most of the commentators and bloggers won’t respond to the hundreds of facts enumerated in these pages. Rather, they will start a campaign to discredit the find by discrediting the authors. Some have already attacked this book before it was completed. But we take comfort from the fact that when it comes to personal attacks on the discoverers of inconvenient truths, we are in good company. Similar attacks were faced by earlier challengers of Pauline Christian doctrine, including Eleazer Sukenik (identifier of the Dead Sea Scrolls), Morton Smith (arguably the greatest New Testament scholar who ever lived), and Bellarmino Bagatti (the legendary Franciscan archaeologist). But all these campaigns aside, nothing will change the truth.
We have now restored British Library Manuscript Number 17,202 to what it was prior to the victory of Pauline Christianity. It provides us with some missing links in Jesus’ life. As well, it has filled in some historical lacunae in the period between the demise of the Jesus movement and the appearance of Gnosticism; between the Gentile church surrounding Jesus and the Gentile church that grew up around Paul. Now we even have the exact date of the crucifixion and the historical timetable leading up to it. What are the implications of all this? The short answer is that we now have a decoded manuscript—at least as authoritative as the canonical Gospels—that provides us with suppressed historical facts about one of the most important individuals who ever walked the face of our planet. It’s as simple as that.
What we do with this information is another matter.