Vatican Newspaper Calls ‘Jesus Wife’ Fragment a ‘Clumsy Fake’
At Religion News Service, Alessandro Speciale reports that the Vatican has declared the recently publicized papyrus, in which Jesus mentions that he has a wife, a fake. Harvard professer Karen King has studied the fourth-century Coptic fragment and believes it suggests that some early Christians believed Jesus was married. Giovanni Maria Vian, a historian of early Christianity and editor of the Vatican daily newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, writes that the fragment represents “a contemporary ideology which has nothing to do with ancient Christian history, or with the figure of Jesus.”