Galen Watson's Blog: The Psalter - Posts Tagged "gospel-of-thomas"

I posted this blog September 30, 2012, after Doctor Karen King announced the discovery of a papyrus fragment that seemed to show Jesus was married. Critics at the time, including the Vatican, claimed the scriptural fragment was a clumsy, modern fake. However, with the news release this week that radio carbon dating shows the papyrus fragment is not a modern fake, and micro-Raman spectroscopy determined ‘the carbon character of the ink matched samples of other papyri that date from the first to eighth centuries CE,’ I’m re-posting it. Some religious critics will undoubtedly dispute the scientific findings; nevertheless, the scripture fragment sheds light on the diversity of early Christian belief.

The Gospel of Jesus' Wife 9/30/2012

Doctor Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School rocked the religious world last week when she presented a papyrus fragment that seemed to show Jesus was married. The fragment, written in Coptic, hinted that Mary Magdalene might be the wife. Doctor King also offered a scholarly paper outlining her research of the document.

Conservative religious scholars and groups, including the Vatican, immediately piled on with assertions that the fragment was a clumsy modern fake. Of course, they made those claims without testing the authenticity of the papyrus or the ink. Religious groups even began leaking [read fabricating] rumors to the press that the Harvard Theological Review would not publish Dr. King’s paper because of doubts about the discovery and its provenance. Dr. King stood behind her findings, and some of the naysayers hedged their accusations, claiming that even if it wasn’t a modern fake, it most certainly was a fourth-century fake. Harvard set the rumor mongers straight, confirming that they would, in fact, publish the paper in January.

One of the more reasoned objections was that the phrases used in the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife were copied from the Gospel of Thomas. Never heard of the gospel? That’s not surprising because it’s not in the Bible, but perhaps it should be. Thomas is one of the oldest scriptures—perhaps the oldest—and many Bible scholars date it even earlier than New Testament gospels. Half of its 114 scriptural sayings are repeated in Matthew, Mark, and Luke—the synoptic Gospels.

The Apostle Thomas - Russian Icon

So why didn’t the Gospel of Thomas make the Bible cut? Because in its pages, Thomas claimed that he was Jesus’ twin brother. Imagine the shivers it sent through the Council of Nicaea as Emperor Constantine demanded that attending bishops come up with a single doctrine to get their cash. That’s right -- follow the money. What the emperor offered, in exchange for settling on one Christian doctrine instead of the existing hundreds, was that Rome would pay a stipend to official priests and their churches.

Roman bishops under Constantine’s jurisdiction were already getting wealthy off Imperial stipends, and they could see it all slipping away if theirs wasn’t the agreed-upon Christianity--and Thomas just didn’t fit. Many of the Gospels could be altered to conform to the official State religion, with a few paragraphs added or deleted here and there, and altered words, but how do you explain away a twin brother? One of the characters in THE PSALTER explains the problem.

“These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas recorded.”
“So?” Isabelle shrugged.
“You’re an expert in ancient Greek. How do you translate Didymos?”
Isabelle thought for a moment. “It means twin.”
“Very good, darling, but what you couldn’t know is that Thomas is the Greek spelling of the Aramaic word Te’oma, which also means twin. So Thomas’ name is really Judas the twin, twice over. Whenever they call him Thomas in the New Testament, the author is calling him the twin.”

So let me see? The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife is a fake because it’s a copy of Thomas, but Matthew, Mark, and Luke are copies of Thomas and they’re canon Gospels—however, Thomas itself is nowhere to be found. I can see why Isabelle is confused, but imagine the implications: If Mary had twins then at least one of them was Joseph’s son, so Mary and Joseph really did…well, you see where I’m going with this. As heretical as it may seem to modern Christians, for some of the earliest followers of Christ, it was gospel.