Digging Deeper Into Archaeology Headlines

The headline reads “A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife.”  Further into the NY Times article – Click Here To Read – you can find out that the scrap is smaller than a business card, contains eight lines of broken text, is found in a different country than Jesus and his first followers lived in, hundreds of miles away from where He lived and preached, written a language He never spoke or wrote and was written more than 300 years after his death.  Three hundred years.  That’s longer than the history of the United States.

And the statement is only partially intact.  The line in question reads “Jesus said to them my wife” and like most hand copied texts of this era, contains no spaces, capitalization or punctuation.  Wouldn't you love to know the context?  What went before this fragment and what followed?

Imagine a business card-sized fragment of paper found in Chile in an Andean native language that said “Washington had two wives.”  Would that be news in the halls of university American History departments?  Would careers advance in the field of “Presidential History?”

I think this article tells us more about the state of academic studies of the New Testament than it does about Jesus’ marital status.  Seriously, here is what you need to realize if you want to advance your academic career in this field:

Originality, Not Substance, Is Rewarded

If you want to get published and advance in the field of New Testament Studies, you need to come up with something “new.”  “New” may not be of substance or value – do you remember “New Coca-Cola?” -   but “new” is what you need for a dissertation these days, not “better.”   Could it be that all that is left to be “new” in some fields is essentially “second-rate?”  Or “reaching?”

Overall, the field of biblical archaeology does continue to advance.  By that I mean, people find credible texts of manuscripts that are closer in time and proximity to original sources than we had before.  The Dead Sea Scrolls come to mind.  These are probably the most significant text discovery in the past 20 centuries and were made in 1948.  But as a college student 25 years after their discovery, I was still being taught the Documentary Hypothesis – from 1870 – as “the weight of modern scholarship.”  Why?  Because the Documentary Hypothesis undermined orthodox views of biblical authority, while the Dead Sea Scrolls essentially demonstrated that the foundational assumptions of the Documentary Hypothesis were false.  Believe anything, except historic Christian faith.

“Don’t believe everything you read about me Jesus said to them.  My wife could set those people straight said Peter.”  Funny if that was the missing part of the text in question.

Since posting this, the conversation in the blogosphere continues.  You may want to also read:
The Bible Refers To Jesus's Wife, Too - by Eleanor Barkhorn for The Atlantic

The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife? When Sensationalism Masquerades as Scholarship - by Albert Moherl