Gospel of Jesus' Wife

The Gospel of Jesus' Wife is a papyrus fragment with Coptic text that includes the words, "Jesus said to them, 'my wife...'". The text received widespread attention when first publicized in 2012 for the implication that some early Christians believed that Jesus was married.

The fragment was presented by Karen L. King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, at the International Congress of Coptic Studies in Rome on 18 September 2012. King suggested that the papyrus contained a fourth-century Coptic translation of "a gospel probably written in Greek in the second half of the second century." Following an investigative Atlantic article by Ariel Sabar published online in June 2016, King conceded that the evidence now "presses in the direction of forgery."

Radiocarbon dating determined that the papyrus is medieval, and further analysis of the language led most scholars to conclude it was copied from the Gospel of Thomas. The fragment's unclear provenance and similarity to another fragment from the same anonymous owner widely believed to be fake further supported a consensus among scholars that the text is a modern forgery written on a scrap of medieval papyrus.

The fragment is rectangular, approximately 4 by 8 centimetres (1.6 in × 3.1 in). According to reports, "the fragment has eight incomplete lines of writing on one side and is badly damaged on the other side, with only three faded words and a few letters of ink that are visible, even with the use of infrared photography and computer-aided enhancement."

King and AnneMarie Luijendijk, an associate professor of religion at Princeton University, named the fragment the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" for reference purposes but have since acknowledged that the name was inflammatory. They further suggested the text was written by Egyptian Christians before AD 400; it is in the language they believed was used by those people at that time. They considered that the papyrus fragment comes from a codex, rather than a scroll, as text appears on both sides. King has stated that the fragment "should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married". Testing has dated the papyrus itself to somewhere between the seventh and ninth centuries, and Professor Christian Askeland of Indiana Wesleyan University has shown that the text is written in a "peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century".

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