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Scholars Dispute Manuscript that Claims Jesus Had a Wife

Mrs. Christ? Scholars at several elite universities have come forward to validate the ancient age of a document that seems to claim Jesus had a wife. Meanwhile, others say the document is a clear case of forgery.

The New York Times reports:

The “Jesus’s Wife” papyrus was analyzed at Columbia University using micro-Raman spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of the ink. James T. Yardley, a professor of electrical engineering, said in an interview that the carbon black ink on this fragment was “perfectly consistent with another 35 or 40 manuscripts that we’ve looked at,” that date from 400 B.C. to A.D. 700 or 800.

Critics say the document is phony. And even the carbon dating has been inconclusive. A team of researchers at the University of Arizaon dated the document to centuries before Christ, a result that team dismissed as erroneous. Others say the lettering and grammar are highly suspicious:

Dr. Depuydt, [an] Egyptologist at Brown University, said that testing the fragment was irrelevant and that he saw “no need to inspect it.” He said he decided based on the first newspaper photograph that the fragment was forged because it contained “gross grammatical errors,” and each word in it matched writing in the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. “It couldn’t possibly be coincidence,” he said.

Read the full story here.

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