Bride of Christ

I'm going to weigh in on this because I can do it briefly, which is unlike most other commenting I can offer.

An ancient fragment of papyrus has very recently come into the public eye that quotes, in coptic, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’ ”

1. The fragment is a fragment. Have you ever gotten a pre-approved credit card in the mail and promptly ripped up the envelope and its contents so that no one could piece together any sensitive information in it? The point of shredding the document is to make it unreadable, to turn it into nonsense, because that's what happens when we take a piece of something out of context. We turn it into nonsense. That's what's happened with this fragment. It has no surrounding pieces. It has been thoroughly decontextualized. It has been rendered essentially into nonsense.

2. The piece is dated about four centuries later than the life of Jesus of Nazareth. It's not exactly an eyewitness account. That's not to say that only eyewitness accounts of Jesus are authoritative; that argument would throw Paul into considerable scrutiny, and we don't have any first-century texts anymore, anyway. Every piece of biblical literature we have is copy that is assuredly much farther than seven degrees away from Jesus. But that this fragment appears so much later, in a language Jesus probably didn't speak, doesn't help gain it any authoritative traction.

3. Who cares? What does our theology - our God-talk - gain by putting faith in Jesus' abstinence and/or celibacy? The theological effect of holding Jesus above the rest of humanity because he never got married and/or had sex is the damnation of sex regardless of its relational context. If we say Jesus is more holy because he never had sex, whether in or out of marriage, then we claim that sex itself is a problem, a sin regardless of whether or not we are in a committed, God-blessed relationship. That is ridiculous! Sex is nothing to be ashamed of. It is a sign of health and intimacy in a relationship, a sign of trust and adoration between people committed to each other. It is a gift from God, not a sin.

Maybe Jesus was married. Maybe not. There's a lot about Jesus we don't know because nobody bothered to write it down. One of these days, maybe I'll ask Jesus about his wife, but in the meantime, I'll just do my best to live like he showed me.