The State of Modern Theological Scholarship

bibleIt was only a matter of time until leftist theologians  crawled back out of the woodwork to once again proclaim the Gospel a lie.  This time it is a rehash of the 2012 Smithsonian magazine declaration that a papyrus fragment would ‘sent jolts through the world of biblical scholarship.’  Well it didn’t  then and hopeful  there are enough sane common sense Americans out there to ignore it the second time around.

The papyrus fragment that professor Karen King of the Harvard Divinity School used to introduce this so-called ‘jolt’ included the words ‘Jesus said to them,  my wife,’ and ‘she will be able to be my disciple. . .”    WOW how earth shattering!   These words were written in Coptic, an Egyptian language, using Greek letters,  and contained on a scrap of papyrus approximately 4 x 8 centimeters, containing around 30 Coptic words written in eight fragmented lines.    It wasn’t much of a jolt then or now!

As a matter of act,  King provides as much evidence for Jesus having a wife,  as the so-called documentary I watched  about a ‘bone box’  discovered buried in the Holy Land  with  the name Jesus scratched on the outside,  proves His  bones were in the box.  No one bothered to mention that the spelling of Jesus in Hebrew  is the same spelling that translates to Joshua, a very common name in ancient Israel as it is in the world today.

There were questions as to whether or not the fragment was a forgery as soon as it was turned over to Dr. King, who couldn’t bring herself to wait for a thorough investigation  before making her  ‘discovery’ known to the world.   Last week, the Harvard Theological Review  finally released a series of articles on the fragment, announcing that it probably isn’t a forgery and that it probably dates back to ancient times.   Ancient times, it turns out, is about 4 centuries later than professor King suggested in 2012, placing the fragment in the context of eighth century Egypt, hundreds of years after the New Testament was written.

While professor King still defends the fragment’s authenticity, she did acknowledged that   “It is not entirely clear, however, how many women are referred to [in the fragment], who they are, precisely what is being said about them, or what larger issues are under consideration.”    She admitted that the reference to females might be “deployed metaphorically as figures of the church or heavenly wisdom, or symbolically/typologically as brides of Christ or even mothers.”   Translation:  As much as I hate to admit it, it probably doesn’t conflict with Christian orthodoxy

Professor Leo Depuydt of Brown University argues that the fragment’s authenticity is “out of the question,” pointing to several factors, including the fact that a set of typographical errors in the fragment matches a set of errors in an online edition of the “Gospel of Thomas,” an ancient Gnostic text.   Depuydt put the chances of coincidence with respect to these errors as one in a trillion but he “has not the slightest doubt that the document is a forgery, and not a very good one at that.”

In  2012 when Professor King called the fragment “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” she was exposing her leftist theology goal of attempting to place  women as disciples of Christ.  She has devoted much of her career trying to make a case that the early church falsely  minimized the role of women.    In 2003 King released “The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle” in which she argued that some ancient texts pointed to Mary Magdalene as an apostle.  Of course she failed to mention that she  based her leftist theology on ancient Gnostic texts.

Professor King, along with others such as Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, reject traditional Christianity and have turned time and again to ancient Gnostic documents, such as were found in 1945 in Nag Hammadi in Egypt, to argue that early Christianity marginalized some theological voices and standardized doctrinal orthodoxy in order to maintain doctrinal purity.

Actually,  they are exactly right.  The pattern of marginalizing false renderings of Jesus is found even in the New Testament, where the apostles are continuously  rejecting false teachings, arguing for what the Apostle Paul called the ‘pattern of sound words.’  To the Galatians Paul wrote: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.” [Galatians 1:8-9]

So much of what is presented as modern biblical and theological scholarship is an effort to destroy the truth of God’s Word.   What Professor King refers to as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” tells us nothing about Jesus and very little, if anything, about early Christianity.   It tells us a great deal about modern scholarship, however,  and that is the real message of this controversy.

If Professor King and her ilk had actually ever read the bible with any understanding, she would know that Christ had many female disciples [students] but all twelve of his chosen Apostles were male.  While the Bible is silent on the subject, it is my own personal opinion that since Christ traveled extensively during his ministry, it would not have been  proper or orderly to have females traveling with Him.

 

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