Papyrus find suggests Jesus Christ was married

A scrap of ancient papyrus no larger than a credit card may provide evidence that Jesus was married and might even have had a family.

The faded fourth-century fragment challenges centuries of Church teaching on clerical celibacy and whether women can be priests. Its existence was disclosed by a Harvard historian and has already triggered fierce scholarly debate.

Containing just eight lines, the document, which measures 3.1in by 1.6in, includes the words, "Jesus said to them, my wife", and the sentence: "She will be able to be my disciple."

Written in the ancient Egyptian Coptic language, it also includes the phrases, "My mother gave to me life" and, "Mary is worthy of it". The latter is likely to be seized upon as evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.

The finding was announced by Karen King, a professor of Church history in Harvard's divinity school, at an international congress on Coptic studies in Rome on Wednesday.

She believes the script is probably a copy of a gospel written in Greek in the second century AD and that while it by no means proves that Jesus was married, it shows that there was discussion of the question as early as the fourth century. Its precise meaning is now the subject of international academic conjecture, but its authenticity has not been disputed.

"Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim," Prof King said.

"This new gospel doesn't prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus's death before they began appealing to Jesus's marital status to support their positions."

Historians believe that the text, already being called "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife", was written by members of the Gnostic sect, which questioned whether Jesus was both human and divine, and which was later condemned as heretical. The prominence given to Mary Magdalene in the Gospels, as the first witness to the Resurrection, has helped to increase speculation about her role.

The Da Vinci Code, the novel by Dan Brown, brought the theory that Jesus married her to a wider audience.

Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at the interdenominational Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, said yesterday: "The reference to the wife is, I think, a reference to Mary Magdalene because in the Gnostic movement there is only one woman that Jesus has that close disciple relationship with." He added that the word wife was sometimes used by Gnostics to signify a non-sexual relationship with a woman.

The provenance of the fragment is unknown. Professor King was first shown the papyrus scrap in 2010 by a collector who wanted help in translating and analysing it and whose name has not been made public. He said he acquired it from a German in 1997. The scrap came with a letter from the early 1980s that names a professor in Egyptology from the Free University in Berlin as having said it was evidence that Jesus was married.

But it is unclear who wrote the text, when, or where it has been for the past 17 centuries. It is believed to have come from Egypt because of the language and because the dry climate there allows ancient writings to survive.

Prof King took great steps to ensure it was genuine and leading scholars, including Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York, have attested to its authenticity. A Vatican spokesman said: "We do not really know where this little scrap of parchment came from. This does not change anything in the position of the Church, which rests on an enormous tradition, which is very clear and unanimous.

"This is not an event that has any influence on Catholic doctrine."

Jacques-Noel Peres, a professor at the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris, pointed out that the text was from a relatively late period.