Mrs. Jesus

I awoke yesterday morning to hear a morning news anchor telling me that something had been found that could “rock the core of Christianity”.

Great, I’m going to spend all day answering questions about something I don’t care about, just like when daVinci Code came out was my first thought.

Come to find out, this discovery is in fact something I care about, as it might reveal to us quite a bit about how people thought, spoke, and wrote about Jesus in the centuries following his death. That this fragment mentions Jesus having a wife is indeed note-worthy, if not historically bulletproof. A small piece of papyrus is a pretty big find when it is 1500+ years old.

But “rocking” Christianity? Come now, CBS Morning News. We survived the Crusades and the Medici. We can survive a scrap of paper.

So let’s look at this for what it is, not what what it might be in some alternate universe where everything is earth-shattering.