Descrizione

Introduction

Teaching the faith is never a task to be taken or taken on lightly. But it is made all the more difficult today by the fact that the laity whom priests, religious, and lay catechists seek to serve in their catechetical ministry are bombarded from every side not just by silly and superficial distractions from the entertainment world but also, more seriously, by distorted ideas about Christ and his Church that are widely disseminated in the news media and popular culture. Be it via television, movies, or nowadays the internet and social media, the more sensationalistic and absurd an idea about Jesus is, the more it tends to be celebrated – often with the implicit message that the latest academic “discovery” calls into question traditional faith in Jesus Christ.

To take but one example: on September 18, 2012, at the International Congress of Coptic Studies held in the city of Rome, Professor Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School presented to other academics a fragment of a papyrus written in the last stage of ancient Egyptian, namely, Coptic2. This leaf of papyrus supposedly depicted Jesus speaking about “my wife.” The news media went wild, immediately proclaiming the discovery of “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” – a title Prof. King used when she published the text. All this excitement ignored the clear facts of the case: the fragment’s origins were unknown and indeed suspect; the key sentence broke off after the words “my wife,” so that we were left with a few words floating in a vacuum; and the papyrus fragment itself dates from around the seventh or eighth century A.D., more than half a millennium after the time of Jesus. (Let us pass over in silence the glaring error of defining the literary genre of a whole work, in this case “Gospel”, from a mere scrap). More important, the larger context of scholarship that deals with Christian Coptic material was largely ignored by the popular media. The fact of the matter is that we are already well acquainted with a large mass of Coptic manuscripts dating from around the 4th century A.D., and many of these documents are full of imaginary and bizarre statements and stories about Jesus, statements that no sober historian would take seriously as a source for knowledge of the historical Jesus. Nevertheless, claims about the papyrus proving that Jesus had a wife received wide coverage in the newspapers, on television, and online. Scholarly questions and doubts about the papyrus were not reported with the same zeal and insistence3.

The public may be forgiven if they are unaware that in June of 2016 an investigative reporter named Ariel Sabar published in The Atlantic Monthly magazine online a lengthy article demonstrating that the […]