Karen King, professor of divinity at Harvard and specialist in Gnostic Christianity, recently announced the existence of a small (3” x 1.5”), late-4th century[1] fragment in which Jesus speaks of his wife. Written in Sahidic Coptic with black ink[2] on papyrus, the fragment contains eight lines of text on the recto and six lines of text on the verso, with all margins missing.[3] The extant text on the recto side reads:
1 Not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe
2 The disciples said to Jesus
3 deny. Mary is worthy of it.[4]
4 Jesus said to them, “My wife
5 she will be able to be my disciple
6 Let wicked people swell up
7 As for me, I dwell with her in order to
8 an image[5]
Although the text bears some striking resemblance to known Gnostic texts (particularly the Gospel of Thomas[6], and to a lesser degree the Gospel of Philip), it does not match any known apocryphal or Gnostic gospel. This may be an independent Gospel of unknown character (Gnostic, apocryphal, etc.) or, as Francis Watson has argued, it may be a modern forgery created using key words from the Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas (more will be said concerning this momentarily).
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