The evidence now suggests that the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” is almost certainly a fake.
Not long ago I offered some thoughts on the alleged discovery of a previously unknown Gospel, referring to Jesus’ wife. It is a very brief fragment, but it bears similarities to already known Gnostic writing. Even if it was everything that Dr Karen King claimed it to be, it would still only have been a work from the fourth century that was arguably first written in the late second century, at a time when plenty of far-fetched gnostic writings were being produced. Not exactly earth shattering. However, quite a number of scholars at the time had serious doubts that this fragment was even as interesting as that, suspecting that it was nothing more than a much later forgery, written to look like an earlier gnostic work but in fact simply plagiarising the Gospel of Thomas.
Those suspicions have now been resoundingly confirmed: the fragment is almost certainly a fake. I say “almost certainly” because of course it’s nigh-on impossible sometimes to prove such things with 100% certainty, but we now have about as much certainty as anyone could hope for. Not only does the alleged Gospel fragment strongly resemble the Gospel of Thomas in terms of language and content (however brief), but it contains an unusual typo – the very same typo that an online version of the Gospel of Thomas contained. For more detail, see the analysis over at Mark Goodacre’s NT Blog.
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Are morally assessable actions the same just if they have the same evil outcome? I don’t think so. I think this misses at least one important aspect of moral thinking, one that I call moral horror.
Political conservatives (among whom many would count me) have been lining up to shoot down Barack Obama’s statement on businesses when he said to entrepreneurs, “you didn’t build that.” They’re wrong when it comes to replying to Obama (because they misconstrue him), and I think that if they actually held to the view that Obama was replying to, they’d be wrong more generally when it comes to claiming the credit for our achievements too.
If by “creationism” we all mean the belief that evolution is false (and probably a lie from Satan) and that the Universe is almost certainly less than ten thousand years old, then I’m not a creationist. I do not have the dire issues with evolution that creationism has, and I think that creationists tend to have a wildly false understanding of the history of the universe.
This is the first in a new category of blog – Q and A. Every now and then I get an email or a message via Facebook with a question related to something that somebody has just read at the blog or in an article, or heard in a podcast episode – or maybe just a question out of the blue about an issue in theology, philosophy or biblical studies. I haven’t answered every such question and I can’t do so in future either – not because I don’t appreciate being asked, but sometimes I’ve got a pile of emails sitting there and I just can’t justify replying to all of them, nor could I necessarily do so even if I tried. I’m really sorry if you’re one of those people who I haven’t replied to. This is what I do in my spare time.
