Was Jesus Christ married?

A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: "Jesus said to them, 'My wife ...'," according to the New York Times.

Some translated legible text is, "not to m. My mother gave me li[fe]," "The disciples said to Jesus," "deny. Mary is worthy of it, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife,'" "she will be able to be my disciple," "Let wicked people swell up," "As for me, I dwell with her in order to," "an image."

When examined, the scrap was under sharp magnification. It was very small, only 4 by 8 centimeters. NYT reported that the lettering was splotchy and uneven, the hand of an amateur, but not unusual for the time period, when many Christians were poor and persecuted.

According to the New York Times, the faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass.

The finding was made public on Tuesday in Rome by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation's oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.

The fragment was only shown to a small circle at some point, but she and her collaborators said they wanted more scholars to weigh in and perhaps upend their conclusions, reported NYT.

This finding could reignite the debate over whether Jesus was married, and whether Mary Magdalene was his wife and if he had a female disciple.

Dr. King gave an interview and showed the papyrus fragment, encased in glass, to reporters from The New York Times, The Boston Globe and Harvard Magazine in her garret office in the tower at Harvard Divinity School last Thursday.

She repeatedly cautioned that this fragment should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married. The text was probably written centuries after Jesus lived, and all other early, historically reliable Christian literature is silent on the question, she said.

But the discovery is exciting, Dr. King said, because it is the first known statement from antiquity that refers to Jesus speaking of a wife, according to NYT.

"This fragment suggests that some early Christians had a tradition that Jesus was married," she said. "There was, we already know, a controversy in the second century over whether Jesus was married, caught up with a debate about whether Christians should marry and have sex."

It may be exciting for some, but others don't believe it entirely.

According to the MiamiHerald, Stephen Emmel, a professor of Coptology at the University of Muenster who was on the international advisory panel that reviewed the 2006 discovery of the Gospel of Judas, said the text accurately quotes Jesus as saying "my wife." But he questioned whether the document was authentic.

"There's something about this fragment in its appearance and also in the grammar of the Coptic that strikes me as being not completely convincing somehow," he said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference.

Alin Suciu, a papyrologist at the University of Hamburg, was more blunt.

"I would say it's a forgery. The script doesn't look authentic" when compared to other samples of Coptic papyrus script dated to the 4th century, he said.

Wolf-Peter Funk, a noted Coptic linguist, said there was no way to evaluate the significance of the fragment because it has no context. He said the form of the fragment was "suspicious."