Was Jesus married?

That's a question raised a couple of years ago by Karen King of Harvard's Divinity School. She had come across a papyrus that included the words “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...”. King did not answer the question as she did not think the papyrus comment was proof that Christ was married. She thought that it did prove that early Christians were actively discussing celibacy, sex, marriage and discipleship.

Many criticized her on grounds that the content was controversial, the lettering was suspiciously splotchy, the grammar was poor, its provenance was uncertain, its owner insisted on anonymity and its ink had not been tested. Well, now the ink has been tested three different ways by professors from Columbia, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who reported that it resembled other ancient papyri. They have concluded that the papyrus reported that it is not a forgery created in moderns times. It resembles other ancient papyri from the fourth to the eighth centuries.

An Egyptologist at Brown University, Dr. Leo Depuydt doesn't think the papyrus proves anything. However,  he saw “no need to inspect it" as testing the fragment was irrelevant. He came to this conclusion based on the first newspaper photograph which showed “gross grammatical errors,” and each word in it matched writing in the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian text discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. “It couldn’t possibly be coincidence,” he said.