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Harvard’s Karen King has become famous to the general public because of the fourth-century papyrus that she wrote about for the Harvard Theological Review (HTR) in which Jesus refers to “my wife.” King was careful to point out that this is not evidence that Jesus was in fact married—only that some Christians in the centuries after his crucifixion thought he was. Nevertheless HTR changed its mind and withdrew King’s paper from its January 2013 issue pending more (secret) tests relating to the authenticity of the fragment, despite King’s careful consideration of the authenticity question, including the judgment of two other eminent experts vouching for the fragment’s very likely authenticity. As of this writing, nothing more is known about the supposed tests or when they will be completed.
More recently, Professor King has written about another ancient document. In this case, Jesus’ wife is named—none other than Mary Magdalene! Professor King’s new study has recently been published in the highly respected scholarly journal New Testament Studies (NTS).1
King has been able to make this identification by studying an apocryphal gospel known as the Gospel of Philip found among the Nag Hammadi Codices discovered in Egypt in 1945. According to King, “The Gospel of Philip represents the incarnate Jesus actually having been married (to Mary Magdalene).” This of course does not prove it has historical veracity.
Professor King explicitly addresses the questions: “Does the Gospel of Philip depict the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene as ‘spiritual companionship’ or ‘real marriage’? Was sexual intercourse performed in the ritual of the bridal chamber?”
In the Gospel of Philip, Mary Magdalene is referred to as Jesus’ koinônos and hôitre. Translated neutrally, both words can mean “companion.” Yet often, depending on context, they can imply marriage or sexual intercourse. In other passages in the Gospel of Philip, King tells us, another Greek word, erkoinonei, clearly refers “to heterosexual intercourse.” Still another “word group hotr (‘join, unite’) is used generally to refer to sexual intercourse and marriage … It is therefore plausible,” King concludes, to read the passage in which Jesus refers to Mary Magdalene as his koinônos and hôitre “as a reference by Jesus to Mary Magdalene as ‘his spouse’ and the ‘one he is joined with,’ i.e., in marriage.”
Following the insights of the Norwegian scholar Einar Thomassen, King tells us that in the Gospel of Philip:
Jesus’ incarnate acts simultaneously are “real” … and are paradigmatic for ritual practices that effect salvation … [T]he question of whether Jesus’ relation to Mary Magdalene is either spiritual (metaphorical) or real (actual marriage) poses a false dichotomy … [A]ccording to the Gospel of Philip, the incarnate Jesus’ real marital relationship with Mary Magdalene provides the spiritual-symbolic meaning and the paradigm for the image of the initiation ritual as a bridal chamber. That is, the marriage is 017 018 both actual and spiritual; it does not merely provide the metaphorical meaning of salvation but effectively enables salvation for those who enter the bridal chamber and are united with their spiritual doubles. The marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is thus both real and spiritually effective.
In another passage in the Gospel of Philip, only partially preserved, King reconstructs it as follows: “The S[avior loved her] more than [all] the discip[le]s, [and he] kissed her [mouth many] times.”
King comments on this passage:
While the lacunae make certainty impossible, the Gospel of Philip arguably refers here again to Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ koinônos [koINwNoC] … While kissing can be read to refer metaphorically to spiritual, not carnal, relations, there is again no reason to see these interpretive options as mutually exclusive. Moreover, if there were no actual kissing, it would be difficult to understand the jealousy of the disciples … This perspective is strengthened by considering [another passage, Gospel of Philip 59:2–6], where the practice of greeting each other with a kiss is explicitly presented as effecting spiritual reproduction.
The Gospel of Philip thus offers what King calls an “incarnational theology” that includes “sexuality and marriage within the compass of the incarnate Jesus’ full humanity.”—H.S.
Harvard’s Karen King has become famous to the general public because of the fourth-century papyrus that she wrote about for the Harvard Theological Review (HTR) in which Jesus refers to “my wife.”a King was careful to point out that this is not evidence that Jesus was in fact married—only that some Christians in the centuries after his crucifixion thought he was. Nevertheless HTR changed its mind and withdrew King’s paper from its January 2013 issue pending more (secret) tests relating to the authenticity of the fragment, despite King’s careful consideration of the authenticity question, including the judgment of two […]
