OK Good Reads

OK, it’s back, flash in the pan news for a few days, the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” is not a forgery after all, notwithstanding not unlikely panic, outrage and denial from Rome. 

OK, nobody took papyrus that, enlarged, looks for all the world like a piece of burlap, and wrote on it with a wide marker pen to try and fool us. Tests indicate the papyrus and ink in Coptic are both ancient, probably dating from 8th century Egypt.

OK, what does this prove? That someone in the eighth century wrote the words “Jesus said to them, My wife ... she is able to be my disciple ...” on the center of the fragment that someone later cut out of a larger papyrus. It no more says anything historical about Jesus than Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. 

OK, to be trivial, while the little fragment stirs the imagination of those who believe Jesus was as fully human as he was fully God (which is orthodox Christianity), and may stir the outrage of Christianity piously obsessed with asexual blond, blue-eyed males naked but modestly and unrealistically wrapped in a loincloth on the cross, and the sinfulness of sex 

the little scrap of papyrus is no more historical evidence about Jesus than speculating about Tom Sawyer’s life as an adult after his adventures with Huckleberry Finn -- and that conversation in which Tom and Huck are digging for buried treasure and fantasizing about what they're going to do with their part of the treasure. Remember?! Huck asks, "What you going to do with yourn, Tom?"

"I'm going to buy a new drum, and a sure-'nough sword, and a red necktie and a bull pup, and get married."

"Married!"

"That's it."

"Tom, you— why, you ain't in your right mind."

"Wait— you'll see."

Was it Becky Thatcher, whom Tom saved from a thrashing when he leapt up in class and shouted, "I done it" -- ?

OK, the 8th century scrap of papyrus tells no more about the historical Jesus than Christopher Moore’s charming little novel Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. For anyone who wants to imagine what Jesus’ doctrinally even-then-perfect but nevertheless likely curious life as a pubertal adolescent might have been like in his period after manger, magi and time in the temple with the elders, but before baptism, I heartily recommend   

OK, of obsessions, I'm remembering driving off a ferry across the sound to Long Island thirty or forty years ago and past a church sign, "Infant Jesus XX Church." Why not "Adolescent Jesus XX Church" where Christopher Moore likely goes for confession on Saturday mornings before attending services tomorrows --

And OK, of Good Reads, this morning’s news of legislation underway to name The Bible as the Louisiana State Book? Not going there. God help us. Some XnRt into selfrighteous up yours and in your face. Comes to mind the Ash Wednesday gospel, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21. Comes to mind the self-effacing humility of the Man on the Cross.

W+