Friday, April 11, 2014

Larry Hurtado’s Summary of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Fragment—Chris Keith

Over at Larry Hurtado's Blog, Prof Hurtado gives a useful and concise summary of the Harvard Theological Review that contains the most recent assessments of the Gospel of Jesus' wife fragment.  He adds some further thoughts as well.

2 comments:

  1. So, if I'm following the discussion correctly, the new consensus (version 3.0) is that this is NOT a modern fraud (version 2.0) or an ancient text roughly contemporaneous with the non-canonical Gospels (version 1.0), but is instead a text of unknown origin and purpose from roughly the time of early Islam, probably from a Christian hand?

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    1. Larry, I think that rather than more clarity, we have more confusion. Basically, the pro-forgery crowd got their doubts out there quite early. This swayed public opinion (I don't think we can discuss "consensus" at this point). We are just now hearing rebuttals that problematize the arguments for modern forgery. I see no clear resolution (as King hopes in her essay) that will allow us to move past the questions of forgery. I'm still having trouble with the typo that matches Grondin's webpage. Now I have questions about the divergent dating of the fragment and the ink. As you know, I remain open to the possibility that this isn't a modern forgery, but my doubts remain as well.

      -anthony

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