A new documentary has revealed that a controversial scrap of parchment suggests that Jesus Christ was married, Live Science reported.
Revealed in 2012, the papyrus, written in the ancient Egyptian language Coptic, includes a line that says, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife...'" Karen King, a professor of divinity at Harvard Divinity School, made the announcement.
However, the so-called "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" confirms that the identity of the owner of the papyrus remains anonymous.
But the papyrus was traced back to its previous owner, a man named Hans-Ulrich Laukamp, through a recent Live Science investigation.
In 1963, Laukamp allegedly bought the scrap along with five others in East Germany. "René Ernest, representative of Laukamp's estate after his death in 2002, told Live Science that Laukamp was not a collector of antiquities and that he lived in West Berlin in 1963, separated from East Germany by the Berlin Wall. Another acquaintance of Laukamp's confirmed that he was not an antiquities collector or dealer," Live Science reported.
Although test results released in April 2014 suggest that the papyrus is not a recent forgery, the authenticity of the scrap is still being disputed by critics.
The style of the message is one of the debates. According to a 2013 article in the journal Harvard Theological Review, a native scribe seems very unlikely to have made some of the mistakes in the Coptic.
The controversial phrase "my wife" is also written in heavier letters than the surrounding text, which strikes some as suspicious, Live Science reported.
"If the forger had used italics in addition, one might be in danger of losing one's composure," Brown University Egyptologist Leo Depuydt wrote drily in the Harvard Theological Review.
"If evidence were to be taken seriously that Jesus was married, vast branches of Christian thought and discipline and life and observance would just evaporate," Rev. Robin Griffiths-Jones, an Anglican priest and theologian from the Temple Church in London, said in the new documentary.
The new documentary, which premiers on the Smithsonian Channel on Monday (May 8) at 8 p.m. ET/PT, follows the story from the first email King received from an anonymous collector asking her to look at the papyrus to the ensuing media storm, which included disavowals of the papyrus from the Vatican, Live Science reported.
