Are you sure it isn't, "Take my wife, please?"


A female professor at Harvard Divinity School has discovered a faded piece of papyrus which quotes Jesus as saying that His wife could be His disciple.

The question of the existence of a Mrs. Christ aside, funny, isn't it, how newspaper accounts of the teachings of the Catholic church (and other churches, like the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which also do not permit female ordination) always seem to locate opposition to the practice solely in the fact that none of the apostles were women? The papyrus- if a genuine quote from Jesus- would overturn that argument. But the media somehow never seem to mention 1 Timothy 2:12:

I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. (ESV)

And oddly, church bodies like the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and the North American Lutheran Church (NALC), which take umbrage on scriptural grounds to the ordination of practicing homosexuals, have no problem defying the authority of 1 Timothy 2:12 and ordaining women- despite the fact that female religious leadership was widely accepted in the Graeco-Roman world of the First Century, and that the Pauline tradition is characterized by a rejection of Jewish legal customs as a basis for Christian practice.

Given the contemporary passion for exalting current cultural values over the Scriptures, I guess if they've found a random piece of papyrus that contradicts Christian teaching, it must be both genuine and authoritative, right?

Yes. That was indeed sarcasm.

Not surprisingly, at this point scholars aren't buying the notion that the newly discovered fragment- even if it turns out to be genuine- means a darned thing.

I'm currently reading a novel by Dean Koontz- and I assure you that Odd Thomas doesn't really exist, even though Koontz has written several novels about him. The same is true of Mrs. Christ, even if the papyrus is genuine.

The whole thing reminds me of the Episkopa Theodora flap my feminist seminary professors made such a fuss over back in the day. A painting featuring a figure so labeled (above) adorns the chancel of the Chapel of Zeno of Verona inside the Church of Saint Praxedis in Rome. The phrase can be translated, by 9th Century convention, either as "Bishop Theodora" or as "Theodora, the bishop's wife." The lady Theodora- historically the mother of Pope Pascal I- wears no mitre or clerical garb, and there is no supporting history for the notion of female ordination in the 9th Century. But that doesn't stop feminists from insisting that somehow she must have been a bishop.

It's easy to invent evidence which, if true, would overturn Christian tradition and biblical teaching. It happens with great regularity

The problem is that the "evidence" invariably turns out to be bogus.

HT: Drudge

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