From Fox News.

A Harvard University professor on Tuesday unveiled a fourth-century fragment of papyrus she said is the only existing ancient text quoting Jesus explicitly referring to having a wife.

Karen King, an expert in the history of Christianity, said the text contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to “my wife,” whom he identifies as Mary. King says the fragment of Coptic script is a copy of a gospel, probably written in Greek in the second century.

King helped translate and unveiled the tiny fragment at a conference of Coptic experts in Rome. She said it doesn’t prove Jesus was married but speaks to issues of family and marriage that faced Christians.

…The unclear origins of the document should encourage people to be cautious, said Bible scholar Ben Witherington III, a professor and author who teaches at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He said the document follows the pattern of Gnostic texts of the second, third and fourth centuries, using “the language of intimacy to talk about spiritual relationships.”

Read it all and check it out here as well.

I wish I could be as gracious as Ben Witherington about sensationalist stuff like this. I really do. But I can’t. I have no patience for it anymore. It is precisely this kind of baloney that has made me lose confidence in the state of biblical “scholarship,” with a few exceptions, Witherington being one of those exceptions. I am grateful that Karen King is not making grandiose claims about this. But let’s get real about this “discovery.” There are no other texts that record Jesus was married, the document dates from the 4th century, and like the other Gnostic texts which seem to fascinate so many people, appears to have very little to do with the biblical story of God’s plan for dealing with the twin problems of evil and death that human sin has caused.

Any biblical “scholar” (I am trying to be generous here by even using the term, scholar) who works to dismantle Scripture so that people lose confidence and trust in it, and operates with the assumption that the ancient texts of Scripture cannot be trusted (the so-called hermeneutic of suspicion) has no credibility in my mind. It is a mystery to me why such people would even pursue biblical studies in the first place.

What folks in the pulpit and pews and on the streets need are scholars who take the text at its word and seek to help the rest of us better understand those texts, folks like Tom Wright+, Ben Witherington, Scot McKnight, and Richard Bauckham.  As for the rest of them, may God have mercy on their sin-sick souls.