The truth about Jesus’ wife

OR A MOMENT BACK IN 2012, READERS AROUND the world might have thought that Jesus had had a wife. Karen King, an esteemed professor at Harvard University’s Divinity School, made headlines when she revealed what she named “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” a small fragment of papyrus with eight cryptic, incomplete lines in Coptic, including: “Jesus said to them, My wife …” The journalist Ariel Sabar was on hand in Rome for her attention-grabbing announcement, which seized the media’s attention (including this magazine’s), thanks to the tantalizing possibility of an entirely different Christian history—one in which Mary Magdalene, the possible wife in question, was even more central to Jesus’ story. King’s discovery had the potential to