Jesus’ wife?

In the April 10 issue of “The Atlantic,” there is an account of the latest developments in the study of a three-inch piece of papyrus that mentions the wife of Jesus of Nazareth.

Scholars from Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Macquarie have been studying the papyrus since 2012, when Karen King brought it to the public’s attention. The papyrus has these words (translated from Coptic): “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’”

Using scientific and scholarly tools, Harvard Divinity School has pronounced the papyrus as dating back to the eighth century. As far as we can tell, therefore, the papyrus is authentic.

King herself was more interested in what the papyrus said about the Christians of the eighth century, who were the authors of the text, than about Jesus himself. After all, saying something about someone who lived eight centuries before does not make your statement authoritative.

Expectedly, many Christians displayed knee-jerk reactions. Instead of asking why anyone would say that Jesus was married, they protested that Jesus could not have married. My immediate reaction was, so what or why not?

Although I am a Christian, I am always upset by the way many Christians want Jesus to behave in a certain way. In a sense, many Christians have made Jesus into their own image.

Let us take the Passion. True, Jesus suffered terrible things, but his followers suffered worse things. Peter himself was crucified upside down. Many saints were tortured and burned. Many endured long bouts with painful disease. While the Passion was awful, it was not as excruciating as the individual passions that Jesus’s followers underwent.

In fact, even non-Christians have endured worse things. (You do not have to look far. Look at the tortures that were done during martial law and allegedly are being done even today.)

We might even irreverently and callously say that Jesus suffered for less than a week, but cancer patients suffer for months, even years.

The point of the Passion is not that Jesus suffered, but that he did not have to. He was God, after all. There was no need for him to suffer. The real point, in fact, is that he did not even have to be on earth. He did not have to be human. He chose to be human because he wanted to save human beings. God becoming human – what Christians call Incarnation – is the big thing, not the extent of his suffering.

Now, since his being God was not obvious to anyone except people who saw the Holy Spirit coming down during his baptism (Mt 3:13-17) or Moses and Elijah beside him during the transfiguration (Mt 17:3), it was not and still is not easy to believe in him.

Paul put it very well when he said that it is the Resurrection that is the core of Christianity. Paul wrote, “And if Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Cor 15:14).

You can scoff at someone who claims to be God but cannot save himself from the cross, but you have to believe in someone who suddenly rises again from the dead. That is the core of Christianity.

In short, Incarnation and Resurrection are the two realities that Christians can hold on to. Whatever Jesus of Nazareth actually did in real life is just, if you will excuse the trivializing, icing on the cake.

What does it matter if Jesus was married? What does it matter if he had, as some Christians believe, biological brothers and sisters? What does it matter if Jesus was such an indecisive person that he changed water into wine after telling his mother that he would not do any such thing (Jn 2:1-11) and that he despaired while he was on the cross (Mk 15:34)? What does it matter at all if he did what all of us humans do?

Nothing about his life really matters, except the two things about him that make him different from the rest of us – he was divine and he rose again.

This is why I do not celebrate Holy Week. I celebrate only Christmas (when God became man) and Easter (when Jesus rose again). As far as I am concerned, these are the only two Christian feasts. People quarrel about everything else and, in fact, have established various sects and kinds of Christianity because of those other things, but they cannot be Christians if they do not accept Jesus’s being God and being alive again in flesh and blood somewhere.

That, by the way, brings us to the question of life elsewhere in the universe. How can you be a Christian if you do not believe that, somewhere in the universe, the flesh-and-blood Jesus is walking around? When we say resurrected, we mean that his material body was resurrected. All of us have immaterial souls, and all of us will remain as souls after we die, but only Jesus still has his physical body. (Thomas proved it, remember?)

There is a reason the Tagalogs call Easter “Pasko ng Pagkabuhay.” Easter is the second and the only other Christmas.

Happy Easter, everyone!