
“The final episode of ‘Seinfeld’ proved quite disappointing to us here in the village. Hosee the goat herder actually got up and left during a commercial break.”
More scholars weigh in on this earth-shattering find that will turn the Christian churches upside down and right-side up (that’s me reading between the lines, in brackets):
“There’s something about this fragment in its appearance [Office Depot watermark] and also in the grammar of the Coptic [repeated use of "groovy"] that strikes me as being not completely convincing somehow,” he said in an interview on the sidelines of the conference.
Another participant at the congress, Alin Suciu, a papyrologist at the University of Hamburg, was more blunt.
“I would say it’s a forgery [you idiots]. The script doesn’t look authentic” [it's printed with an IBM Selectric] when compared to other samples of Coptic papyrus script dated to the 4th century, he said.
[Dr. Karen] King acknowledged Wednesday that questions remain about the fragment [which Target did you buy this from, the one on Hillside?], and she welcomed the feedback from her colleagues. [I'll kill you bastards if I get the chance] She said she planned to subject the document to ink tests to determine if the chemical components match those used in antiquity [which, as we know, stretches from the days of the Pharoahs right up to the Coolidge administration].
“We still have some work to do, testing the ink and so on and so forth, but what is exciting about this fragment is [all the attention I'm getting and] that it’s the first case we have of Christians [Gnostics] claiming that Jesus had a wife,” she said.
She stressed that the text, assuming it’s authentic, doesn’t provide any historical evidence that Jesus was actually married [I never said that and please stop spreading the rumor that I did], only that some two centuries after he died, some early Christians believed he had a wife [which is good enough for me to get into the New York Times].
Wolf-Peter Funk, a noted Coptic linguist, said there was no way to evaluate the significance of the fragment because it has no context [although it will be featured on Letterman tonight]. It’s a partial text and tiny, measuring 4 centimeters by 8 centimeters (1.5 inches by 3 inches), about the size of a small cellphone [which it references repeatedly, which is also weird].
“There are thousands of scraps of papyrus where you find crazy things [I know, I wrote most of them],” said Funk, co-director of a project editing the Nag Hammadi Coptic library at Laval University in Quebec. “It can be anything [like Jell-o].”
He, too, doubted the authenticity, saying the form of the fragment was “suspicious.” [why is half the text X'd out with the word "stet"?]
And if it is proved a forgery, you will still hear from some quarters: “But why would someone fake this if they didn’t already have reason to believe others would believe it to be true? Why is that? Because … it’s true—and the forgery proves it!”
As with the Jesus Seminar, the standards of scholarly rigor drop precipitously the closer you get to anything that might resemble the so-called Jesus of faith…







o172709@rtrtr.com
September 20, 2012 at 1:50 PM
I find your use of brackets to highly detract from the message. Many talented authors, when attempting to show a type of double speak, will simply include a “translation:” paragraph following the main body of their work.
Anthony Sacramone
September 20, 2012 at 2:29 PM
Why I have NEVER been so insulted in all my LIFE! [Well, of course I have. In third grade my teacher had the audacity to call me a "pitiless pedant" -- and in front of the police! But I have to build up to high dudgeon, you understand. With low dudgeon, you can just hit the ground running..]
“Many talented authors…” Well there’s your mistake right there! If I were among the ranks of talented authors, do you think I’d be caught in this virtual hell with you? Do you think Herman Melville took time out from his day to pick nits about brackets/end brackets with anonymous critics in the comboxes of his blog? Talented authors…
I’ll thank you, sir, to check your misapprehensions at the door, which I hope you never darken again!
But thanks for reading and have nice day.
Andreas Wendt
September 21, 2012 at 4:20 AM
Anybody with good eyes will spot the words “Let Be” at the end of the fragmend, which have doubtlessly been turned into “Let It Be” by following transscriptors according to their feeling for metric. This is nothing less than the original manuscript of the 1970 Beatles’ hit – a discovery which a big conspiracy tries to suppress by spreading rumors about something so meaningless as “Jesus’ wife”.