Ancient papyrus scroll verified, scientist say Jesus had a wife

New Delhi: In a shocking revelation, the scientists have said that Jesus Christ had a wife as they examined a small piece of papyrus.The piece is very small, barely three inches wide, and covered in dense, incomplete lines of crudely written Coptic text.The text on the papyrus is a conversation between Jesus and his disciples. “The Gospel of Jesus's Wife”, as it has become known since its discovery two years ago, refers to Jesus saying the words “my wife” and was this week confirmed by scientists not to be a modern forgery, but an ancient document dating from between the sixth and ninth centuries AD, or possibly earlier. This was revealed by a group of academicians in a conference in 2012.The piece could support the notion that Mary Magdalene was “a major leader in the early Jesus movement”. Karen King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, who announced the discovery of the text in 2012, said that it could shed light on early Christian debate about whether “the ideal mode” of life was a celibate one.Although the business card-sized fragment contains only a few scraps of sentences apparently torn from a larger text, they seem to express ideas not seen in the canonical Gospels of the New Testament. "This was a piece of literature generated by Christians to affirm that women who are mothers or wives can be followers of Jesus," King said on Thursday.A conservationist and an electrical engineer from Columbia University analyzed the chemical composition of the ink using micro-Raman spectroscopy and found it lacked the characteristics of modern ink but was similar to the Gospel of John ink.