In Ariel Sabar's extensive reporting on the scrap of papyrus dubbed the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife," the journalist revealed two striking truths: first, the document was in fact a hoax, perpetrated by an amateur eccentric with just enough training in ancient Coptic and Egyptology to make a convincing fake. But second—the hoax, artfully-constructed though it was, also met with far too credulous a reception from scholars who ought to have known better.
The reason for this slip in academic rigor, Sabar suggests, is that the con artist cleverly selected his marks—offering them far a discovery that catered directly to their deepest wishes. The Harvard Divinity School scholar who gave the fragment her imprimatur and authenticated it before the world, Karen King, had been searching for precisely this document all her career. Sabar relates video footage of King describing the ideal hypothetical find in a previous lecture—and it turns out that it matches perfectly with the fragment the con artist ultimately placed before her.
King had devoted her career up to that point to the study of early Christian Gnostic sects—the sort of competing schools of early Christian thought that would later be denounced as heretical. As a feminist scholar of religion, she was particularly intrigued by those sects in which women held prominent roles, of which there were several among the Gnostic groups. Yet she was dismayed that many of those same sects often denigrated marriage and the body.
The division of the early sects thus seemed to be clear, and married women who wished to follow Christ and become leaders in his church seemed to be on the horns of a dilemma. There were models of early interpretations of Christianity in which women could be leaders; but in order to do so, they needed to renounce marriage and all forms of sexuality; then there were other models of early Christianity—such as those that would eventually be judged orthodox—in which marriage was tolerated; but in which women were assigned subordinate roles in the Church hierarchy. There seemed to be no middle ground.
King therefore once remarked wistfully—as Sabar recounts—that what seems to be missing from the record of early Christianity is an interpretation of Jesus's message that combined matrimony with women's leadership: which suggested, that is to say, that women could be leading apostles of the Jesus movement without simultaneously having to renounce marriage and sexuality. In the video that Sabar describes, King was heard expressing the wish that some evidence might be found suggesting that such a sect existed after all—that an ancient scripture could be found attesting that some early Christians at least believed that married women could be leaders in Christ's inner circle.
Whether the con artist knew of this video of King's expressed wish or not, he clearly chose his target with surgical precision. The ambiguous fragment he created was a subtle enough fake to pass the initial smell test; but it also managed to hint, with just the few words that it contained, that it might be a scrap of just the sort of document King had envisioned. It contained the key words "Jesus said," and "my wife," among others. The document could therefore be presented to the world as most likely a Gospel recounting in part the experiences of a woman married to Jesus. The rest is history.
The papyrus fragment was ultimately revealed to be a forgery, and Sabar's reporting brought to light the identity of the con artist who made it. But the diversity of early Christian ideologies—before the process of canonization clamped down on the proliferation of heterodox sects and gospels—remains intriguing; and the possibility that one could find in their midst a take on gender and sexuality radically different from later developments in the church remains tantalizing (there's a reason the Da Vinci Code was a bestseller; and why a German con artist ultimately undertook to try to summon a real-life "Da Vinci code" where none had truly existed).
And now I wonder—based on a stray passage that caught my eye in an unlikely source (a nineteenth century work of fiction by a great novelist)—if this take has been hiding in plain sight for longer than we suspected.
In Flaubert's The Temptation of Saint Anthony, which I was reading last night (the novelist's late-career closet "drama"—as perpetually unstageable as the second part of Goethe's Faust) when the anchorite is besieged in the desert by the importuning voices of various Gnostic sects, one of them—the "Elkhesaites" (Flaubert's alternative spelling of the Elcesaites) drops a hint that would surely intrigue the same scholars who were so eagerly taken in by the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife." "Honor marriage!" they cry in the unwilling ears of the Saint, as he tries to shut out their temptations to heterodoxy. Then they go on: "The Holy Spirit is feminine!" (Hearn trans.)
It would take a scholar of Flaubert and of the first centuries of Christianity to be able to track down the French novelist's source for this interpretation of the sect's doctrine. It is possible, of course, that Flaubert was inventing or elaborating imaginatively on the sparse sources that were available to him at the time. (The nineteenth century novelist was writing long before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts in 1945, so pretty much all he had to go on in constructing his drama, as sources for the beliefs of the gnostic sects, were the polemical denunciations of their beliefs found in orthodox heresiologies.)
It could be, therefore, that the historical Elcesaites were just another body-denying sect who associated sublime knowledge with the escape from the material realm and the consequent renunciation of sexuality or of any other sensual existence. Yet, Flaubert is not usually wrong on the details. His Temptation of Saint Anthony resembles his other works of historical fiction—Salammbô and "Hérodias," e.g.—in so far as it combines its lush Orientalism with an often astonishingly broad classical erudition. The author of Bouvard and Pécuchet, it cannot escape notice, had a pronounced tendency to encyclopedism, and the Temptation partakes of the same spirit.
Flaubert therefore probably had some classical source for the teachings on sexuality and gender that he attributes to the Elcesaites. And if they were actually just another body-denying gnostic sect, why did he include that line about "Honor[ing] marriage"? After all, Flaubert includes many other sects in his parade of heretics who explicitly renounce sexuality: the Valesians who insist on mutilating themselves in the manner of Origen, in order to suppress sexual urges; the Montanists, whose leadership included two women prophets but who practiced celibacy. If the Elcesaites were another of their number, why do they recommend matrimony, in Flaubert's telling?
Speaking for myself, I do not share King's keen desire to locate such a sect among the early Christians. As a lifelong single, I don't have the same stake in defending marriage, and as a non-Christian, I'm not anxious to find some way in which the Jesus movement could find a place for me in its leadership. Besides, marriage and sexuality in Roman life may well have been such coercive and brutal institutions that it would hardly be a feminist victory to find an ancient sect that sanctified either. (This was, after all, a time in which patriarchal absolutism in the family was given legal sanction, and in which sexual enslavement was the norm.)
But regardless, Flaubert's attribution to the Elcesaites nonetheless fits so well with the specific ancient doctrine that King longed to find, that I'm intrigued to know if something more behind it could be discovered. And it is hardly the only hint of fascinating forgotten doctrines or roads-not-taken that Flaubert's parade of the heretics before the baffled Saint suggests. (Here, among the Cainites, for example, it would seem that we have all the roots of Romantic blasphemy—what Camus calls "metaphysical rebellion"—already circulating among the early believers. It didn't take Shelley or Byron to make Cain the hero of his story, that is to say—a gnostic sect was already working on such a subversion of values as early as the first centuries of Christian practice.)
It is likely I am saying things here that are already old hat to the students of this subject. So if anyone knows the answer, I'd always be glad to know: where was Flaubert getting his notion that the Elcesaites sanctified marriage and regarded the Holy Spirit as a feminine emanation of the deity? It's worth investigating. Because if the French novelist was basing this idea on any ancient source at all, it suggests that we need not look to German con artists to find what Karen King was seeking: there was in fact an ancient group of believers who joined marriage to women's discipleship.
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