Jesus: Not the Universe's Most Eligible Bachelor?

Pardon the title, but I couldn't help myself.

The past few days have thrust a wee bit of controversy into the midst of the Christian community...and with that, a chance to learn a little bit!  The controversy: a 4th century fragment of a papyrus manuscript that apparently makes reference to "Jesus' wife."  For the whole story, check here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/september-web-only/jesus-said-to-them-my-wife.html

So, before we get all hot and bothered here, let's establish WHAT WE ACTUALLY KNOW rather than jumping to conclusions and wanting to damn all modern scholars and their satan-inspired ways, ok?  What is said, and thus what we know:

-The fragment appears to be authentic to the 4th century rather than some sort of modern forgery inspired by The Da Vinci Code.
-The fragment is Egyptian and in Coptic; this suggests, but far from proves, that this text fragment could be connected to the very sizable Gnostic community in Egypt during the Early Church era.
-The document is a fragment - 33 words on 14 incomplete lines.  It's not conclusive of much of anything, other than that at least some early Christians thought that Jesus was married.  That doesn't mean Jesus was married.  It doesn't mean that this idea was mainstream.  It does, however, mean that at least some people thought this.

This is along the same lines of the "Jesus' tomb" discovery from a few years back; see http://abcnews.go.com/International/jesus-tomb-controversy-rages-archeologists-explore-2000-year/story?id=16111993 if you need a refresher.  That is, it's a tempest in a teapot; people sensationalize the news because they know it will get a rise out of some people.  Hardcore atheists will get all excited because it makes Christianity and the Bible look "less true," and hardcore conservative Christians will get huffy about it and start decrying the worthlessness of modern scholarship that would even consider something like this manuscript.

So, here's where we have a teaching moment.  An important one.  The circle-the-wagons approach to defend against "secular" modern scholarship and its "anti-God" agenda misses one really rather key point - most of what we know about our scriptures have come down to us through the witness of a variety of manuscripts, many of them fragmentary.  There is no copy of the whole Bible dating back to when we think much of it was written.  For the sake of ease, we'll focus on the New Testament.  Our best guess is that the earliest of the New Testament's books, some of Paul's letters, were being written in the 50s AD; we figure that the youngest books (some of the general epistles and Revelation) probably came around at the end of the First century or early in the Second.  Our oldest COMPLETE COPIES of any of these are older - we don't have a complete New Testament manuscript that is older than the Fourth century (Codex Sinaiticus).  And...that one is missing some familiar verses, and contains the Epistle of Barnabas and sections of the Shepherd of Hermas, two popular early Christian writings that were ultimately not included in the official canon.  Prior to the discovery of Sinaiticus and some other very old, complete manuscripts (Codex Vaticanus being the other HUGE one), our go-to text was a document known as the Textus Receptus, which Erasmus compiled in the late 15th and early 16th century based off the best Greek manuscripts of his time.  Before that, we didn't do much with the Greek and Hebrew, really, since the Catholic Church maintained that the ONLY valid biblical witness was the Latin Vulgate, which was a late 4th century translation into Latin from the Greek and Hebrew mostly by St. Jerome, and which included the Old Testament Apocrypha.

In order to arrive at an idea about what the oldest, most original texts of the New Testament originally said, we have to take a look at the large amount of fragmentary manuscript evidence - we've got pieces from everything in the New Testament.  From there, we have to compare all of them and make educated decisions about what makes the most sense as being the original text.  This is a difficult, arduous process that a biblical scholar can devote an entire career to helping do.  What we've arrived at through modern scholarship is a better, more faithful text.  This where I have to disagree with my KJV-only sisters and brothers - the King James is based, for the New Testament, off the Textus Receptus...which, contrary to what many KJV-only folks maintain, is not some sort of magical whole Bible from way-back-when.  It was a compilation, too, but one done before scholars had access to any of these wonderful, really old (and thus closer to the original) manuscripts and fragments.  If your choice is a translation based off of compilations, would you rather have the compilation that reflects the oldest (and thus most original) documents, or the one put together by a scholar who lived hundreds of years before any of those manuscripts were even discovered?

So, back to our new fragment - what do we do with it?  It's not from any canonical book of the Bible, or even from another known early Christian writing, so ultimately it's a historical curiosity and piece of evidence proving that at least some people in the early Church thought Jesus was married.  It's not going in the Bible.  It's not changing anything in the scriptures.  It's a historical artifact; no more, no less.

None of this is meant to challenge anyone's faith.  At the end of the day, reading the Bible requires a certain amount of trust, no matter who you are or which translation you're using - trust that God has, does, and will continue to speak through a document in which flawed human beings have been entrusted with its penning, preservation, and presentation.  Trust God.  Trust that God speaks through the scriptures...but don't turn them into an idol.  Don't say things about them that they themselves don't say.  Be wise and discerning.  Listen for God's voice in them.  Think about them; study them; meditate on them.  But please, please, PLEASE - don't use them for what they're not, belittle the faithful women and men who engage in scholarly study of them, or craft a faith for yourself which is so fragile that a piece of papyrus from the 4th century becomes the most threatening thing in the world.