Today's nytimes has an article - "A Faded Piece of Papyrus Refers to Jesus’ Wife." Here's a picture of Harvard's Karen King holding "a fragment of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a reference to Jesus' wife."
Shame on the New York Times for this headline, which implies that Jesus had a wife. This document, if authentic, was written hundreds of years after Jesus lived on the earth! King knows this, and "repeatedly cautioned that this fragment should not be taken as proof that Jesus, the historical person, was actually married. The text was probably written centuries after Jesus lived, and all other early, historically reliable Christian literature is silent on the question, she said."
Of course it is interesting as a fourth century piece of cultural information. As for the nonsensical claims of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, King simply says: “At least, don’t say this proves Dan Brown was right.”
The translated legible text reads:
not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe]
