DID THE NAZARENE HAVE A WIFE?
The controversy is hinted at, but not the legitimacy of the papyrus in question. (9/21/2012)
On this web site, as an Orthodox Jew, I have made a point of avoiding matrices about the Nazarene who is at the focus of Christian faith. However in the last few days there have been several stories in the press about the discovery of a papyrus with the Nazarene quoted as speaking about his wife. I’ll leave it to an article here by the Catholic News Agency to elaborate on how they view the item in question. The only issue to be discussed here is the matrix below. On it the axis term is MARY WIFE (of) YESHU. The latter name is a 3-letter, easy to find name that some have alleged has been used for him in the Talmud. It is used in a translation of the Babylonian Talmud 43a by Herford in Christianity in Talmud and Midrash, and I saw it many years ago in a translation put out by Soncino, but in my copy of the Shottenstein Edition of the Talmud, the name is rendered only as so and so. At any rate, since Pope Gregory the Great in 591 CE, Mary Magdalene has long been portrayed as a prostitute. As such she would be defiled. In the open text crossing the Nazarene's name is This is the law of jealousy when goes a wife under a husband and defiles... If she actually married this man, she became a widow. Crossing WIFE is The WIDOW who in your midst in the place who chooses the Lord Your God to establish his name.
DISCUSSION OF THE MATRIX. The axis term, MARY WIFE (of) YESHU, required more than one computer pass through Torah to locate. While I was interested in seeking terms dealing with prostitution and widowhood, I only found one on the matrix about a defiled wife and another about a WIDOW. The full phrases This is the law of jealousy when goes a wife under a husband and defiles... and The WIDOW who in your midst in the place who chooses the Lord Your God to establish his name were basically found a-posteriori. The Stone Edition Chumash renders Numbers 5:29 as "This is the law of jealousies, when a woman shall go astray with someone other than her husband and becomes defiled." Stone translates the full verse of Deuteronomy 16:11 as "You shall rejoice before HaShem, your God, - you, your son, your daughter, your slave, your maidservant, the Levite who is in your cities, the proselyte, the orphan, and the widow who are among you - in the place that HaShem, your God, will choose to rest His name."
Nothing was seen on the matrix about the papyrus being a hoax, inaccurate, authentic or accurate. For the two synonyms checked for WIDOW, there was about 1 chance in 15 that one of them would be on the 480-letter matrix. I rarely use R values, but they can give a sense of how likely to occur an axis term is. The more positive they are, the more significant they are. This axis term had an R value of +0.167 so it had about a 68% chance to exist in wrapped Torah.
R values that are negative are expected to be at an ELS in Torah more than once. An R-value that is 0 would be expected to be in Torah once; those that are positive should be expected less than once. The table below shows R values (including that of the matrix in this article) and word expectancies:
TABLE 1: R VALUES AND WORD EXPECTANCIES | |
R-VALUE | NUMBER OF TIMES EXPECTED AT AN ELS IN TORAH |
-3 | 1,000 |
-2 | 100 |
-1 | 10 |
-0.301 | 2 |
0 | 1 |
+0.167 | 0.68 MARY WIFE (of) YESHU |
+0.301 | 0.5 |
+1 | 0.1 |
+2 | 0.01 |
+3 | 0.001 |
+4 | 0.0001 |
+5 | 0.00001 |
+6 | 0.000001 (one in a million) |