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In Religio 1/2013 I reported on a newly discovered fragment of the Coptic text in which Jesus speaks about his wife. Many scholars have had strong reasons to regard this fragment, called the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" (GJW), as a modern forgery. My present article summarizes the new reasons leading to the conclusion that this particular text is a forgery and briefly discusses the problem of detecting forgeries of early Christian texts in general. On the example of the dispute about the authenticity of the Letter to Theodore (the Mar Saba Letter), we can see that with the absence of serious doubts about language, writing or material, and with a - however problematic - content making good sense in the ancient context it may be very difficult to determine whether a text is a forgery or not. The article also deals with several notions of the married Jesus as found in the history of biblical interpretation, the conclusion being that the idea of Jesus' wife, most often recognized as Mary Magdalene, has been widely known only since the 20th century. These modern interpretations have arisen through a stronger emphasis on the human nature of Jesus. Perhaps the first person to come with the idea of a fully human (and married) Jesus was Nikos Kazantzakis in his novel The Last Temptation (1955). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a Czech translation and interpretation of the newly discovered Coptic fragment which is usually called the Gospel of Jesus' Wife. The main aim is to describe the circumstances of its discovery and the most recent debates among scholars about its authenticity. I try to reconstruct the possible content of the fragment (or - if it is a fake - the intention of its forger) by means of a comparison with the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary and Gospel of Philip. Because the main candidate for Jesus' wife seems to be Mary Magdalene, my analysis is focused on her depictions in Gnostic stories and in contemporary literature. My conclusion is that the text on papyrus was probably influenced by both ancient and modern tradition, and it is more likely to be a modern forgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]