The Jesus' Wife Fragment, or Watch Out For All The Manure

Watch Out For All The Manure
The Lost Art of Truth Detection
The Jesus' Wife Fragment



(The true scholars have weighed in. If you haven’t heard the headline, a Harvard professor has discovered and published a report on a papyri fragment that mentions Jesus had a wife.
If you want the scholarly rebuttal, read the always venerable Dr. Al Mohler.)

Here is my take:

Reason, rationale, logic, common sense…does anyone remember these things anymore? People have forgotten the importance of critical thinking skills. Even the back-wood-country-boys use logic and reason; they just call it something different… “good sense”. (among other more colorful descriptions).
Critical thinking is even more important in an information age. We are bombarded with information like never before. This makes it more necessary to employ critical thinking and reasoning than ever before. And yet, it seems, the opposite has occurred. While more and more information is spewed less and less reason is applied to evaluating that information.
Do you need some examples? How about POLITICS? I don’t care which side you are on, political information is in desperate need of a critical thinking filter.
Another example, the recent discovery of the “Jesus’ Wife Fragment”. Karen King, a liberal Harvard Divinity professor, supposedly found a fragment that mentions Jesus’ wife.
Since the news broke, serious scholars have weighed in to debunk this bit of fiction reported as fact. It seems Karen had an agenda, the fragment is from over 300 years after Christ, and it is the size of a worn out business card.
But it doesn’t take a scholar to recognize something as bogus. Let’s apply some simple country good sense to our information filters. If it smells like cow manure, looks like cow manure, it is probably cow manure. It doesn’t matter how it is packaged or described, it’s still cow manure.
We have a biblical mandate to employ the brain that our Creator has given us. There is another good biblical word for this: wisdom. We must use wisdom as a filter for the information that is ever flowing from all types of sources.