Bawdy Language

Introduction

During a recent archeological dig, I chanced on an ancient dumpster. At the very bottom, I found nestled between a moldy ham and cheese sandwich and a ravaged condom—three rectangular pieces of faded papyri, each no more than 10 centimeters in length.

Drawing on my vast linguistic storehouse, I quickly determined that what I had found was fourth century Coptic. Hours of laborious translation revealed the eight lines of the first in black ink to be a partial shopping list: “Pistachios, fruit, toilet paper, and milk,” it read. “Make sure not to forget the milk.” It was signed: “To Jesus, from his loving wife and truest disciple.” Hugs and kisses, Mary M. XXX.

Could it be? Jesus, a married man and to Mary Magdalene no less! My findings set off a firestorm amongst the church fathers. Traditionalists disputed the authenticity of the papyrus and its provenance. Professor Sidney Icon, holder of the Chaste chair of Divinity at the All-Christ seminary in Poughkeepsie called the find “a cheap fake intended by Bawdy to simply promote his blog.”

The Reverend Chutney Chilworth, director of New York University’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Crap, however, championed my position, declaring the papyrus to be the find of a century and its meaning unambiguous. He told the Times, “It’s hard to construct a scenario that is at all plausible in which someone fakes something like this. The world is not really crawling with crooked papyrologists.”

You may have heard of the so-called Apocryphal gospels – these were the ones church authorities later decided were not authentic enough to include in the Bible – because they contained woman-friendly reference. They include the gospel of Thomas, and the Gnostic, heretical, gospel of Philip, discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 – written in Coptic in the fourth century, both of which hinted at a Jesus marriage.

Add to the list, the Gospel According to Bawdy.

The second papyrus revealed the details of the Jesus relationship with women and with his own sexuality: Everything you always wanted to know about Jesus, The Man, The Father, The Lover.