Papyrus that mentions Jesus' wife fake: Vatican

VATICAN CITY: An ancient papyrus fragment which a Harvard scholar says contains the first recorded mention that Jesus may have had a wife is a fake, the Vatican said on Friday.
"Substantial reasons would lead one to conclude the papyrus is indeed a clumsy forgery," the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, said in an editorial by editor, Gian Maria Vian.
Joining a highly charged academic debate over the authenticity of the text, written in ancient Egyptian Coptic, the newspaper published a lengthy analysis outlining doubts about the manuscript and urging extreme caution.
The fragment, which reads "Jesus said to them, my wife" was unveiled by Havard professor Karen King at a congress of Coptic Studies in Rome last week. ap