Person: King, Karen
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King
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Karen
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King, Karen
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Publication "Jesus said to them, 'My wife ...'": A New Coptic Papyrus Fragment(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2014) King, KarenPublication Response to Leo Depuydt, "The Alleged Gospel of Jesus's Wife: Assessment and Evaluation of Authenticity"(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2014) King, KarenPublication Reading Sex and Gender in the Secret Revelation of John(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) King, KarenThe Secret Revelation of John is replete with imagery of the divine Mother alongside the Father God and his Son Christ. It boasts of powerful female saviors—and even identifies Christ among them. Eve is not the cause of humankind’s fall, but of its redemption. The sexual intercourse of Adam and Eve marks not original sin, but a step toward salvation. Yet readers find, too,an idealized divine world in the pattern of the ancient patriarchal household,and a portrait of another female figure, Sophia, whose bold and independent action leads to a fatherless world headed by a sexually violent and deviant bastard. The complexity of this imagery, nestled in a story that operates with oppositional strategies and parody, ensures that no single monolithic perspective on sex/gender will rule—and indeed it opens up a crack where it is possible that the wise-fool Sophia is more completely the hero of the story than one might think. This essay aims to explore the complexities of SRJ’s representation of gender and the implications of their strategic deployments.Publication Factions, Variety, Diversity, Multiplicity: Representing Early Christian Differences for the 21st Century(Brill, 2011) King, KarenAbstract Early Christians largely understood their differences in terms of factionalism, articulated in terms of discourses of orthodoxy and heresy. Contemporary historiography has troubled those discourses with talk of the “diversity” or “variety” of early Christianities, but without entirely displacing either the logic or the functions of the orthodoxy-heresy bifurcation. This essay examines the limits of current historiographical modes of treating early Christian diversity, and suggests an understanding of religion and methods of analysis usable for a history of difference beyond orthodoxy and heresy.Publication The Place of the Gospel of Philip in the Context of Early Christian Claims about Jesus’s Marital Status(Cambridge University Press, 2013) King, KarenIt has long been recognized that one of the main topics of the Gospel of Philip is ritual, including ‘the bridal chamber’, and numerous studies have discussed what practices and attitudes toward sexuality and marriage are implied by this imagery. This article will build on these studies to argue that the Gospel of Philip portrays the incarnate Jesus as actually married (to Mary Magdalene) and it represents that marriage as a symbolic paradigm for the reunification of believers with their angelic (spiritual) doubles in Christian initiation ritual, a ritual which effectively transforms initiates into members of the body of Christ and also enables ‘undefiled marriage’ for Christian partners by freeing them from demonic influences. The article aims to show that this distinctive position on Jesus' marital status was catalyzed by reading Ephesians 5 in conjunction with Valentinian incarnational theology.Publication Jesus(Oxford University Press, 2019-11) King, KarenThis essay examines the diverse ways in which representations of Jesus/Christ served as paradigms for authorizing, exemplifying, and promoting early Christian beliefs and practices. It asks how ancients might have read the sex/gender status of Jesus/Christ in such depictions of him as a savvy interlocutor in public debates, an exorcist, an eschatological warrior, the divine Son of God, divine Wisdom, an enthroned imperial ruler, a publicly humiliated and executed criminal, a slave, a homeless man, a mother, a eunuch, the husband of many virgins, a circumcised Jew. Representations of the gender and sexuality of Jesus/Christ appear in resistance to (Roman) violence and injustice; in the cultivation of moral and spiritual selves; in intra-Christian debates regarding sexual ethics; in the promotion of Christian teachings as divinely authoritative; in the polemics of identity formation and boundary setting, especially with regard to Jews; and in theological reflection, especially Christology and ecclesiology.