Undermining the tenets of Christianity is a popular theme with many college speakers, even those from a famed Divinity School.

Jenna Neumann, a student at Kalamazoo College, has a report from a speech at her school in which one professor from Harvard questioned the marital status of Jesus Christ.

Harvard Divinity Professor Karen King – who caused a worldwide controversy last fall when she unveiled a 4th Century papyrus fragment that implies Jesus was married – told a roomful of Michigan students Wednesday night that Christ could very well have been someone’s husband.

While King was careful to hedge her comments by saying no one knows for sure, she argued that her controversial evidence, in which Jesus supposedly refers to his “wife,” proves that the debate is far from over – despite the Vatican and other scholarly experts’ rejection of the papyrus scroll and its text as a fake and forgery.

“My first reaction was modern forgery; it would be two years when I finally began to change my opinion,” King said during her speech at Kalamazoo College, a private liberal arts institution in southern Michigan.

“We are still not quite sure what it is … (and) we have come no closer to answering the question of if Jesus was married or not,” she said, insinuating there indeed is a possibility that Jesus was, in fact, married.

King commented that, as a scholar, there is more at issue for her than Christ’s possible marriage. She questioned how Jesus’ celibate status came to be accepted, astonished few have previously challenged this issue.

“We should be asking how we have largely come to believe that Jesus was not married,” she said.  “It is worth questioning something that has come to shape gendered law and normative institutions.  Much is at stake in constructing this history of a usable past.”

King prompted international headlines in September when she unveiled the 1.5-by-3 inch, honey-colored scrap of papyrus paper that hails from Egypt and that she dubbed “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.”

It states in Coptic: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . . I dwell with her…’ ”

It has since been roundly criticized by scholars across the globe, and the fragment is now undergoing more scientific testing.

King said in her speech that she still awaits the results of the carbon “C-14” testing.  In the meantime, she said she grapples with questions.