Via NBC Los Angeles

Joanne Murphy, right, is a library booster and former emergency room physician who realized that an old Bible had belonged to baseball great Branch Rickey, who broke the color barrier by hiring Jackie Robinson for the then-Brooklyn Dodgers. At left, Rickey's grandson, Christopher Jakle.

Joanne Murphy didn't see much in the old Bible that someone had left in a pile of books donated to the Sacramento Public Library’s volunteer fundraising group.

Its cover – which wasn't high-end to begin with – was cracked and dry, ripping along a crease more than 50 years in the making.

It had lain in a box for months – and then languished in her workshop as she avoided the tough work for restoration.

Finally, about a week ago, Murphy, a retired emergency room physician who has been learning how to restore books, picked it up. She glanced at the water damage on some of its pages, and frowned at the work that would need to be done to restore its brown and gold cover.

The only interesting thing about it was the inscription page. "Pirates," it said, "1953," followed by a long list of signatures.

It almost didn't seem worth it.

But then Murphy thought about her teacher, a rare book expert who was helping her learn how to fix the binding on old books. Always check the signatures, he'd taught her. That's one thing you don't ever want to neglect.

She peered at the list. Maybe, she thought, she recognized a name: Joe Garagiola.

She took the book to her husband, who immediately recognized the name of the baseball great, along with several others.

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The Bible, it turned out, had been a gift to baseball legend Branch Rickey, the baseball executive who broke the sport's color barrier by hiring Jackie Robinson for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Robinson made baseball history again two years later when he was named Most Valuable Player, and he moved in 1958 with the team to Southern California, where he had grown up.

In 1953, when he received the Bible, Rickey was president of the Pittsburgh Pirates. According to an obituary posted on the website of The New York Times, Rickey came from a religious Methodist family, never once in his long career playing, directing or attending a game on a Sunday.

As a young man, Rickey had lobbied in support of Prohibition, and had a reputation as a lay preacher, according to the obituary, which was written by United Press International after Rickey’s death in 1965.

In her attempts to authenticate the Bible, Murphy tracked down one of Rickey’s grandsons, Christopher Jakle, who lives in the Sacramento area. Rickey's daughter, identified as Mrs. Edward Jakle in the obituary, had lived in the Bay Area suburb of Los Altos, Calif., at the time of its 1965 writing.

But Jakle had never seen the Bible, and did not know how it might have ended up among 500 boxes of donated books in a Sacramento warehouse.

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Now repaired, the book will be put on display at the library for Black History Month in November, said Don Burns, a spokesman for the Sacramento library system.

He said it was highly unusual for a rare book to show up in the thousands of boxes that the system receives each year.

"I've been here for almost 21 years and this is the first I've heard of something of that sort," Burns said. "It’s like 'The Antiques Roadshow.'"

NASA

Hurricane Sandy is seen from the International Space Station on Oct. 29 shortly before it made landfall on the East Coast.

CHICAGO -- Nearly four in 10 Americans say the severity of recent natural disasters such as Superstorm Sandy is evidence the world is coming to an end, as predicted by the Bible, while more than six in 10 blame it on climate change, according to a poll released on Thursday.

The survey by the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with the Religion News Service found political and religious disagreement on what is behind severe weather, which this year has included extreme heat and drought.

Most Catholics (60 percent) and white non-evangelical Protestants (65 percent) say they believe disasters like hurricanes and floods are the result of climate change.

But nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of white evangelical Protestants say they think the storms are evidence of the "end times" as predicted by the Bible.

Overall, 36 percent point to end times and 63 percent to climate change.

PRRI research director Daniel Cox said that some respondents -- including 75 percent of non-white Protestants -- believe extreme weather is both evidence of end times and the result of climate change.

"No one really knows how (end times) would look and how God would bring it about," Cox said.

Politics also color perceptions of the weather, the survey found. More than three-quarters of Democrats and six in 10 independents believe that the weather has become more extreme over the last few years, while less than half of Republicans say they have perceived such a shift.

"Their political leanings are even affecting how they experience weather, which is pretty fascinating," said Cox.

The January-to-November period in the United States this year was the warmest first 11 months of any year on record for the contiguous states. And 2012 will likely surpass 1998 as the warmest year on record for the nation, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Most climate scientists believe that the warming trend for the nation and the world is tied to human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels.

Extreme storms like Sandy, along with more intense droughts, wildfires and floods, are projected by some as the result of climate change, though scientists are reluctant to attribute individual events to global warming.

The PRRI survey found that while there is disagreement about the causes of global warming, there is widespread agreement about the need for action.

Two-thirds of Americans say the U.S. government should do more to address climate change -- including most of those who believe global warming is due to natural weather patterns, the survey found.

It also found that 15 percent of Americans believe that the end of the world, as predicted by the New Testament's Book of Revelation, will occur in their lifetime. Some 2 percent believe that the end of the world, as predicted by the ancient Mayans, will occur by the end of this year.

Some people who say they believe in end times do not act on that belief in their everyday lives, said Cal Jillson, political science professor at Southern Methodist University.

"I think that's their way of expressing a deep commitment to Biblical literalism," said Jillson. "If you sat down with them and said, 'Do you really think that within the next few years we'll experience the end times?' they probably don't ... A good number of these people are saving for retirement."

The survey of 1,018 adults was conducted between Dec. 5 and Dec. 9. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

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Karen L. King/Harvard University via Reuters

A previously unknown scrap of ancient papyrus written in ancient Egyptian Coptic is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters September 18, 2012. The papyrus has four words written in Coptic that provide the first unequivocal evidence that within 150 years of his death, some followers of Jesus, believed him to have been married.

If a fourth-century fragment of papyrus that purportedly quotes Jesus telling his disciples about "my wife" is authenticated, it could upend the modern church’s understanding of the “son of God.”

“If Jesus is a normal human being and he’s sexual, that’s the real fear,” James Tabor, a biblical scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the co-author of books about Jesus and his family, told NBC News. “You can’t think of Jesus like that because he’s too holy.”

The Bible contains no explicit mentions of Jesus being either married or not married, but few churches have room for the idea of a sexual Jesus. The Catholic Church’s celibate priesthood is built on the belief that Jesus was not married. Eastern Orthodox priests are often married, but the church teachings don’t mention a married Jesus. Protestant ministers are allowed to marry, but there again, it is not common to teach that Jesus himself was married.

Reality check on Jesus and his 'wife'

"I would say that the more conservative groups might be more inclined to be bothered by the idea of a married Jesus, and especially that he might have had a child, god forbid, since that would really raise questions about his 'divinity,' since they see him as fully human and fully God," Tabor subsequently explained in an email.

"Can God sleep with a woman and have a child? It just doesn't fit the concept they want for Jesus," he said.

The Unification Church, however, does believe that Jesus was supposed to get married, and some of the early teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stated Jesus was married and even fathered children, although that belief is not widespread today.

The Mormon and the Unification Church’s beliefs, however, have more to do with their own theology of marriage rather than with scripture, Ben Witherington III, a New Testament professor at the Asbury Theological Seminary, told NBC News.

Unlike their modern counterparts, there is evidence that some early Christians -- the Valentinian Gnostics -- believed Jesus was married, according to April DeConick, a biblical scholar at Rice University. The recently discovered papyrus, she told NBC News, would be the second piece of evidence from an ancient Christian gospel that early Christians were not bothered by the idea of a married Jesus. The first piece of evidence -- which DeConick said comes from the Gospel of Philip -- identifies Mary Magdalene as Jesus' wife.

NYT: Historian says piece of papyrus refers to Jesus' wife

Karen L. King, the Harvard Divinity School professor who unveiled the papyrus, cautioned that the discovery does not serve as evidence that the historical Jesus was married.

Harvard University/Rose Lincoln/EPA

Karen L. King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University holds a previously unknown ancient papyrus fragment from Egypt that has four words written in Coptic that provide the first unequivocal evidence that within 150 years of his death, some followers of Jesus, believed him to have been married.

"This new gospel doesn't prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage,” King said in a press release. “From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus' death before they began appealing to Jesus' marital status to support their positions."

The Christians who eventually became dominant, DeConick said, believed celibacy was the route to heaven.

“Catholicism was deeply shaped by monasticism in its formative period,” Witherington said, adding that he thinks this belief brought about “a very deficient view of the goodness of human sexuality as a gift from god.”

“There’s just nothing biblical about that,” he argued. But Catholics couldn’t imagine Jesus as married, because that would have “tainted” his holy image, he said.

DeConick, who explored sex and gender in early Christianity in her book, “Holy Misogyny,” said that in the ancient world, the female body was considered weak, pitiful and wretched.

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“We have so many hundreds of years of an understanding of sexuality that in some way sex is not divine, it’s not sacred,” she said. “It’s going to be a long hard road for people to see a figure that they think is god as being engaged in a sexual activity – even with a wife.”

Witherington believes most churches will likely be ambivalent about a married Jesus because the implications are unclear. But he said some liberal Protestants might even accept the idea that Jesus could have had children in the same way as some Protestant churches no longer teach the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.

“It doesn’t mean [the children]'d be as perfect as dad,” he said. “That would be a hard act to follow whether you’re a wife or a kid.”

The public, however, appears more open to the idea of a married Jesus. Ongoing for centuries, the debate about the possibility that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene was also the subject of author Dan Brown’s bestseller, “The Da Vinci Code.” Both the book and the recent discovery of the papyrus fragment that reignited the debate have garnered a positive reaction from the public.

“Maybe it makes him more human for us,” Tabor said.

Witherington, who wrote a book debunking some of the statements made in “The Da Vinci Code,” said he encountered the same “enormous positive reaction” on his book tour at the time.

“There was such a willingness to believe that what Dan Brown was saying was the gospel about Jesus,” he said.

“Jesus was an early Jew. I don’t think Jesus had any qualms about marriage,” Witherington added. “But [Jesus] also thinks it was perfectly viable for an able-bodied man to become single for the sake of [god’s] kingdom.”

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