Was Jesus Married?

September 21st, 2012

09:28 AM ET

My Take: I don't know if Jesus was married (and I don't care)

Editor's Note: Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of "The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation," is a regular CNN Belief Blog contributor.

By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN
A few years ago I wrote a book about Jesus in the American imagination. What I learned along the way is that the American Jesus is a Gumby-like figure who can twist and turn in almost any direction.
Our Jesus has been black and white, gay and straight, a socialist and a capitalist, a pacifist and a warrior, a civil rights activist and a Ku Klux Klansman. Over the American centuries, he has stood not on some unchanging rock of ages but on the shifting sands of economic circumstances, political calculations and cultural trends.
Part Proteus, part Paul (who called himself "all things to all men"), he became during the Victorian period a sentimental Savior. During the Progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, he flexed his muscles and carried a big stick. During the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, he grew his hair long and strummed his guitar for peace.
Now, in an era in which Americans are debating who can marry and have sex with whom, we are given a Jesus who has given his body and soul in marriage, at least if we are to believe the scrap of ancient papyrus soon coming, via Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King and the Smithsonian Channel, to a television set near you.
“Jesus said, ‘My wife,'” this Coptic papyrus reads, and since King announced her finding at a Coptic studies conference in Rome on Tuesday, the world is trying to imagine not only what manner of man (and god) this might be, but what sort of woman he might have taken into his marriage bed.
As for the question everyone is asking — was Jesus married? — the only correct answer is that we do not know.
There are all sorts of reasons to be skeptical about this find. First, according to King it is owned by an anonymous dealer who is willing to give the fragment to Harvard, but only if it buys other parts of his collection.
Second, we don’t yet know anything about where this fragment was supposedly found or by whom, and the world of ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts is replete with fakes and fakers.
Third, even if the papyrus is genuine, it points only to one author quoting Jesus as referring to his wife. Perhaps that author was simply trying to push the early Christian tradition away from a preference for celibacy over marriage.
Or perhaps the reference is to some symbolic or spiritual “wife,” rather than one of the flesh-and-blood type. (In the New Testament Jesus already refers to himself as the bridegroom.)
In the end, what intrigues me about this tiny fragment (it measures roughly 1.5-by-3 inches) is the huge hype. The original Belief Blog piece on this story has over 4,000 comments and counting. And a Smithsonian documentary is in the works for September 30.
Jesus may be one of the best attested figures in the ancient world, but we still know hardly anything about him. And because he is the key figure in the largest religion in the world, we are keen to fill in the blanks.
The Jewish tradition has a name for this: midrash, which refers to a way of storytelling that fills in the gaps. This is what Americans have been doing for centuries with Jesus. Not sure where he was during his “lost years” from the end of his childhood to the beginning of his ministry? Send him off to India. Not sure how he looked? Draw a painting or carve a statue.
What is going on here, as I see it, is a reluctance to say, “I don’t know.”
The truth of the matter is that we don’t know what Jesus looked like. We don’t know where he was or what he was doing when he turned 18. And we don’t know if he was ever married or divorced.
What we do know is that we live in a country besotted with Jesus and in an age obsessed with marriage and sexuality and the body, which is why this tiny papyrus is making such big waves.
As for me, I don’t much care what Jesus thought about marriage, or whether he engaged in it. I think we as a society tend to collapse religion far too readily into bedroom questions, as if Jesus came into the world to tell us with whom we should be having sex, and how.
I’m more interested in what Jesus has to say about wealth and poverty, the rich and the poor. And there is plenty in the available record to read and heed, "if only we have ears to hear."
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephen Prothero.

end quote from:
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/21/my-take-i-dont-know-if-jesus-was-married-and-i-dont-care/?iref=obnetwork

If Jesus was married his most likely wife was Mary Magdelene. Even though in many scriptures Mary Magdelene was someone Jesus greatly respected at one point (about 1000 years ago) some translator or Pope decided one word had a different meaning because of multiple translations through languages that Mary Magdelene was a Harlot) and this unfortunately stuck to her. So, for the first 1000 years Mary Magdelene was someone in scripture (like Jesus' best friend: wife?) which many also felt he had children with (he was 33) and people then married as was expected of all male jewish men then in that culture by  15 or 20 years of age. So, if he was married and had children it is likely that Emperors and potentates would not want to recognize Jesus' children and might want to eliminate them if they could discover them because they might be a threat to all   monarchies as potential Kings, Queens, Princes and Princesses. So, it makes complete sense that Jesus' wife and children were left out of the picture and that Jesus was deified so no one could become like him.  This would naturally be done  by all Monarchies wanting to stay in place with their own rulers and genetic ascendance intact ongoing.

But, potentates having done this have disrespected and disenfranchised all Christians since the time of his birth when Herod tried to kill every child in his country (and did) when Jesus' family took him to Egypt so he wouldn't be murdered with the rest of the babies his age in Israel who all were killed unless they were whisked away to another country like Jesus was. So, basically all babies from uneducated and unwealthy families likely were killed at that time by Herod's soldiers if they weren't taken out of the country beforehand or whisked away in some fashion. So, Herod's intended victim escaped but thousands of babies in Israel did not. Did Jesus' wife Mary Magdelene and his children escape the wrath of Christian potentates by going eventually to India and and did Jesus after resurrecting himself from the tomb go to India with Mary Magdelene to become Saint Issa a very famous Guru there at that time along with all his children? If you will notice Jesus in Aramaic Jesus' native language which is Yeshua or Yesu is almost exactly Issa if you allow for people slightly pronouncing his name differently in a foreign language?