Thinking of Jesus’ Many Descendants

Thinking of Jesus’ Many Descendants March 30, 2017

jesus-magdalene

Okay, not really. What I am thinking about is that perennial desire among some, including friends that Jesus married somebody. Mary Magdalene is my personal favorite among the various candidates, in case you were wondering. And, there’s more, there is also a deep wish that together with this spouse the holy couple had descendants. The good people at Wikipedia have traced how this narrative has evolved over the years. What follows is my summary of how this took place together with some asides, as well as a few links added in.

Let’s start with some facts on the ground as best we understand them. And, yes, I know with the recent election we have embarked on a fact free experiment with reality. But this blog will remain steadfastly among that small band resisting the temptation to just make it all up when going with what we can verify just wouldn’t be as satisfying. While I would be happy as a clam were it to be so, quite simply there is no textual or other contemporary or even vaguely contemporary evidence for the assertion Jesus married and had children.

If you’re interested in the actually historical documents that might support the thesis, Karen King, a serious scholar has dug seriously into the matter and even found a Coptic fragment where Jesus refers to a wife. The Wikipedia article states the document is believed to be a forgery. I believe this is a bit more of an open question. But, even this text dates from no earlier than five, or at best four centuries after Jesus’ life. Some surviving non canonical texts show Jesus and Mary Magdalene in relationship. And, I think they provide hints of Mary’s true significance to Jesus – my speculation is as her chief disciple and possibly the person who should have succeeded him as head of his spiritual community.

But, back to the Jesus marrying and having a family theme. Beyond that scant evidence there are some ossuaries that got a lot of press a few years back. They appeared to have some of Jesus’ family names inscribed on them. Again, vastly less than tenuous. And sadly, they are believed by many scholars to be forgeries.

Beyond this there are some legitimate reasons to speculate Jesus married based in cultural referencing, where unmarried men were very uncommon in that time and place unless they had joined one of the few sects that practiced celibacy. (Which has its own cottage industry, of course.)

And that’s kind of it, at least from something in the neighborhood of Jesus’ lifetime.

The story of a married Jesus seems to begin in the thirteenth century when a monk Peter of Vaux de Cernay claimed the suppressed gnostic sect the Cathars taught that Jesus had some sort of relationship with Mary Magdalene. He thought concubine. While there has been to date no corroboration of this assertion about the Cathars and their supposed tradition, the story begins. The Mormons believe that Jesus had several wives. But, their source is not generally accepted outside their faith tradition. And at roughly the same time the Mormons suggested Jesus married, Leon Aubry, writing pseudonymously as Louis Martin asserted Jesus not only had a wife, but also a son. He also let us know Jesus had by that time become an atheist.

This part, not the atheist bit, but the marriage and child really caught on in the mid twentieth century. Donovan Joyce, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln, all wrote on the subject. And it was the later three who declared in their 1982 magnum opus, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail that Jesus was the genetic ancestor of the bloody (literally) Merovingians.

By the end of the twentieth century the thesis was becoming something of a cottage industry. A mix of novels and “non-fiction” presented a variety of possible narratives. One revealed pretty much all royal European families could claim Jesus as their ancestor. Another throws in an alien hybrid theory. I do like that. Psychics seem to have filled in some of the blanks left by the lack of documents. Of course the king of all these books devoted to the idea of a married Jesus would be Dan Brown and his runaway bestseller and Tom Hanks movie the Da Vinci Code. It planted the seed of an idea in many a receptive head.

Interestingly, two of the authors of Holy Blood sued Brown for stealing their idea about Jesus and Mary. A little strange as they had claimed it wasn’t an idea they cooked up and therefore owned, it was history. Me, I want to add the novel that contained the idea Jesus married Mary that I found moving as a spiritual text was Nikos Kazantazakis wonderful, wonderful Last Temptation of Christ. Here it fits into a powerful story that I find a lot more compelling than Mr Brown or his putative sources. But, that’s me.

The ever wonderful Wikipedia even gives us a list of people who have stepped forward to admit that Jesus was indeed their ancestor.

Basharat Saleem, the late Kashmiri caretaker of the Martyr’s Tomb of Yuz Asaf in Srinagar.
Michel Roger Lafosse, a Belgian false pretender to the throne of the former Kingdom of Scotland.
Kathleen McGowan, an American author, lyricist and screenwriter.
Sajiro Sawaguchi, a Japanese man living in Shingō, Aomori.
Suzanne Olsson, linked to the Roza Bal shrine of Sufi saint Yuz Asaf in Srinagar (she has subsequently renounced this claim.

I suspect there are more.

The Wikipedia article details many of the refutations of what they generously call the “hypothesis.” But, that’s a lot more boring than the story. As is always the case with such things.

So, I’ll conclude this little reflection here with the delicious if unlikely story hanging as a what if. And don’t we all love a good what if?


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