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Photo: Karen L. King/Harvard/AP |
Papyrus fragment of a lost gospel that supports claims Jesus was married.
Was Jesus married?
My answer to that question has shifted dramatically over the
years, moving from a firm negative, to a tentative affirmative, and then to a
confident affirmative. The shift reflects a broader shift in my thinking about Jesus,
the Bible, and theology.
In seminary, and the years immediately following, I accepted
much of traditional Christian theology, and the biblical interpretations upon
which it rests, at face value. This resulted in an often uneasy, unacknowledged
contradiction between that theology and some of my thinking, e.g., with respect
to Christian exclusivity. Over the years, I've struggled to reconcile a growing
appreciation of genuine pluralism, science, and Christianity. The result has diminished
my acceptance of traditional Christian theology; I increasingly appreciate theology's
dynamic rather than static nature and regard revelation in relationally rather
than propositionally.
Traditionally, Christianity has asserted that Jesus never
married. No evidence supports this assertion. The New Testament's silence on
the subject is no help: arguments based upon silence have little if any logical
force. Instead, the assertion that Jesus never married was a necessary
correlate of the orthodox formulation of Jesus' ontological identity as fully
human and fully divine. If Jesus had married, would his children have been
fully (or even partially) divine, sharing both Jesus' dual nature and his
wife's humanity? Furthermore, Christianity from its early days adopted a very
negative attitude toward sex and procreation. How could a sinless Jesus engage
in sexual intercourse? Jesus' bachelorhood also provides the most important
basis for a celibate clergy, men who emulate Jesus by remaining single as in
the Roman Catholic Church.
More recently, I've concluded that the stories of Jesus'
divinity represent attempts by early Christians to talk in a meaningful, historically
and culturally appropriate way about their experience of God's life-giving, liberating
love in their encounter with the person and story of Jesus. Twenty-first
century Christians still experience God's life-giving, liberating love in their
encounter with Jesus' story, but find the concepts of a fully human/fully divine
being incomprehensible and incompatible with modern scientific thought. In
other words, those stories invite us into the mystery of ultimate reality and transformative
power even though the metaphors and myths through which people attempt to
communicate that reality have become increasingly anachronistic.
Sadly, the shift in my thinking was slow. Theologians and
biblical scholars began arguing for those positions at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Bishops like John A.T.
Robinson in the Church of England and John Spong in the Episcopal Church (e.g.,
cf. his book, Born of a Woman) started
popularizing those views in the mid-twentieth century.
If one accepts the validity of these updated perspectives,
then Jesus was a first century Jewish peasant who lived in Galilee. It's almost
inconceivable that he, like all of his peers, did not enter as a teenager into
an arranged marriage. Most likely, that marriage resulted in children. Nothing factual
is known of his children or spouse. Controversies about recently discovered
documents lend credence to the supposition that Jesus was married (cf. Paul
Wilkinson, "Lost
Gospel? 'Deepest bilge' say historians," Church Times, Nov. 14, 2014; Joel Baden and Candida Moss, "The
Curious Case of Jesus's Wife," The
Atlantic, Nov. 17, 2014)
Speculation that Mary Magdalene was Jesus' wife originated
in Christianity's early years and continues to attract considerable
speculation, e.g., in Dan Brown's bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. If Mary Magdalene were Jesus' wife, it might
explain why legend links her romantically with Jesus (legend most times has
some historical basis) and why Christians have often condemned her as a
prostitute (i.e., because to admit that she was Jesus' wife would be to introduce
sexual pollution into the sinless Jesus).
Presuming that Jesus was married paints a picture of a human
Jesus, a person who faced a life similar to mine and yet who embodied both a
radical obedience to God and a radical love for others. This is the Jesus I want
to know; this is the Jesus whom I want to emulate.
1 comment:
Thanks for this post. Thought you might be interested in a presentation Mark Goodacre (Professor of NT at Duke) gave at the 2013 Cadbury Lecture series, where he discusses the Karen King fragment referenced below.
http://youtu.be/1CtVG5GyluA
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