Did Jesus have a wife and children? This sensational claim resurfaces periodically, sparking curiosity and generating dramatic headlines. However, the subject often frustrates many theologians and researchers of religion due to the lack of credible evidence.
One of the most recent rekindlings of this controversy occurred in 2014 with the publication of the book “The Lost Gospel” written by journalist Simcha Jacobovici and historian Barrie Wilson.
The authors’ arguments were based on an ancient manuscript, described as “forgotten in a dusty corner of the British Museum” and written by an anonymous monk at least 1,600 years ago. The two researchers have made the first translation of the document from Syriac into English, claiming it offers new insights into the life of Jesus before the crucifixion.
Did Jesus have a wife and children? Among the many claims in this book, the authors claimed that the story of Joseph and Aseneth is actually a “disguised history” of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. If this were true, one could conclude that their two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, would be the children of Jesus.
Did Jesus have a wife and children? A question that keeps coming up
The above paper was not the first to make such a claim. A central element of the 2003 hit novel The Da Vinci Code is the idea that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus and the couple had offspring protected by mysterious secret societies.
In 2012, a professor of the history of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School (USA) added a new element to this debate, claiming to have identified a fragment of a religious text from the 4th century AD that contained the phrase: “Jesus – he said: ‘My wife…'”. The text also mentioned the name “Mary” and the phrase “she can be my disciple”. It attracted a lot of public attention, but later specialists proved that the document was a fake, notes IFL Science.
Despite these claims, most theologians and Bible scholars maintain that there is no evidence to suggest that Jesus had a family of his own or that the Joseph of the story was the historical figure of Jesus.
What does the Bible say?
“For the early Christians, their Bible was the same as that of the Jews. Important figures from the Old Testament were seen as models for Jesus. Christians recognized in a popular figure like Joseph certain elements of the mission of Jesus”, wrote Jonathon Wright in 2014, then a doctoral student at the Oriental Institute of Oxford University (England).
“The authors of the book claim that the story is about Jesus, but there is no proof in the text or in the more than 90 extant manuscripts. In Armenian tradition, the story is often included in the Old Testament. Joseph in the story does nothing that we associate with Jesus. The story was probably copied frequently because it was not controversial and because it conveyed Christian beliefs about repentance and conversion in an ostensibly Jewish context,” added Wright.
Another central point of the 2014 book is that the story of Jesus and his family may have been intentionally censored because the earliest Syriac manuscript is missing the first chapter and the end of a letter from the translator. The authors proposed that the editors intentionally removed these parts to obscure the controversial narrative of Jesus’ marriage to Mary.
So did Jesus have a wife and children?
However, biblical scholars question the above theory.
“We can seriously question that statement! It is much more likely that the page was lost due to wear and tear. There are other places in the manuscript where this happened. The story was copied into another Syriac manuscript in the Middle Ages, which included the opening chapter, so the page still existed hundreds of years after it was written. This later manuscript contains many works of the Church Fathers, who would have categorically rejected the idea that Jesus was married. “The copyist probably felt that the message of the work was sufficiently clear and uncontroversial,” explained Wright.
“A well-crafted conspiracy theory always helps unprovable claims,” he added.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
