Was Jesus Married?

Fiction

Brown claims that Jesus wed Mary Magdalene. He writes: “The early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible. Unfortunately for the early editors, one particularly troubling earthly theme kept recurring in the gospels. Mary Magdalene…More specifically, her marriage to Jesus Christ…It’s a matter of historical record” (244).

Fact

Jesus never wed anyone. The idea that he did is totally absent from Scripture and the early church traditions. No spark of evidence of this possibility exists anywhere…even in the bizarre, second-century apocryphal gospels…there is no evidence or even reference that Jesus ever got married. Brown theorizes that Jesus was expected to get married and must have according to rabbinical traditions. But this is a logical error to claim that Jesus could not have remained single because of a general expectation of marriage. Exceptions for bachelorhood were granted by the rabbis, and there were whole sub-groups in Judaism that practiced celibacy, such as a branch of the Essenes or the Egyptian Therapeutae familiar from Philo. Nor did many of the great prophets, such as Jeremiah, or the wilderness prophet Banus – under whom Josephus studied – or John the Baptist, have wives. Jesus was regularly linked with such as a desert prophet early in his ministry.

Fiction

There are many variations, including Brown’s, on the theme of Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene, and their child (Sarah) or children. In Holy Blood, Holy Grail – the source of many of Brown’s theories in The DaVinci Code – Mary, pregnant with Jesus’ child, fled to France, where she gave birth to a girl named Sarah, who became an ancestress of the Merovingian dynasty in France. Do these allegations come from early, original sources?

Fact

No. This version of Jesus’ family life first surfaced in the ninth century AD!

Fiction

Brown continues with further bizarre claims writing: “Jesus was the first original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene…She was of the House of Benjamin…of Royal descent” (248).

Fact

There is no record whatever of Mary’s Jewish tribal affiliation, nor of a member in the tribe of Benjamin thereby having royal blood. And there is nothing to suggest that Jesus commissioned Mary instead of the apostles as the original church leader.

Fiction

The cornerstone of Brown’s evidence for Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene comes from the apocryphal Gospel of Philip. In one passage Jesus supposedly kisses Mary as his “companion,” which Brown translates as “spouse or wife in Aramaic”: “And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” (246)

Fact

1. If Jesus had a wife, it would have been unthinkable for his disciples to speak out against her, no matter how strong their disapproval.

2. The Gospel of Philip was not written in Aramaic, as Brown claims, but in Greek!

3. The Gospel of Philip is very late among the apocryphal gospels, dating to the third century, at least two centuries removed from Jesus’ time. Scholars dismiss the work as having no genuine historical recollections that are not drawn from the canonical Gospels. The early church rejected this document.

4. It is apocryphal also in the literal understanding of that term today: “not genuine, spurious, counterfeit.”

Fiction

Brown also refers to another document in support of his married-Jesus hypothesis, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Brown’s character Teabing exaggerates, “I shan’t bore you with the countless references to Jesus and Magdalene’s union” (247).

Fact

First, neither of these documents specify that Jesus was married. Both references are late, and even they do not explicitly report any “union” of Jesus and Mary!

Fiction

Why is there no evidence of Jesus’ marriage in all of church history? Dan Brown, echoing other revisionist authors before him, claims that the church suppressed this evidence in a great conspiracy of silence. This, of course, raises the antennae of conspiracy-lovers everywhere, the sorts who thrive on UFO sightings and alien invasions from outer space and who fear the Tri-Lateral Commission. “Everyone loves a conspiracy,” writes Brown, knowingly, and clearly, many do. For this reason he can get away with the outrageous lie that Jesus’ marriage is a “matter of historical record” (244).

Fact

REALITY: No history, No record! While we do not have one wisp of historical evidence that Jesus ever married, we do have powerful evidence that he did not. Even the most radical revisionists agree with sober biblical scholars that the writings of St. Paul constitute our earliest – and therefore most credible – records of Christianity. In 1 Corinthians 9:5, Paul defended his right to have a wife – a prerogative he never implemented: “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles, and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas [Peter]?” Now if Jesus himself had ever married, Paul would surely have cited that as the greatest precedent of all, after which it would have been unnecessary even to mention such subordinate examples as Peter and the other apostles. Without question, 1 Corinthians 9:5 is the graveyard of the married-Jesus fiction.

But what if there were some real piece of evidence for Jesus’ marriage? One can hardly resist speculating as to whether Jesus’ mission to the world would have been compromised had he, in fact, wed. Certainly, entering into marriage, as ordained by God, is not sinful, so might not Christ have done so? The DaVinci heroine, for example, claims she would “have no problem” with a married Jesus, and many reader might agree. But one of the principal purposes of marriage is to have children, and an enormous – even cosmic – problem would have arisen if Jesus and the Magdalene had produced offspring. Theologians would have argued for centuries as to whether such children did or did not participate in Jesus’ divinity. And what of their children and grandchildren in turn? It would have caused no less than theological bedlam. But no such documents or arguments exist! That Christ remained celibate was very wise indeed!

Fiction

According to Brown, the church suppressed this secret, yet the secret would not die! To guard and convey that secret and to retrieve the Sangreal documents that corroborated it from under the Jerusalem Temple, the Priory of Sion supposedly created the oldest of the church’s military-religious orders: the Knights Templar.

Fact

This group did exist during the Crusades to protect pilgrims on their way to and from the Holy Land, the Knights were indeed founded in 1118 and should have become obsolete when the last Crusader fortress at Acre fell in 1291. But by then they had amassed considerable wealth and had metamorphosed into a medieval banking institution cum travel agency.