Did Jesus have a wife and children? This sensational claim surfaces from time to time, sparking curiosity and some less-than-subtle media headlines. However, it often frustrates many religious scholars due to its lack of credible evidence.
One of the most recent instances of this debate being fired up was in 2014, sparked by the scandalous book The Lost Gospel by journalist Simcha Jacobovici and historian Barrie Wilson.
Their arguments were founded on an ancient manuscript that was, so they say, “gathering dust at the British Museum,” written by an anonymous monk at least 1,600 years ago. The two researchers carry out the document’s first-ever translation from Syriac into English, apparently revealing new insights into the life of Jesus before he was crucified.
Among the many claims in the work, the authors argued that the story of Joseph and Aseneth is actually a “disguised history” of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. If that’s true, it would follow that their two sons – Ephraim and Manasseh – would be the children of Jesus.
The book was far from the first attempt to make this assertion. One of the central plot points of the 2003 blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code involves the tenet that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus and the couple had descendants whose lineage was protected by a shadowy network of secret societies.
In 2012, a historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School added to the discussion by boldly saying she had identified a scrap of fourth-century CE religious text that contained the phrase: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’ ”. The text also includes the words “Mary” and “she is able to be my disciple.” It attracted a lot of public attention, but the document was later exposed by scholars as fake.
Despite a handful of claims, most biblical scholars argue that there is no evidence to suggest that Jesus had his own family, nor that Joesph was literally the historical figure of Jesus.
“For early Christians, their Bible was the same as that of Jews. Important figures in the Old Testament came to be seen as types of Jesus. Christians saw in a popular figure like Joseph some elements of Jesus’ ministry,” Jonathon Wright, then a DPhil student at Oxford University’s Oriental Institute, wrote in 2014.
“The book’s authors claim the story is about Jesus all along, but there is no evidence for this in the text, or any of the 90 or more manuscripts still existing today – indeed in the Armenian tradition it is often in the Old Testament. Joseph in the story does not do anything we associate with Jesus. The story was probably often copied because it was not controversial and because Christian beliefs about repentance and conversion were portrayed in an apparently Jewish story,” added Wright.
Another central claim of the 2014 book is that the story of Jesus and his family was actively censored because, in the oldest Syriac manuscript, the first chapter and the end of a letter from the translator are missing. They proposed that the editors deliberately removed it to conceal the controversial narrative of Jesus and Mary’s marriage.
Once again, it’s easy to see how this claim was made, but Biblical scholars doubt this to be the case.
“We can strongly doubt this! It is much more likely that the page was lost through wear. There are several other places this has happened in the manuscript. The story was copied into another Syriac manuscript in the middle ages, and this included the opening chapter, so the page still existed hundreds of years after it was written. This later manuscript has many works of the Church Fathers which would absolutely dispute that Jesus was ever married. Probably, the copyist thought the message of the work was clear enough and not controversial,” explained Wright.
“A good conspiracy theory always helps improvable claims,” he added.
