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Possible Scholarly Evidence that Jesus was (gasp) Married


gustava

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I just read this and came to post about it; you beat me to it! :lol:

I don't know if he was married or not, but even if incontrovertible truth were discovered that he was, the

Catholic Church wouldn't believe it unless Jesus himself came down and told the Pope. Even then...no, probably not. :roll:

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I always thought it was a possiblity because of the era and location in which he lived. It was the cultural norm for young men to marry. That was just how things were done and it had nothing to do with the ebul secks or defrauding or any of that crap! It was all money and raising family standing in the community. And, on a more emotional note, Jesus had a lot of heavy issues he was dealing with - who would want to deny him a special person to share things and confide in? That's just cruel.

There was a ton of document editing that was done for cultural modification (encourage Christianity, discourage other religions in the area) & political purposes in the few hundred years after his death and those early church organizers probably hid or burned tons of things that didn't fit their motives. I hope the archeologists find a ton more verifiable artifacts!

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Judging by the time and place Jesus lived in (and my admittedly limited knowledge of it), I have a difficult time believing he was never married, and that the New Testament never mentions anyone questioning Jesus' marital status. Surely if Jesus were celibate, Paul would have mentioned this at some point, or the authors of the books that detail Jesus' life?

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The actual document is around the year 400, and the text doesn't seem to be much older because the article states it was written in the language of that time.. so, this document, if it doesn't rely on older, trustworthy sources or is much older than it it believed, it isn't a really good source, unfortunately.

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It wouldn't affect me one way or the other if there was definitive proof that Jesus was married. However, I don't think that it is absolutely out of the question he was unmarried. The Essenes are the most well documented, but their were movements of Jewish celibates who lived common lives during the period of Second Temple Judaism. Before Christianity, Judaism also was also a religion that proselytized. There are some scholarly estimates that up to 10% of the Roman world during the Second Temple period could have been practicing some form of Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today is the survival of the Jewish theological and social tradition after the destruction of the Temple.

I do hope more information is released about this fragment. It's always exciting to find writing that is autheticated for the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

Edit-Just saw Cran's post and reread the HuffPo article. Well that's a disappointment. I thought they were claiming the document was from the 2nd century.

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What hard evidence do we have, other than from early Christian sources, that Jesus even existed? Seriously.

Not much. There are some writings by Josephus but it is a blurb and largely believed to be inserted later. Not to mention that Josephus was not a contemporary of 'Jesus'. I find it amusing that people will dismiss this newly found writing because of when it was written, but they won't dismiss the bible for the same reasons.

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oh please, we all know he was gay! :lol:

Seriously though, I don't see it as a big deal if he were married! I would actually kind of look on Jesus more positively if I knew he was more like us, with flaws, married to an ex prossy etc...

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Since his age at the crucifixion is traditionally thought to be 33, there is also the possibility he may have been a widower who then took up itinerant preaching. Women died like flies in antiquity.

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What hard evidence do we have, other than from early Christian sources, that Jesus even existed? Seriously.

There is some evidence that his mother Mary was not a virgin. Like the fact that sperm is needed to fertilize an egg! There is some evidence that snakes don't talk and tell you not to eat apples! There is some evidence that a man cannot part the sea! Etc, etc, etc.

These people clearly don't care about evidence or science.

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There is some evidence that his mother Mary was not a virgin. Like the fact that sperm is needed to fertilize an egg! There is some evidence that snakes don't talk and tell you not to eat apples! There is some evidence that a man cannot part the sea! Etc, etc, etc.

These people clearly don't care about evidence or science.

Pfft!! ~**..MAGIC..**~

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The idea that Jesus was unmarried and chaste is largely accepted by Christian denominations and a reason for the practice of celibacy among Roman Catholic priests.

Heh, that reminds me of the old joke about the priest who arrives in heaven and finds out the word was actually celebrate.

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What hard evidence do we have, other than from early Christian sources, that Jesus even existed? Seriously.

There is no evidence. His story is not original. Much of his life was taken from pagan gods. In addition, nothing that he taught was really new to Jewish beliefs. His statement about the greatest commandment was stolen from a Jewish scholar, Hillel.

Although we think of Romans as only worshipping Zeus and other typically Greek inspired dieties, there were several foreign religions that had temples in Rome. Many of them were very popular with the Roman populance. Before the destruction of the temple, Judiasm actually had several Roman converts.

It makes sense to me, that in such an enviroment, someone sympathatic to Judiasm but also enjoying some of the mystery religions could have combined them into the story of a rabbi who died and rose again-just like the pagan gods did in the mystery religions

By the way, I wanted to post this! Darn it.

Some of the comments that follow the article are interesting. It really shouldn't be a threat to Christian theology for Jesus to have been married.

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At the time this was written they were still fighting over what Christianity really was. There were lots of 'heretical' gospels running around at the time and no official orthodoxy. This sounds like a gnostic text to me, which makes sense since it's in Coptic. Deciding what became canon was very political and I don't think we can discount that when we look for the 'truth' about Jesus' personal life in the bible.

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What Grovelina said. It may very well be a gnostic text (I was thinking along those lines, too). The headline is designed to make people take a look at the article, but all this partial text reveals is that Jesus said something about "my wife." The pice of paper is 1 1/2" by 3" and that's far from a complete context. It's interesting in the study of the history of Christianity, that there was a group of people who possibly believed that Jesus was married. Whatever one believes about the historical Jesus, this little piece is an interesting look into ancient Coptics and evidence of the debate about Christians and marriage at the time. By seeing that an ancient text may have referred to Jesus as married, we can infer that there were folks at that time who probably at that time who used it as evidence that Christians should marry. What made it into the canon completely ignores the issue of his marital status.

My beef is with the headline and the backlash - "all the evil librul scholars are now saying Jesus was married! That's not in the Bible!!!" waaahhhh! The foundations of our very faith and American patriotism are being torn apart! We must circle our wagons even tighter and breed more babies to destroy these evil-thinkers. ..... in reality, the scholar in the article (can't recall her name) doesn't even say anything about Jesus' marital status, just that there is a bit of paper with a bit of words on it.

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What Grovelina & Salsa have said.

Early Christian history until at least AD 400 was a hotbed of conflict & competition amongst competing belief groups, all of whom understood very well the importance of getting their theology into religious canon.

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To the question of the existence of a historical Jesus, there are no, meaning 0 scholars at any US/ European/Middle Easterm institution of higher learning who have researched the both the text and the sociology of the time and come to this conclusion. Secular institutions and scholars who certainly do not believe he is the son of God. That meme is decades old and I have seen it used as a sort of "ah-ha!" arguement to discredit each branch of the Abrahamic faiths by their various critics. You can find essays questioning the existence of Moses or any charismatic leadership figure for the ancient Israelites, and just last year someone published a book questioning the existence of Mohamed as an actual historic person.

Specifically about Jesus, remember that the Jesus movement STARTS in Judea and the Judaism of the time. It did not start in the pagan world, it moved over to the pagan world once the movement maxed out on the number of Jews who would accept him as the Messiah in Judea and other capitals with heavy Jewish populations like Damascus, Antioch, and Alexandria. The earliest leadership is Jewish. Trinitarianism, Jesus's exact relationship to God, and creeds are not articulated until hundreds of years after the begining of the movement, and were done to explain monotheism in the Greek pholosophical language of the time. The appeal of the earliest form of Christianity in the pagan world was not how much it lined up with mystery cults, because it took Christianity hundreds of years to fully get there. The appeal was those early communities DID feed the hungry out of their resources, buried the dead (and this is truly a big deal in the ancient world where if you were destitute and did not have a proper burial, or your body was descecrated, it was felt your spirit would never be at peace) and accepted slaves into its faith.

We can argue how far off the original message it would stray, but there is no scholarly evidence that Jesus is some made up guy. Of course he isn't mentioned in contempary Roman sources, he was an itinerant teacher who was from the most backward part (Galilee) of what was considered the pit of the Roman Empire (Judea). Why would any Roman official at the time who is looking to get rotated out of Judea write about a criminal? As to him being missing from Jewish sources, of course he is. Why would they waste scroll on someone they considered a heretic and a blasphermer?

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I'm not a huge Jezebel fan, but I laughed at this:

So you met this really nice guy, and it's been going great. You talk all the time, he really seems to "get" you, you've let him into your heart, you've been getting into some pretty kinky shit (not to go all TMI, but there's some cannibal roleplaying involved). And then, yesterday, out of nowhere he just sort of casually lets it drop that he has a wife. What the hell, Jesus?!?

http://jezebel.com/5944527/jesus-waits- ... es-married

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