So, I am always kind-of annoyed when the whole Jesus was married debate pops up. It was the big theme of that Dan Brown book and the debate always comes to the surface. The part about the debate that really gets me isn't the possibility that Jesus was actually married but instead the amazing lengths that people go to either proclaim he wasn't or that the church has covered this up unwilling to admit the truth.
I think the real question here and the real debate here should be why does this conversation make many Christians so uncomfortable? And why does this debate make many non-Christians so excited with glee that Jesus was married?
The reality here is that this should stir conversation...conversation about Jesus' humanity and divinity. For this is really what is at the core of this debate - how much was Jesus human and divine? Where is the line and when does it get crossed. For some Jesus couldn't have sinned or his divinity would be called to question, where you know from previous blogs I feel that Jesus as fully human had to experience sin - separation from God - in order to fully take on our sins and offer salvation to humanity. But the question here isn't really was Jesus married but where does the line between his humanity and divinity blur? Making it difficult for us to understand the truine nature of God.
You see, when Jesus first died - when Matt, Mark, Luke and Paul were writing - Jesus was a human. People knew him, people felt him and people saw him. His humanity was not called into question for all understood him in that nature, a fully human being. So, much time was spent proving his divinity. We see this in Matthew's attempt to time and time again prove the Old Testament prophecies that Jesus fulfilled. We see this in the great extent that Paul goes into the idea that Christ is the bride of the Church and what the resurrection of Christ did for us. You see, those early pioneers were forced to PROVE that this human being that all had come to know, even if just through word of mouth, was actually a divine God.
As the early church wasn't even formed and there were as many practices following Christ as their were people it become very important for the earlier foundation setters that Jesus divinity was proven and understood. This understanding of a God - a trinity God - was expanding the thought of the Hebrews and was often misunderstood as just another pagan cult group. But it wasn't, and they were trying to explain that.
But eventually, and you can see the shift as early as the late 1century and even in some of John's work, the new generations who didn't know the Jesus who walked amongst us were starting to need to understand the human side of Jesus; and so the paradigm shift began and the discussions continues today. The debate forever now is how do we understand Jesus as both the human and the divine Christ. How do we live with this seemingly contradictory duality?
Which brings us to the newest evidence a piece from a group called the gnostic from the 4th century which has Jesus proclaiming someone as "my wife." Oh- the holes in this that have proven it to be of course false, but for me this isn't what we should be looking at. It doesn't matter if Jesus wasn't actually married, what does it say about the cultural dialogue and the early Christian church that we have such scrolls?
For me, it means that this debate of Jesus humanity was still an important part of our culture. The gnostics just don't talk about Jesus' wife but have many other controversial thoughts - especially because the book of Thomas goes deep into Jesus' childhood and what that was like for him as he came to understand his divinity.
You see, Jesus' marriage status is not what we should be talking about here, but instead how do we as a Church come to understand and accept Jesus as both divine and human. Clearly there seems to be some invisible line that if crossed proves in either direction that Christianity is false...Jesus can't be either too divine or too human.
Why is that? What is it about Jesus' humanity that scares us - why can't Jesus be too human? What is it about the divinity of Christ that needs to be preserved just so in order for the Redeemer to be a true savior? And why is it that the Christian church is always blamed in "great cover ups" instead of realizing the truth that the early church, in all its flaws, was not one big cohesive group but instead a group of believers just trying to figure out and understand their faith - and to this day that is all we are, a group, mostly dysfunctional, of people trying to put a faith - a religion - to an experience and a set of personal beliefs.
