really recommend getting a partner with a different religion than you and very little knowledge of your religion because the opportunities for explaining things to each other are just exquisite
yesterday she told me some story about the Buddha's wife and child and I was like. Wait. He fucked? And she was like yeah of course he fucked, why wouldn't he, he was the most attractive and loveable and and wise and etc. person who ever lived. why would he not fuck.
this morning she looked perplexed in the kitchen at me and said "did Jesus not fuck?"
I mean, he did. But it was monogamous and his wife was a literal sex worker before their marriage, but people like to ignore that fact.
If you ask the Roman Catholic Church, they will swear that the woman wasn’t his wife and he was a bachelor and virgin.
Guess it's time to debunk some conspiracy theories about Jesus.
(My credentials: I have a Masters of Divinity, which is a combination of Biblical analysis, Christian history, and some other odds and ends. I am not Catholic, and have never attended a Catholic school; my school taught using the standard academic texts about the Bible, not doctrinal assertions from any denomination or Christian group. Although my professors were all Christian, the Biblical and Christian history was taught the same way it would have been if an atheist were teaching it.)
There is absolutely ZERO evidence that Mary Magdalene was a sex worker. The belief that she was is based on a combination of Medieval misogyny (on several levels) and sex negativity. As for Jesus, the only evidence that Jesus was married comes from one fragment of a papyrus with shaky provenance that was probably written at least 200 years after Jesus' death (and probably later than that).
"But that's because the Catholic church suppressed everything!" Well, if you knew anything about the early church, you would realize that's nonsense on several levels. The Catholic church as we know it didn't exist yet. Until Christianity became intrinsically linked to the power structures of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century AD, authority was decentralized. Local areas governed themselves. They had bishops, but there was no central authority appointing them, it was "whichever priest or monk the locals think is especially holy and/or wise". There was no central set of scriptures that everyone agreed to, the central set of doctrines was still under hot debate, as were organizational structures and worship patterns and pretty much everything else. The Catholic church has historically done a lot of censorship and suppression of things it didn't like, but that begins in the Medieval era, when it had the power to enforce things, which it did NOT in the early centuries of Christianity.
Early Christians decided things like "which books should be in the Bible" with a series of ecumenical councils between 325AD and 787AD where hundreds of representatives from all around the Mediterranean and beyond came together and decided on things they could all agree on. When texts were not included in the New Testament, it was because only a handful of churches actually used that text. Not because a central authority told them to, because there wasn't a central authority. But because they didn't like it, or they knew that (despite it claiming to be from the first apostles) it was actually written much later.
We know a great deal about what texts the various early churches used because we've spent a LOT of archaeological time and effort over the last century excavating 1st and 2nd century Christian areas looking for texts. And then scholars worldwide spend years analyzing them to death. (Many of them are not Christian.) (Any translation of the New Testament made in the 20th Century is based on those archaeological manuscripts, not the ones sitting in the Vatican, btw.) We also have a bunch of letters from early church leaders where they discuss all of this. We know with a fair degree of certainty which texts (and which versions of texts) were earlier and which were later. In order for all of that to be wrong, somebody centuries later would have had to come in, dig up all of the archaeology, destroy some of what was there, and put it back so neatly that modern archaeologists can't tell things have been changed.
"But what if those early Christians were sex-negative misogynists who didn't want to record Jesus' marriage?" Christianity's hatred of sex didn't get codified until the writings of St. Augustine in the 3rd-4th Centuries; the early Christians would have had no reason to suppress that Jesus was married, and we have a lot of copies of the New Testament texts that date to the first and second centuries. Besides the Gospels itself, Paul spends a decent amount of time talking about marriage and families in his letters, and he never once even implies that Jesus might have been married.
Also the Catholic church is European. The great Christian power in the Levant, Turkey, Greece, and other areas that had large concentrations of Christians in the first few centuries of Christianity was the Orthodox church. So if there was anybody creating a conspiracy and altering things it would have been the Patriarch of Constantinople doing it, not the Pope in Rome.
In Christian communities, sharing stories, myths, and legends about Jesus was a cottage industry. Everybody was making up and sharing stories. Most of them don't seem to be designed to be taken as factual. The Gospels that made it into the Bible were the earliest ones, the ones that everybody knew dated back to the first generation of Jesus' followers. Those, they were careful about keeping accurate and copying precisely and upholding their authority. The other stories that got passed around were held to different standards--and that's why they weren't included in the Bible. Most of them seem to be designed assert what Jesus would have said or done in such-and-such situation, or in response to a particular topical issue, or just make Jesus seem like The Most Awesome Dude Ever. (It was sort of like fanfic. "wouldn't it be cool if Blorbo From My Religion had said/done X?" and it continued to be a major thing up through the late medieval period.)
So, with that background, where does the idea that Jesus was married come from? Mostly, it comes from The DaVinci Code. I mean, periodically people have thought "wow, wouldn't it be cool if Jesus were married?" but with no evidence or source beyond "wouldn't it be cool." Which also is the sum total of Dan Brown's evidence. People who believe it point to a single fragment of papyrus, written in Coptic. And that fragment is not believed to be a forgery but it doesn't have any provenance and there's a lot of mystery surrounding where it was found. And only a small handful of scholars have been allowed to inspect it. So like. It's shaky, at best. (Also, it wasn't publicized until 2012, and so cannot be the source of earlier stories.) We don't start seeing Christian texts in Coptic (an Egyptian dialect) until the beginning of the third century AD. So the very earliest this papyrus fragment could come from is about 170 years after Jesus' death, in a text written in a language Jesus didn't speak, in an area he never lived in. In a time where people were passing around all sorts of legends. Assuming that it is a genuine ancient text, it's still not very good evidence that it's relating historical sayings of the actual Jesus. The Bible mentions Jesus' parents and siblings, why doesn't it mention a wife anywhere?
Dan Brown made a shitton of stuff up for The DaVinci Code and its sequels. It is a great work of fiction, but it is fiction. The thing he's really good at is coming up with puzzles that tie into things people want to believe, and into various historical conspiracy theories. Please take everything he says with a boulder of salt.
So now let's turn to the question of "was Mary Magdalen a sex worker!" And the answer is no, she was not. You have to understand that there are a lot of women named Mary in the Bible, and lots of people conflate them. For our purposes, the other Mary you need to know is Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha and Lazarus).
In the Gospel of John, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. In the next chapter, Mary of Bethany (Lazarus' sister) anoints Jesus feet with oil, presumably in gratitude for her brother's resurrection.
In the other three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), there is also a story about a woman anointing Jesus' feet, but she is unnamed and pretty clearly not Mary of Bethany. She is a sinner who washes Jesus' feet in gratitude for having been forgiven. The context of the story--and the way Jesus talks about it--are completely different. But historically, people would go "eh, all women are the same, right? so this unnamed woman has to be Mary of Bethany" despite all the differences in the text and context.
So then we come to Mary Magdalen. Mary, we are told, had seven demons cast out from her and after that became one of several wealthy women who paid for his and the disciples' bills (this is a patronage relationship, and doesn't imply anything sexual--wealthy people in those days would regularly subsidize teachers they liked. Lydia, for example, supported Paul in his ministry, as did several other women he names in his letters.)
But the medieval Catholic church looked at this and went, "well, all women are basically the same woman, right? Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany and all the other Marys (except Jesus' mom) are all the same woman, pretty much. So therefore, Mary Magdalen anointed Jesus' feet, and therefore she was publicly known as a sinner. (Despite the fact that a) Mary Magdalen didn't anoint Jesus' feet, and b) Mary of Bethany, who did, wasn't publicly labelled a "sinner") And also, look at those seven demons that were cast out from her, that's GOT to be a reference to the Seven Deadly Sins, right? (which were a medieval fabrication, not found in the Bible.) And the sin of women is lust, so therefore Mary Magdalen was controlled by lust and therefore she was a prostitute!
And in addition to the fact that there is zero evidence of this whatsoever, there's the fact that the vast majority of sex workers in the ancient world were desperately poor. She would not have had the money to sponsor Jesus and his disciples if she was a former sex worker.
As someone who believes that sex work is work and should be legalized (and that sex workers should be unionized and have legal protections), I'm not saying this because I think her being a sex worker would be a shameful thing. I really like all the modern theology about "Jesus hanging out with sex workers." I wish it were true! But it almost certainly isn't.
tl;dr: Jesus almost certainly wasn't married, Mary Magdalen was never a sex worker, and Dan Brown is a fiction writer not a historian.
Was there not also a Pope or some other prominent figure in the first few centuries CE who publicly conflated Mary Magdalene with the sinner who washed Jesus’ feet with her hair, in some major speech or other document?
Yes, that was a fairly common thing to do (and lots of people still do it today), as I said in my post.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about the school of thought that thinks Jesus was married, but not to Mary Magdalene?
Apparently the evidence is 1) it would've been deeply strange for a Jewish man of that age at that time *not* to be married, 2) it's not so strange for Jesus' wife and any children not to be mentioned in the later stories about him because they mostly don't take place in the domestic sphere and Misogyny.
Also there was something about the wedding at Kanaan and how it must have been Jesus' own wedding because if he was some random wedding guest, why would his mother be keeping track of how much wine there was or telling him to fix it when they ran out?
I think "well, all adults were married, it would have been weird if Jesus wasn't!" is very weaksauce evidence. It's possible Jesus was married, I have no theological objection to the idea, I don't believe sex is a sin. But even in cultures where the vast majority of people marry, there are exceptions. Paul, for example, was not married, and we know that for sure because he mentions it ... but it only comes up when he's addressing the question of Christian marriages, it's not something that seems to have been an issue for him. So I don't see any reason why Jesus can't also have been unmarried.
Especially because he did not have much/any status in his community aside from being a notable religious expert, and your status is one of the major factors affecting your ability to get married in that culture. People seem to have known he was a bastard; he is pointedly referred to as "Mary's son" on several occasions, which they would only do if they knew he wasn't Joseph's son. And the fact that he and his family are of low status is a major factor in how people respond to him on several occasions. (cf. Mark 6:3 "Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offense at him.") That's a major shame for him and his family. Why would any family want to marry their daughter to him? Once he was a noted rabbi, that might affect his status enough to make him a man worth marrying, but before that he would not exactly have been marriage material.
As to "not mentioned because of misogyny," Jesus' sisters get mentioned twice, including the passage above. Why mention the sisters and not a wife? The sisters would be subject to no more misogyny than a wife would be. And Jesus is in his home town; surely if he were married, his wife would also have been present. And remember, the early church was misogynistic but not as sex-negative as it would later become; they didn't fetishize virginity, the idea that sex in and of itself was a sin wasn't something that would be dreamed up until a couple centuries later. (Screw you, Augustine.) They would have had no reason to think that Jesus being married (if he was) was anything problematic.
Medieval Christians would have thought it problematic, and they weren't above editing the Bible for misogynistic reasons (cf. the apostle Junia becoming Junias, because of course women can't be apostles). However, we have plenty of manuscripts from the second and third centuries, before sex negativity took hold, so we'd know if they edited out mentions of a wife.
In Mark 3:31-35, Jesus' mother and brothers show up to take him home because he's embarrassing the family. If Jesus was married, I'd expect his wife would have been part of the delegation. Unless the wife supported his ministry, in which case wouldn't she be mentioned with the other women who followed Jesus around? For that matter, why isn't she at the cross? Jesus' mother Mary was, and so were several other women from his group. This isn't necessarily a very strong argument, but I think it's stronger than "marriage was the cultural norm, so therefore Jesus must have been married."
The Wedding at Cana ... weddings are a big deal and hospitality is a MASSIVELY important thing at Middle Eastern weddings, always has been. It's not surprising that people would have noticed when the wine began to run out. Especially women, who are used to being the ones managing the food and drink. Hospitality is much less important in our culture, but I know a lot of women (mostly over the age of seventy, who grew up in the 50s and 60s) who always pay attention to the food and drink at every gathering so they can volunteer to help if they're needed. In that culture? I'd be more surprised if there was a woman there who wasn't paying attention. Jesus' response when she told him to fix it was basically "not my problem, why do you care." Which would be a surprising response if it was his wedding, because then it would very much be his problem.
As for why tell him to fix it ... she knew he could, and it would save the family hosting the wedding from being shamed and losing honor in front of several villages worth of people. (Also, there's the fact that Jesus showed up with his disciples; could the wine be running out because the groom's family didn't account for an extra dozen guests? In which case, it's his fault and he needs to fix it.)
I think it's unlikely that Jesus was married, but not impossible. The idea that Cana was his wedding and the author of John was hiding it ... that's way less plausible.
