One can infer anything they wish, but if one doesn’t look at things as we do today there would be even more to Debate. It seems some see what they want to see.
All true, but none of he canonical gospels make a point of saying that he wasn’t married, which would have been a pretty big deal at the time. It seems to be more an issue of thinking that sex is dirty-- hence the problems people have with him even having siblings.
At any rate, my point was that if he had children, that would present all sorts of problems that him being married wouldn’t.
It fits if part of his mission is to experience life as a human.
Look at it this way:
Did Jesus shit?
Probably not. This is outside my little bubble of expertise, so get the salt ready. I know of no evidence that identifies Jesus with an Olympian. He was a person, walked on earth, healed the sick, performed miracles, etc. There is tons of evidence that identifies him with Asclepius and there certainly was a lot of early confusion between Jesus and the Mithraic sun god. The kind of life Jesus lived, a wandering healer and preacher, was already quite well-established in antiquity, so it would have been easy to apply the boilerplate to Jesus and get some of the details confused.
Heh, and here I thought I came up with that approach. 
Part of the fascination for the subject comes from the sources. We have extraordinarily detailed records from the Council of Chalcedon. It’s probably the best documented few days in antiquity altogether. The whole conflict really comes alive when you read about all of the arm-twisting, the bishops denouncing each other, and the passion that they really brought to this conflict. One of the Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nyssa IIRC, complains in a letter that he couldn’t go anywhere without someone offering an opinion on the nature of Christ. He specifically mentions how irritating it was that he got pestered at the dry cleaner and the bathhouse.
Ha, sure. My work is in social history, specifically official justice and dispute resolution in Roman Egypt. I’ve got to get some of these projects on editors’ desks before I go on the market. When that’s done, I will certainly crow about it.
This is true. Judea was in some ferment at this time. Things didn’t get much better: the Jews were in open revolt by AD 66
The problem is that it presumes that Jesus was basically average until he wasn’t. First, men married much later than women. The figures for Egypt are much stronger due to surviving census data, but I doubt there was too much difference. A woman might marry at 14, but her husband would be at least 10 years older than her, frequently more.
If we are going to say that Jesus was ordinary until his conversion, then there is a good chance his wife simply died. Again, going by the numbers from Egypt, ~25% of women could be expected to reach the age of 20 from birth. (My book is not handy, so I am going from memory) There was a huge die-off after the first pregnancy. So even if he was married, it would have been a safe bet that she was dead before he started his grand tour.
It wasn’t the Coptic Church then. It was just the church. The official split probably occurred after the text was recorded. It would have been written down like any of the other Gospels later determined apocryphal: someone thought it was worth copying.
We really don’t know enough about what people believed at the local level to determine how active the Roman authorities could have been. Nor can we say just how offensive alternative traditions would have been to other Egyptians. The Chalcedonian formula was clearly offensive, but that was as much political as anything else. As long as this group was solidly Miaphysite and anti-Chalcedonian, I really couldn’t say how much their neighbors would have cared. The Roman government was really wary to get involved in these kinds of issues because they were political minefields.
I agree with this sentiment from my current viewpoint.
But if I think about it from the other side, we’d have an equally good fit for a Jesus who got married.
Right now, we say Jesus didn’t marry because the church is his bride and he needed to be focused on his mission. But if he had married, we’d say “See, Jesus knows how to care for his church because he demonstrated that with an Earthly bride.” If you grew up using that explanation, then an unmarried Jesus would seem like something that didn’t fit.
However… I think I would be upset to learn that Jesus married a woman who was a disciple. To me, that smacks too much of the televangelist sleeping with his secretary kind of scenario. The teacher/disciple relationship is not one that should include sex. I’d feel the same way about a modern pastor marrying a church member. If you’re a pastor with spiritual authority over someone, the relationship needs to stop at pastor/churchgoer. Even if no abuse of power was actually involved, there’s too much potential for abuse.
While working today I found a piece by the excellent Caroline Humfress on this issue, called “Citizens and Heretics” in a coauthored volume Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity. This piece has the view from the late Roman lawyers, which would have been different than the situation on the ground, especially in the provinces. But it’s shared on academia.edu, so you can search for it, log in through Facebook or Gmail, and read the paper if you like.
Of course - but it did not stink.
Jesus only spent 33 years on this planet, according to the official timeline. I didn’t get married until I was 37. Did I not experience life as a human during those first 37 years? Sure seemed like it to me.
In the news this month we are have a somewhat comparable situation in the political world, where Narendra Modi, favored in polls to be the next prime minister of India, turns out to be a wedded man:
If you read the link above, you’ll see some possible parallels. Modi is supposed, in the eyes of his supporters, to be more devoted to India because he doesn’t have competing family loyalties.
Should Modi lose, we’l have a bit of evidence that the answer to the thread title question is yes.
But, more likely, Modi will win :mad:
Modi’s been in The Economist several times over the past year, so I’ve kind of had my eye on him. What is shocking is that more people seem to be getting upset about this than about his complicity in sectarian violence, but we live in a crazy world.
I guess that is why the Christian Religion is so divided.
Well, my negative emoticon was about the latter.
A bit divergent, but I’ll never get a better chance to ask: Have your studies yielded any evidence of a Roman custom, at any time or place, that allowed the mob to give the condemned criminal of its choice a “get out of jail free” card, as in the tale of Barabbas?
I’ve never come across anything like that, but then again, there are very few historical accounts of Roman justice at work. Most of the evidence I work with are written petitions to magistrates, so we rarely get to see how they turned out. Sometimes we have written records of trial proceedings. One especially juicy one records that the governor ordered a petitioner to be flogged, probably because of the triviality of his legal action.
You can certainly find mob justice and riot in the Acts of the Pagan Martyrs (Acta Alexandrinorum).
I often think that would be a good way to cut down on frivolous lawsuits.
You might think that, but looking at the evidence suggests otherwise. This is actually what I am writing my dissertation about, but since it has nothing to do with Jesus, I will spare you the details.
I don’t know if the situation is comparable at all, it appears that Modi’s was an arranged marriage when he was 18, they were separated when he was 21 and it hasn’t been a marriage for over 30 years. His being wifeless isn’t much of a big deal for anyone in India either. He’s mentioned it once or twice in the hundreds of campaign speeches that he gives, as support for his incorruptibility. As a side note, could you explain your :mad: smiley on the prospect of his becoming PM? I’ve encountered similar sentiment before on the board, but believe it’s misplaced.
ETA: Sorry, I see that complicity in sectarian violence is your reason. Do you have any evidence that he was complicit? Because India’s courts don’t.
If you’re judging based off Economist articles, I’d advise you not to. They’re really quite bad. The latest one in which the Economist withholds its endorsement for his candidacy for instance, is such poorly argued and openly biased tosh that I was surprised to read it.
Of course it was biased. It was an opinion piece. But anyway, the reasons why it may or may not make a difference are quite different in this case. Jesus did not stake any particular claims on not being married. We might care in posterity to the extent that we want to imitate his life.