The main “what’s the big fishin’ deal?” thing to me is that if he and Mary M. had kids and they had kids and they had kids, etc., so many people would be their descendants today that it’d be no distinction at all.
Pocahontas, had only one child to survive infancy. That child, Thomas Rolfe, had only one child, Jane, to survive infancy and she had only one child, John Bolling, to survive infancy. This means that Pocahontas had only one great-grandchild. Today she has thousands upon thousands of direct lineal descendants from that one great-grandchild. Most of her descendants don’t know (and probably don’t care) that they have her lineage. (Add to this that Pocahontas’s son, Thomas Rolfe, may have had a second wife with whom he had children [legal issue dealing with his half-Indian ancestry clouds the issue] and the potential number of Pocahontas descendants explodes.)
The Monticello Association is an organization comprised of direct lineal descendants of Thomas Jefferson and has more than 2,000 living members. That does not include the descendants of Sally Hemings and not including all direct legitimate descendants. Jefferson was a monogamist who died less than 200 years ago and who had only 2 legitimate children to survive childhood (and one of them had only 1 child). Add in the Hemings descendants (most of whom are not known) and you’ve multiplied the number of Jefferson descendants several times to probably more than 10,000 in less than 200 years.
Jesus died more than 1,950 years ago. If he had only one child to survive infancy, if two hundred years later somehow he had only one direct descendant living, if that one lost all his descendants but one during Justinian’s Plague in the 6th century, etc., then it would STILL be probable rather than just possible that there would be literally MILLIONS of Jesus descendants running around. Given the location of Israel it would also be very likely they’d be on several continents- he could have descendants who were on both sides at Pearl Harbor, the Battle of Mafeking and every other conflict, he could easily have been a common ancestor of Martin Luther King, Mao Tse Deng, George Wallace, Russell Crowe, Winnie Mandela, Eva Peron and Emiliano Zapata, etc… It could even be conceivable that Muhammad was his descendant (and once your bloodline gets plugged into a polygamist culture, boy howdy but you’re off and running).
If he did have issue they clearly weren’t important. (Very common: how often do ou hear of Einstein’s kids, or Shakespeare’s or Benjamin Franklin’s or Madame Curie’s or the spawn of most other famous and brilliant parents?) Today the “divine” component of the DNA would be so watered down as to comprise a minute percentage of one percent of a minute percentage of one percent of the descendant’s overall composition. Big whoop.
The only way that it would be at all impressive would be if brother married sister for more than 1900 years. I’m told there was a graphic novel once that actually had this as a plot- an incredibly deformed through inbreeding descendant of Christ- though I’m not sure which one.
But even if I were a devout and Fundamentalist Christian I wouldn’t care less beyond a mild “hmm… that’s interesting” moment if Jesus had children. It wouldn’t detract from his message in the least, it just means that he really was a man, which I already knew (it’s rather the whole point of him being here). I’m sure he also pooped his nappies as a child and played with dogs and probably had favorite and least favorite foods and had days when he felt like takinga picnic instead of healing lepers but had to do so anyway. If he didn’t experience the human emotions and temptations and pleasures, why be human and born of a woman and all?
Though if it is ever proven he had kids, can you imagine the number of blue haired genealogists falling over each other to stake their claim? “That Nativity Set there has been our family a long long time… that’s supposed to be my great great great great grandaddy when he was a baby, though I think in real life he looked more like my boy Buster did when he was a baby.”
