Your refutation of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’ wife left out one salient point. None of the canonical gospels mentions Jesus’ bachelorhood. Mithra, Apollo, Horus, Zoroaster and others were supposedly born of mystically inseminated virgins. Jewish law of two thousand years ago required marriage and fatherhood by the age of twenty of all Jewish men. Thus, it may well be that virgin birth was less remarkable than being a thirty year old unmarried Jew. Yet, not only do the four evangelists forget to mention this enormous tidbit about Jesus, but the other thirty or so gospel writers overlook it too. This is like writing a biography of David Dinkins or Doug Wilder and leaving out the fact that they were Black. In those cases where a datum is contextually extraordinary, lack of evidence is indeed evidence of lack.
In 1998, Ramon Jusino noted the several points in which Mary of Magdala and “the apostle that Jesus loved” figure in the same scene in the Gospel of John, and also that the insertion of the beloved disciple – generally considered to be John – is clumsy and out of sync. He postulates that the fourth evangelist was Mary, and that later redactions hid her gender to make the gospel palatable to the increasingly misogynist church. Certainly the Johanine community of Christians were noticable different from other sects and held onto sexual equality longer.
More important is the multiple mentions of Mary Magdalene in the gospels. The twelve apostles aren’t all named, yet Mary is there at every major turn and is the disciple to whom the risen Jesus first reveals himself. Regardless of when they were first written, the oldest extant versions of the gospels date to no earlier than the 4th century, when the church was actively marginalizing females and literally prostituting the Magdalene. That she remains identified and central to hs story certainly points to her exceptional importance in Jesus’ life and to the strong oral tradition of her presence at these events. Mary was clearly Jesus’ significant other in literal terms – the most important woman in his life other than his mother. Is it really such a leap to see her as just that in the figurative sense?
Cite, please, for the requirement, under Jewish Law, that Jewish men have married and reproduced by age twenty. After all, such a rock-solid support of his thesis could hardly have gone unremarked-upon by Dan Brown.
Hmmm. Which is more likely, a virgin birth or a lawbreaker? Hmmmm. Of the two, only one of them is, as far as we know, physiologically impossible. Sorry, I gotta go with the thirty year old unmarried Jew.
I know of no responsible scholarship that attributes the Gospel of John to anyone who ever saw Jesus. Most place the time it was written at about 120 AD.
I’m going to take your word for it (I’m not too keen on the notion of slogging through that thing again). Of course, I wouldn’t regard that book as a cite, even if I had noticed the reference.
I think what the OP is trying to get at in his hyperbolic way is that it was normal custom for a Jewish man to be married by 30. If Jesus were single, it might not be illegal, but still remarkable. Maybe.
What this has to do with Gospels written to a Greek audience is another matter. Would the Hellenistic peoples from whom orthodox Xtianity derives find a 30-year-old bachelor odd? Would this affect the narrative, & if so, how?
There isn’t one, as such. It’s in The DaVinci Code, that’s the only place AFAIK anybody’s ever said it. Just one of the book’s many amazing assertions that go hurtling past while you sit there in slack-jawed astonishment at the cheerful chutzpah of the thing.
A minor point, but O’ in Irish names is not an abbreviation of “of”, as McDonald’s would have us believe, but of “Óg”, which is Irish for “son of”. The feminine equivalent "daughter of " is “ni”.
Luke was the Gospel written for a Hellenistic audience. Matthew was directed at a Jewish audience, and included most of the references to ther fulfillment of OT prophecies, IIRC. I don’t believe there was any such law as quoted by the OP, either way.
Óg smash with Irish dictionary. Ó and óg are two completely separate words.
ó: masculine noun, grandson, grandchild, descendant. Used in surnames. (Mac, literally son, is also used in men’s surnames, and ní is used in women’s surnames)
óg: adj., young. Masculine noun, young person, youth.
This post was so ridiculous I had to renew my membership just to reply to it. I too would like to see a cite other than the FICTIONAL DaVinci Code to the first assertion. As to the second one I quoted, it is patently absurd. Take John 19 "
“25 Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. 26 When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Dear woman, here is your son,” 27 and to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.”
So now you have to introduce not only misunderstanding in interpretation about who the disciple was, but deliberate misquoting of Jesus by someone after the author of the book is dead / no longer around - of course, the entire basis for the conspiracy theory of Jesus’ marital status and subsequent cover-up. And IF you were going to propogate a conspiracy like this, why not leave out altogether the proposed gospel that was allegedly written by the wife of Jesus, instead of merely swapping around some facts and insinuating a new author?
Well, it took me awhile, but here comes the cite from the FICTIONAL DaVinci code. I probably would have skipped it altogather, seeing as kaylasdad99 seems willing to concede the point, but I found something interesting about it.
Chapter 58 pg. 265 of the paperback.
emphasis mine
Thereafter comes the resoning that someone would have made an explanation for His bachelorhood.
But, even in the book, there is no LAW or claim of a law that precludes bachelorism. Just, social decorum.