Was
Jesus Married?
What Are We
Really Looking For?
There is a great need in our
culture for symbols of
balance and wholeness. Hence the popularity of books like The
DaVinci Code, and
Holy Blood, Holy Grail, despite their historical
inaccuracies.
Readers of these books
are enticed by
the prospect of ancient
artifacts proving that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married---even
though this evidence can only be, in the final analysis,
fictional.
People are
always looking outside themselves for an answer that can only be found
within. What are we really looking for?
We yearn for symbols and
stories that help us to remember who we really are, or who we have the
potential to become. The image of Jesus
and Mary Magdalene as enlightened lovers is the same archetype that we
find in the Song
of Solomon---a symbol of the
ecstatic union of male
and female in God, and an invitation to participate more fully in the
eternal love story that connects all others. In an article on Tantric
yoga, this union was described by Alan Watts, as follows:
"in an
embrace of this kind, all considerations of time and place, of what and
who, drop away" and they discover in themselves "the primordial 'love
that makes the world go round.' There is an extraordinary melting
sensation ... and, 'seeing their eyes reflected in each other's, they
realize that there is one Self looking out through both... The
conceptual boundary between male and female, self and other, dissolves,
and---as every spoke leads to the hub---this particular embrace on the
this particular day discloses itself as going on forever, behind the
scenes."
--- Alan Watts, On Tantric Yoga
"Erotic Spirituality,"1971, p. 89
Was Jesus Married?
More
fundamental than the question of whether or not Jesus was married, is
the question of whether or not Jesus existed at all. Robert M.
Price and Earl Doherty,
among other "mythicist" historians, argue that, in all likelihood, he
did not.
One
of the mythicists' most compelling arguments is the simple fact that
none of the
earliest first century letter writers, including Paul of Tarsus, ever
mentions any of the miraculous events that later came to be associated
with
Jesus' life on earth. Paul never mentions the virgin
birth, for example, and makes no reference to the stories of Jesus
walking on water,
multiplying loaves and fishes, healing the sick, or raising the dead...
even though this evidence of supernatural power would have helped him
to disarm Jewish skepticism, and charm credulous Greeks and Romans...
whose oral and literary traditions teemed with similar miraculous
stories of heroes and gods. In fact, nothing in the letters of
Paul identifies Jesus as a
real historical figure who recently walked the earth. Read without
superimposing the later gospel stories, Paul's letters convey his
belief in an entirely supernatural being who... like Attis, Adonis, and
Osiris... died and was resurrected in an entirely supernatural
realm.
In
the face of Paul's silence regarding miracles, some apologists argue
that
Paul was simply not interested in the biographical details of Jesus'
life. However, as Doherty points out, the recipients of his letters...
the budding Christian communities, and the prospective converts that he
was
writing to... certainly would have
been; no less so than later Christians who treasured and preserved the
gospels. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that Paul could have
written
so many thousands of words without ever making a single offhand remark
referring to some time and place in Christ's earthly life.
In his book, The Jesus Puzzle,
Doherty attempts to reconstruct the complex historical process by which
several literary and philosophical- religious traditions combined to
form the Jesus narrative. Here is a brief outline of his argument:
[1]
Jesus of Nazareth and the Gospel story cannot be found in Christian
writings earlier than the Gospels, the first of which (Mark) was
composed only in the late first century.
[2]
There is no non-Christian record of Jesus before the second century.
References in Flavius Josephus (end of first century) can be dismissed
as later Christian insertions.
[3] The
early epistles, such as Paul and Hebrews, speak of their Christ Jesus
as a spiritual, heavenly being revealed by God through scripture, and
do not equate him with a recent historical man. Paul is part of a new
"salvation" movement acting on revelation from the Spirit.
[4]
Paul and other early writers place the death and resurrection of their
Christ in the supernatural/mythical world, and derive their information
about these events, as well as other features of their heavenly Christ,
from scripture.
[5] The ancients viewed the
universe as multi-layered: matter below, spirit above. The higher world
was regarded as the superior, genuine reality, containing spiritual
processes and heavenly counterparts to earthly things. Paul's Christ
operates within this system.
[6] The pagan
"mystery cults" of the period worshiped savior deities who had
performed salvific acts which took place in the supernatural/mythical
world, not on earth or in history. Paul's Christ shares many features
with these deities.
[7] The prominent
philosophical-religious concept of the age was the intermediary Son, a
spiritual channel between the ultimate transcendent God and humanity.
Such intermediary concepts as the Greek Logos and Jewish Wisdom were
models for Paul's heavenly Christ.
[8] All
the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from one
source: whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark. The Act of the Apostles, as
an account of the beginnings of the Christian apostolic movement, is a
second century piece of myth-making.
[9]
The Gospels are no historical accounts, but constructed through a
process of "midrash," a Jewish method of reworking old biblical
passages and tales to reflect new beliefs. The story of Jesus' trial
and crucifixion is a pastiche of verses from scripture.
[10]
"Q", a lost sayings collecttion extracted from Matthew and Luke, made
no reference to a death and resurrection and can be shown to have had
no Jesus at its roots: roots which were ultimately non-Jewish. The Q
community preached the kingdom of God, and its traditions were
eventually assigned to an invented founder who was linked to the
heavenly Jesus of Paul in the Gospel of Mark.
[11]
The initial variety of sects and beliefs about a spiritual Christ shows
that the movement began as a multiplicity of largely independent and
spontaneous developments based on the religious trends and philosophy
of the time, not as a response to a single individual.
[12]
Well into the second century, many Christian documents lack or reject
the notion of a human man as an element of their faith. Only gradually
did the Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the Gospels come to be accepted
as historical.
--- Earl Doherty,
The Jesus Puzzle, © 1999, p. vii
Reflections On My Own Journey
What follows is my earlier
exploration of this issue, before I discovered The Jesus Puzzle.
Even for those who believe in the historicity of Jesus, there are good
reasons for keeping an open mind
on the question of whether or not Jesus was married. If you are looking
for
an in-depth, scholarly exploration of this issue, read Was
Jesus Married? and The
Sexuality of Jesus, by William E.
Phipps.
Also, you might want to read
this
article in conjunction with Elaine
Pagel's online
review
of The Da Vinci Code. And for those who have an
interest in early Christianity, I highly recommend: When
Jesus Became
God, by Richard E. Rubenstein; and The
Gnostic Gospels,
by Elaine Pagels.
All of these historians
appreciate the significance of diversity and dissension in the earliest
stages of Christianity. From the very beginning, there were bitter
ideological battles between the proponents of various
versions of Christ's life and teachings. And their differences were not
trivial, but focused on such central questions as whether or not Jesus
really claimed to be the only son of God. Mainstream Christians (if
they
are aware of
these feuds at all) generally assume that,
with the help of God, the true version of Christianity must have
prevailed. Some of us are less impressed, however, by battles
that have been won by
burning books
and "heretics," rather than by reasoned argument.
Even the
Bible itself cautions its readers against the presumption that the
scriptures are protected
by
God from error:
"Look! the scriptures have
been
changed by dishonest
scribes." (Jeremiah 8:8)
The
first generation of
Christians, would be thoroughly perplexed by modern beliefs and
practices regarding Jesus. Dozens of books and letters considered
authentic by the Jewish Christian Ebionites and other early groups were
destroyed or consigned to oblivion by censure and neglect. As
Christianity migrated into Hellenic culture, where there was a long
tradition of gods being born of virgins and walking the Earth in human
form, there was considerable
pressure to leave out any writings suggesting that Jesus was a great,
but merely human, prophet of God, as in the earliest Jewish-Christian
opinion.
The original message of Jesus
was seriously
compromised when Constantine yoked Christianity to the temporal power
of Rome. Under the auspices of "the ruler of this world" (Matt. 4:8-9),
a series of councils were convened to separate the wheat from
the chaff of early Christian writings.
These councils drew a circle excluding most of the documents that had
inspired the earliest Christians, and established the tenets of a new
state religion. In addition to the obvious questions regarding their
impartiality
and good faith, it should be born in mind that their idea of evidence
was
rather different
from ours. The second century theologian, Irenaeus, for example, argued
that only
four of the early writings were genuine---Matthew,
Mark, Luke, and John--- because (according to the
science of the time) there were
four
principal winds
and four pillars that hold up the sky.
With these considerations in
mind, it seems reasonable to conclude that there simply
isn't enough evidence to draw a definite conclusion on the question of
whether or not
Jesus was married ---too much of the evidence of
Jesus' life and teachings was lost
or destroyed during the
internecine battles of the first four centuries, or during the age of
barbarism and cultural darkness that followed the fall of Rome. So, in
the second part of
this
article, I've tried to sidestep this lacuna by examining the coherency
of the mainstream belief system itself, and placing the "marriage
question" in a larger context; namely: Is God a
masculine spirit
with no
feminine counterpart?
Was Jesus Married? Part 1
According to ancient Christian
manuscripts discovered in 1945, Mary Magdalene was not only Jesus' most
enlightened disciple, but also his most intimate companion. Here is a
key passage from the Gospel of Philip:
The companion of the savior
is Mary Magdalene. And Jesus loved her more than all the disciples, and
used to kiss her often... The rest of the disciples were jealous, and
said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?''
In her review of The
Da Vinci
Code, Professor Pagels cautions against reading too much
into this passage:
"Those who have studied the Gospel of Philip see
it as a mystical text
and don't take the suggestion that Jesus had a sexual relationship with
Mary Magdalene literally."
Pagels'
cautious and evenhanded critique is a mark of true scholarship;
however, there are some additional caveats that could be joined with
hers. There is, for example, the possibility that the author(s) of the Gospel
of Philip
might have
sublimated and mystified what was
in fact a real attraction. Historians of religion, and people in
general, should ask themselves how likely it is that Christ's disciples
were
privy to the most intimate moments of his life.
Since none of Christ's own
writings
were miraculously preserved by God, everything we think we
know about him
is second hand---filtered
through the beliefs and opinions of several very different schools of
thought, and drastically reduced to the four canonical gospels, Acts,
and the
Pauline
and pesudo-Pauline letters. Also bear in mind that, as
the story of Jesus
spread
throughout the surrounding Hellenistic culture, it was blended with a
dualism of body and spirit that was very un-Jewish. Although there
were celibate Hebrew communities like the Essenes, the
notions
that
sexuality and spirituality are incompatible; that celibacy is more
pleasing to God than marriage; that Jesus could not be both holy and
sexual, were more likely Hellenistic inversions of the earliest
expressions of Christianity.
Arguments From Silence
Mary of Magdala
figures
prominently, even in the canonical Gospels. By some accounts, when
Jesus was crucified,
most of his disciples kept themselves hidden, but Mary suffered with
him through his
agony on the cross. She was the first to seek out the place where he
was buried, and the first to see him after his resurrection. According
to John 20:15, Jesus
spoke to her, as she was crying by his tomb in the darkness; but she
was so distraught that she did not recognize him at first. Thinking
that he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away,
tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."
Who was this woman who felt
that she had the right to claim Jesus' body?
The wedding in Cana may have
been Jesus' own wedding. All the evidence in the gospels suggests that
his parents were observant Jews. According to custom, Jesus'
father would have arranged a marriage for him while he was still young.
God's first commandment, recorded in Genesis, was to "be fruitful and
multiply," and, generally speaking, men were not considered mature
enough to counsel others, as rabbis,
unless they had wives and children of their own. An explanation would
have
been called for, if Jesus had not followed this customary path, and in
all likelihood,
that explanation would have been remembered and transmitted by the
first Christians as a matter of importance.
Likewise, if Jesus taught that
celibacy was preferable to marriage, he would have been vehemently
challenged, and his arguments recorded and quoted by Paul, and
the earliest evangelists. It is highly unlikely that Paul would have
failed to quote the Master or cite his example, if Jesus never married,
or if he said anything at all that could be used to support Paul's
advice in 1 Cor. 7: 9:
Now to the unmarried and the
widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if
they cannot control themselves , they should marry, for it is better
to marry than to burn with passion.
But if Jesus was married, how
do we explain the absence of direct evidence? In addition to the
sex-negativity of those who preserved his words and deeds, we should
also take into account that, after his execution, his
friends and relatives
would have been extremely reticent and highly motivated to hide his
wife and children from the Romans. All the more so if he was believed
to be an heir to the throne of David. For these reasons, and many
others cited by professor Phipps, it is reasonable to keep an open mind
on the issue of Jesus'
marital status.
Some of these arguments are
characterized by mainstream apologists as weak and unpersuasive
"arguments from
silence," because they rely on circumstantial, rather than direct,
evidence. But it seems rather disingenuous to complain about lack of
evidence, in view
of the
religious establishment's long history of book burning and violent
intimidation.
And it is especially ironic that demands for more direct evidence
should come from people who insist that their own extraordinary claims---the
immaculate conception for example---should
be accepted on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.
Was
Jesus Married? Part 2
Ever since the council of
Nicea, nearly 300 years after Jesus' death, the central premise of
mainstream
Christianity has been that Jesus was the earthly embodiment of God. So,
asking whether or not Jesus was married is rather like asking
whether or not God was married---an outlandish
idea to many Christians. But as a matter of fact, there
was
a time,
in the ancient days of Judeo-Christianity, when our ancestors believed
that Yahweh had a female counterpart---a
goddess. And although
it may sound shocking, this primitive notion is actually
more rational than the commonly accepted modern belief.
Mainstream Christianity
characterizes
God as a bodiless masculine spirit. But if, as some people say, God is
a pure
spirit residing in a purely spiritual, sexless heaven, then what does
his
masculinity consist of, if he has no bodily parts? And what
does this
masculinity exist in relation to, if he has no feminine counterpart?
The dominant version of Christianity characterizes the Godhead
(Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) as a species comprised of males
only. Everywhere in nature males function in relation to
females, and,
without this functional reference, maleness becomes a meaningless
abstraction---like up without down, and hard
without soft. Yet for most
Christians, the one and only God is a "he," not a
"she." We hear of "God the father," without reference to "God the
mother."
Does it really make any
sense
to say that God
is limitless, omniscient, and omnipresent; yet somehow, masculine only,
and not feminine? Is this not a profound self-contradiction? If the
Source of life is
truely
limitless, it must contain within itself both male
and female. This symmetry was represented in king Solomon's time by the
loving relationship of a god and a goddess,
Yahweh and Asherah.
This might sound like dread
polytheism; yet, many people who consider
themselves
monotheists are comfortable with the idea (mentioned earlier)
that the Godhead is comprised of multiple persons. How odd then that,
despite the common belief
in an omnipresent, all-encompassing God, none of these persons
is female.
According to Raphael Patai and
A. Marmorstein,
the two concepts "Shekhina" and "Holy Spirit" were used synonymously
during the Talmudic period of Jewish history, and refered to the
feminine aspect of God. [1] However, Catholic dogma proclaims that the
Holy Ghost is masculine:
Though
really distinct, as a Person, from the Father and the Son, He is
consubstantial with Them; being God like Them, He possesses with Them
one and the same Divine Essence or Nature.
The Catholic Encyclopedia
Officially then, the Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost are members of the only "known"
species consisting of
males
only; whose non-physical masculinity exists without any feminine
complement or counterpart---like up without down,
or hard without soft. Ironically, the defenders of this flight of the
imagination suddenly become models of scientific rigor when they
turn to the question of whether or not Jesus was married.
The nearest equivalent to a
goddess in Christianity is Mary, "the mother of God".
But the woman who provided Jesus with a human body is not (according to
mainstream theology) a primordial being who existed "with God
in
the beginning," as Christ is believed to have done. She is not, like
Christ, considered to be a primordial power through whom "all things
were made." (John 1:3) Mary does, however,
fill the psychological need for an image of divinity with a friendly
feminine face (as the intercessor between wretched humanity and the
stern
medieval lord on high); yet she is not officially interchangeable with
the Holy Ghost, and is not officially
recognized
as a member
of the Holy Trinity.
The Goddess of love---erotic
love---has been suppressed
in
Christianity, but there was a time when she had
full
status. Human existence was understood as part of a primordial love
story between the
male and female aspects of
the
Source of Life. In his book, The Hebrew Goddess,
Raphael
Patai concluded that the Hebrew Goddess, (Asherah
/ Anath / Astarte)....
was deeply established in the
lives of the Hebrew
people, in various forms, from the conquest of Canaan to the Babylonian
Exile. From about 400 BC---after the post-Exilic reforms of Ezra---she
seems to vanish, although, curiously, her image still remains in
the Holy of Holies of the Second Temple."
...even from the beginning
there were two images of divinity in the Ark: both Yahweh and his
consort---possibly the Canaanite goddess...
[According to Philo] one of
the Cherubim in the Temple represented a
male, the other a female figure. This is consonant with the Talmudic
tradition.... according to which the Cherubim couple was shown in
marital embrace in a sculpture which stood in the Holy of Holies of the
Second Temple.(p. 78)
After the destruction of
the First Temple and the building of the Second Temple, the cherubim in
the Holy of Holies were believed to reflect the male and female aspects
of Yahweh. Later still, before the destruction of the Second Temple,
figures of the male and the female cherubim embracing, which stood in
the Holy of Holies, reflected the union of Yahweh with the Community of
Israel, his bride.
Raphael Patai, "The Hebrew Goddess"
The synthesis of goddess and
god, as facets of one all-encompassing Source of Life, was complicated
by the goddess Asherah's association with Canaanite religion and
matriarchal social structure. Thus the worship of Asherah was opposed
by a faction of kings and prophets who were devoted exclusively to
Yahweh, and during those periods when they held power, they attempted
to abolish the worship of other deities, including Asherah. (See the
story of king
Josiah) Over the
course of several hundred years, the statue of Asherah was repeatedly
removed and reinstalled in the Solomonic temple. Despite the sometimes
violent opposition, her statue graced the temple for 236 years,
nearly two-thirds of the time that the temple stood in Jersusalem. All
in all, "the Hebrew nation remained devoted from the
days of the conquest of
Canaan down to the Babylonian exile, a period of roughly six
centuries."
By suppressing the idea of a
divine
feminine as an aspect of God, mainstream religious institutions have
reinforced and
sustained the social
subordination of women---with disasterous
consequences for culture and
society.
There is no way that this system could have been maintained without
violence and the threat of violence; thus allusions
to the "divine feminine" have had to be carefully worded:
What does God do all day
long? He gives
birth. From the beginning of
eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth to the All. God is
creating this whole
universe, full and entire, in this present moment.
---Meister Eckhart
What pronoun would Eckhart have
used, if he hadn't been living in a era when teachers who
strayed too far from orthodoxy were burned at the stake? At
the age of 68, Eckhart himself was tried as a heretic by Pope John
XXII. A
confession of error was extracted under duress, and although he was not
condemned to death, he died in the papal prison before his trial could
be concluded.
Did Jesus, like Eckhart, ever
allude to the divine feminine? According to The Secret Book of John
he did. After Constantine put an end to the Roman persecution
of
Christians, and established Christianity as the state religion,
Christians were free enlist the power of the state to
persecute each other. The
Secret Book of John was one of the early texts that
had to be hidden
away in the desert to preserve it from book-burners like Bishop
Irenaeus and Archbishop Athanasius.
In her article The Truth at the Heart of the Da
Vinci Code, Elaine Pagels suggests
that perhaps
the worst blasphemy of all, in the so-called heretical gospels, was
that they spoke of God using both masculine and feminine imagery:
The Secret Book of
John tells how the disciple John, grieving after
Jesus was
crucified, suddenly saw a vision of a brilliant light, from which he
heard Jesus' voice speaking to him:
"John, John, why do you
weep? Don't
you recognize who I am? I am the Father; I am the Mother; and I am the
Son."
After
a moment of shock, John
realizes that the divine Trinity
includes not only Father and Son but also the divine Mother, which John
sees as the Holy Spirit, the feminine manifestation of the divine.
In his book, "The Lost Religion
Of Jesus,"
Keith Akers argues that it was the earliest followers of Jesus, the
Jewish Christians, who understood Jesus better than any of the gentile
Christian groups. Although Jewish Christianity had hardly liberated
itself from patriarchy, it did accept the idea of the divine
feminine:
Jesus refers to the holy
spirit as
his mother in the Gospel According to the Hebrews, a gospel used by
both the Ebionites and by the Nazoraeans. The Homilies speak of the
"Wisdom" or "Sophia" of God as if it were part of God's feminine aspect
(16.12). The Elchasaites, another Jewish Christian group, believed that
the Holy Spirit was female and was either the equal of Christ or his
sister (Panarion 30.17.6, 53.1.9). All of this makes sense because it
is in accordance with Hebrew, which spoke of the holy spirit or divine
presence, the shekinah, as feminine.
Since so much of the early
literature was destroyed by misogynistic heretic-hunters, the evidence
for this
balanced view of God in early Christianity is not abundant. There
is,
however, plenty of evidence
that women were systematically
divested of the authority that Jesus accorded to them, and
intentionally
written out of early Christian
history. See Karen King's article: Women In
Ancient Christianity: The
New Discoveries. Also see Bart Ehrman's
book, "Misquoting Jesus." According to professor Ehrman, the bible was
altered in non-trivial ways by the scribes who copied it.
Marginal notes made by copyists were incorporated as God's word, and
words were
altered in ways that profoundly affected doctrine. For example, women's
names were
eliminated or masculinized because scribes couldn't believe that women
held positions of authority in early Christian communities.
Did Jesus use both masculine
and feminine imagery in his references to God, as claimed by
the The Secret
Book of John and the Jewish Christian
texts? The scarcity of
evidence must
be weighed against the Church's propensity for destroying evidence.
But, on a more a priori level, does
it really make any sense to pray to "our Father in heaven," if there is
not also a Mother in heaven? The
idea of masculine without feminine is an impossible abstraction
like up without down, or hard without soft. It makes more sense to
suppose that the ultimate Source of Life contains
within itself both masculine and
feminine---just as light contains all
colors.
Jesus' comment, "I am the vine
and you are
the branches," tends to support this view. Branches are inherent in the
vine, just as colors are inherent in light. These metaphors
express the idea of our fundamental continuity with God, and, in the
case of great pioneers of consciousness like Jesus and Eckhart, they
point to the possibility
of oneness with God: an experience that is at the heart of all
great
spiritual traditions, not just Christianity. The vinelike "body of
Christ" is sometimes
understood
too narrowly as the Church itself---the communion
of believers---but that
is
not how it was understood by mystics like Eckhart and
Francis of Assissi, for example.
Francis felt a kinship with all life, and Eckhart saw God's immanence
in all beings:
The knower and the known are
one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood
there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in
knowledge... God is nearer to me than I
am to myself.
In her review
of the Da Vinci Code, Professor Pagels asks: what were
the alleged heresies that so provoked churchmen like Athanasius and
Irenaeus. In addition to their fair and balanced use of
masculine and feminine descriptions of God, many of the suppressed
gospels
suggest that the
way
to God can be found by anyone who
seeks.
According to the Gospel
of Thomas, Jesus suggests that when we
come to know ourselves at the deepest level, we come to know God: "If
you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save
you.'' This message---to seek for oneself ---was
not
one that bishops like Irenaeus appreciated: Instead, he insisted, one
must come to God through the church, "outside of which,'' he said,
"there is no salvation.''
Second, in texts that the
bishops called "heresy,'' Jesus appears as
human, yet one through whom the light of God now shines. So, according
to the Gospel of Thomas,
Jesus said,
"I am the light that is
before
all
things; I am all things; all things come forth from me; all things
return to me. Split a piece of wood, and I am there; lift up a rock,
and you will find me there.''
To Irenaeus, the thought of
the divine energy manifested through all creation, even rocks and logs,
sounded dangerously like pantheism. People might end up thinking that
they could be like Jesus themselves and, in fact, the Gospel of Philip
says, "Do not seek to become a Christian, but a Christ.''
As Irenaeus read this, it was not mystical language, but "an abyss of
madness, and blasphemy against Christ.''
Pagels
Yet, this suppressed wisdom
from the
Gospels of
Thomas and Philip is entirely consistent with Meister Eckhart's
insights, with the insights of mystics from other spiritual traditions,
and with Jesus' own comments in the canonical gospels regarding
"the kingdom of heaven within" and "the vine
and the branches."
The Book Of Nature
Who were the first to be born
in the mystery of
self and other? Who were the first to give and receive love? Who are
the primordial lovers, through whom all things come into being?
According to John 1:3, Jesus is the masculine spirit "through whom all
things were made." If you accept this premise, and if you agree that
masculine without feminine is an impossible abstraction (like up
without down), then it is reasonable
to ask: who is Jesus' female counterpart? This is the sort of question
that I would expect to arise naturally in a religion of love and
untethered wonder, where theology is undistorted by violent
suppression.
Everywhere in nature, complex
life-forms are propagated through the union of male and female. If the
Source of Life, like any other artist, is reflected in its creations,
then the book of nature seems to be at odds with the Bible. Which
testament is more likely to be true? Which one has been (until
recently) most resistent to human tampering?
It makes more sense to
postulate a Trinity
comprised of male and female
emanations from a single androgyous Source. The common concept of
Trinity seems like a poor imitation of this,
designed to project onto heaven the injustice of an earthly order
where women have been treated like second class
citizens, or worse. A Godhead
comprised of male and female emanations from an androgyous Source is no
more polytheistic than the
trinitarian concept of three persons in one God. In fact, if the Holy
Ghost is recognized as the
conspicuously absent feminine divine, then why should it be difficult
for those who believe that Jesus is the masculine spirit "through whom
all
things were made" to entertain the possibility that he might have a
feminine
counterpart---a wife?
Conclusion
Although there are lots of
good
reasons for keeping an open mind about the possibility that Jesus was
married, we simply don't have enough information to say, one way or the
other. Yet there is a great need in our culture for symbols of
wholeness. Hence the popularity of books like The
DaVinci Code, despite their historical inaccuracies.
Readers of the The Da Vinci Code are enticed by
the promise of ancient
artifacts proving that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married---even
though this evidence can only be, in the end, fictional. People are
always looking outside themselves for an answer that can only be found
within. What are we really looking for? We yearn for symbols and
stories that help us to remember who we really are, or who we have the
potential to become. The image of Jesus
and Mary Magdalene as enlightened lovers is the same archetype that we
find in the Song
of Solomon---a symbol of the
ecstatic union of male
and female in God, and an invitation to participate more fully in the
eternal love story that connects all others. In an article on Tantric
yoga, this union was described by Alan Watts, as follows:
"in an
embrace of this kind, all considerations of time and place, of what and
who, drop away" and they discover in themselves "the primordial 'love
that makes the world go round.' There is an extraordinary melting
sensation ... and, 'seeing their eyes reflected in each other's, they
realize that there is one Self looking out through both... The
conceptual boundary between male and female, self and other, dissolves,
and---as every spoke leads to the hub---this particular embrace on the
this particular day discloses itself as going on forever, behind the
scenes."
--- Alan Watts, On Tantric Yoga
"Erotic Spirituality,"1971, p. 89
[1]
Raphael Patai,
"The Hebrew Goddess"
For more
about the Song of
Solomon and the mystical experience of "unitive
consciousness," read the introductory essay:
Unitive Consciousness:
the Marriage of Heaven and Earth
See also:
The
Hidden Meaning of the Song of Songs
Wedding
Music for the
Marriage of Heaven and Earth.
Recommended
reading:
"Was
Jesus Married"
and "The Sexuality of Jesus,"
by William E. Phipps.
"The
Hebrew
Goddess,"
by Raphael Patai
Articles
online:
(PBS Frontline) "From Jesus To Christ:"
Women
In Ancient Christianity: The New Discoveries---an interview
with Karen King.
The
First Christians: Roles For Women--- interviews whith
Elizabeth Clark and Elaine Pagels.
Background:
"The Last Supper," by Leonardo Da Vinci
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The
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Christian
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Was
Jesus Married?
Illustrations
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A
New Traslation of the Song of Solomon
Music
for the Song of Solomon
Christian
Wedding Music
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