WAS JESUS MARRIED TO MARY MAGDALENE? The bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, has been getting some press lately for having this as part of the plot line. It does play off a real mystery in the Jesus tradition: Jewish men normally got married. It was considered a duty by the rabbis and celibacy (apart from temporary periods of celibacy by priests when they served in the Temple) was quite unusual. Philo, Josephus, and Pliny tell us that at least one faction of the Essenes were celibate men. (If the Dead Sea Scrolls were collected by Essenes, as I think they probably were, it is interesting to note that none of the texts ever refer explicitly to celibacy. It is possible to take the Community Rule as the constitution of a celibate group living at Qumran, although I don't find this interpretation persuasive myself. And one passage in the Damascus Document (CD VII.4b-7) could be read as referring to a celibate group, but it need not. The archaeology of the site of Qumran seems to be fairly consistent with the possibility of a quasi-monastic group living there, but it isn't by any means necessary to interpret it that way.) And Philo also tells about a celibate Jewish community (male and female) in Egypt called the Therapeutae.

So Jesus' marital status is a mystery. We would expect, a priori, that he would have been married, but the tradition tells us nothing about his wife, if he had one, and I can think of no good reason the Gospel writers would have wanted to hide the fact if he was married. But it would have been unusual, although not unprecedented for a Jewish man of that period to be celibate. Like the Essenes, he may have renounced marriage for the sake of his ministry. Most people assume that this is the case.

Judging by its sales records, The Da Vinci Code is probably a good read, although I doubt I'll get around to it myself. I have too many science fiction novels heaped up at home crying for attention. But I wish the author weren't so confident that it is actually true that Jesus was married to Mary. You can read the arguments for this in the linked review. I'm not impressed by them. If Jesus was married, I suppose Mary Magdelene is a possible candidate for his wife. But nothing in the traditions we have says anything about his being married, even though his family is mentioned a number of times. Like so much about Jesus, we just don't know.

I'm not an expert on the area of women in the Gospels, and these are just my extemporaneous musings. (Come to think of it, most of what I say here is extemporaneous musing. I blog, you decide.) If you want to read the latest serious scholarship on Mary Magdelene and other women in the Gospels, see Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels by my colleague Professor Richard Bauckham.