Did Jesus have a wife and child?

This is great BBB! Thanks. I just finished The DaVinci Code the other day and have been waiting to hear some discussion on this.

The book is a run of the mill good/guy bad guy chase thriller, but the historical theory and art history are fascinating. It's a fun read.

It may seem like a crackpot theory to some, but to me makes a lot more sense than the accepted story.

fealola
fealola, you changed your avatar?

BBB

Yep! That's me! Well it's really KD Lang!

the Nag Hammadi texts tend to show the relationship between Jesus and the Magdalene as much closer than his relationship to teh other disciples. Some curent scholarship suggests that for the Messiah to be unmarried would have been considered an abomination. this is a six of one, half a dozen of the other sort of topic. It certainly gets a lot of play from the "bloodline of the holy grail" types. I don't see how it can be verified one way or the other.

Yep, apparently they eloped and moved to France, of all the godforsaken places to move.
Imagine, no wonder the french are so snooty, they have illusions of godliness.

The theory is: Mary and Jesus were descended royal Hebrew lines. Jesus was not divine but a great man never-the-less. Mary M. was preggos with Jesus child when he was executed. She fled to Europe and was protected by secret societies in order to carry on the bloodline.

The Holy Grail is not the cup from the last supper. The holy grail is the remains of Mary Magdeline and documentation of the history and geneaology.

It goes alot deeper than that, and is a fascinating theory having to do with the transition from paganism to the Catholic Church and all the cover-ups that went on.

I find the many books that this "conspiracy" has generated fascinating and tres amusant! However, as a student of medieval religious and intellectual history, I have to say that in my (mere, worthless) opinion, the Pope Joan story has greater veracity.

Would you give us a capsule on Pope Joan? We under-educated eat this stuff up!

The Pope Joan story says that in the 8th (or 6th, or 5th) Century CE a girl from Trier (or London) wished to study theology, and shaved her head and joined a monastery. Years later, a leading theologian, she made it to Rome, and was in the proto-Curia. She also fell in love with another theologian, discovered that tab a into slot b was great fun, and got knocked up. Then the Pope dies, she is elected, and takes the name John. On the way to the papal residence she goes into labour and "surprise!" a kid is born (usually female). The outraged mob hangs her and the child.
To prevent this ever happening again, the new Pope is required to sit in the stercory chair (a chair with a hole in the seat) on election, and the Papal secretary feels his balls, pronouncing "Habet testiculum, et bene pendente!" The Pope is probably not supposed to enjoy this!
It first pops up in the writings of Jacobus de Voraigne in the 14th century, and then fades away. The story re-appeared in the 16th century as Protestant rhetoric against the Church. The best work on this is Alain Boreau's The Myth of Pope Joan: Reason and Rhetoric in Support of an Archetype, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2001.
He has also done some work on the "Droit de Seignieur" idea.
Guerevich mentions Pope Joan in his work Medieval Popular Culture, Cambridge, 1996.
Now, the million dollar question...was there a "pope Joan?" Probably not. Ah, well.

But is the chair still a papal tradition? (That's what I want to know!) What was it, a potty chair?? Weird.

Wait! I looked it up:

One entry found for stercoraceous.

Main Entry: ster·co·ra·ceous
Pronunciation: "st&r-k&-'rA-sh&s
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin stercor-, stercus excrement
Date: 1731
: relating to, being, or containing feces


What the....?

you made that up.

The stercory chair still exists, and is in the Vatican Museum at the Lateran. It is a porphyry (i.e. purplish reddish marble) seat that was probably found in a latrine in an imperial palace, then was used as a throne (with a cushion!) in the period before about 1100. THe existence of such a lush potty-seat certainly dovetailed (pardon the expression) with the legend of Joan.
I sincerely doubt any official fondling was ever part of the festivities surrounding the crowning of a new Pope. Any fondling was (and probably remains) a private matter.

So most of the western world believes these guys and think the Grail Seekers are a bunch of crackpots.

Speaking of Crackpots --(at least the pagans didn't put their crack in a pot and worship it....)

The problem with Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, and all the others who follow in their footsteps lies in their poor interperetation of sources. If you read Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (which I did around aged 15, and I loved it, it was one of the factors that pointed me toward medieval studies) certain fallacies that are inherent when one who is unskilled in the interperetation of historical data become apparent. The most eggregious one being the over willingness to construct complex and highly unlikely theories that rely on long term conspiracies when current theory is not as satisfyingly tabloid-like. One of Baigent, et al's follwers proudly proclaimed he had found the tomb of Jesus in a place caled Cardou. Y'see, Cardou must have obviously been derived from Le corps de Dieu, right? Wrong. Apparently it means Stone Mountain inthe local argot. oops! A recent guilty pleasure was a book claiming that the heads of Jesus, Leonardo daVinci, and Jaques de Molay are in the apprentice pillar at Rosslyn chapel,and that they are the results of a survival of an ancient pre-Jewish headhunting cult. This relies on a highly improbable interperetation of the word "baphomet" to mean "sacred head" in mystical Ancient Egyptian written in Ogham. Well, Baphomet is more likely to have been a corruption of "Mahomet."
I would love for some of these things to be true. The world is a dingy place without some sort of mystery and magic in it. I also firmly applaud having an open mind. Unfortunately, some of the folks who write these works have minds so open things fall out! There is no vast conspiracy among academics to "censor" the mystical trhuths. If anything there is a vast conspiracy to come out with odder and odder interperetations of sources in order to publish! The latest trend in medieval theology is that everything is about (same)sex relationships, most especially when the source specifically states is is not about sex!
I applaud the imaginative amateurs who come up with these things, but their very status as amateurs implies that they are careless in their interperetation and synthesis.

Mary Magdline was his if not a wife.

Knowledge is Power. More! More!

mary mag and the man were a class act and there is no doubt about it in my mind.

truth
If Jesus was married, it should be a relief for those who feared he was gay (with John the Baptist).

Welll..."homsexual" and "heterosexual" were not cut and dried in the pre-modern era as they are in the twenty-first century. Among urban, hellenized Jews,as Yeshua seems to have been, homosexual liasons, though contrary to mosaic law, were not uncommon. And I always thought it was the enigmatic "beloved disciple" that was rumoured to have been the Christos' lover. If that disciple was the woman known as the Magdalen, it explains a great many things.