Jesus Married?

The report today is that they have found a fragment of ancient writing indicating Jesus had a wife. Of course the question arises, "does this change anything for you?" as asked by one CNN newsroom personality. And my answer is, "You betcha!"

I should get a crowd to go to that University professor's house and we would picket, yell obscenities, yes, even crucify him and his colleagues over this disregard to our faith. We should find out the professor's ethnicity and smear his name and origins. We  should tear up his library, burn his car, and a few tires on the front lawn. The news would cover it and testify that thousands of us were there, and that all Christians around the world are furious over his little piece of parchment enshrined in a little glass slide. He will never get away with this kind of heresy. The outrage will spread.

The pope will speak for all Christendom as the pope spoke out in favor of the earth centered universe that was under attack by Galileo and his intellectual cohorts back in the 1600s. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest, and there is no reason why this hot shot Harvard guy shouldn't do the same for shattering my bliss and the millions of Christians.

Whoa! Isn't that a bit extreme? Not really when you consider we like to be extreme in our society. If you are not extreme, you are no where. A wuss. A middle of the road squirrel who will get run over. You have to stick to your guns, no matter what the scholars and men of reason might say. Science, archaeology, whatever, is only there to mess you up. They solve problems that are not there, and get us all upset.

Okay, okay! Let's look at this more objectively. We have a piece of writing from around the year 200 that refers to Jesus' wife. That's about the same time frame that the New Testament was deemed to have been completed with the book of the Apocalypse. There have been discoveries over the years of thousands of documents relating to Christianity dating from before that time which were not included in the Bible, but which tell history as it was lived at the time, and which have historical facts, or traditions that shed light on the Christian community and lived faith of the people of that time. (We should look for truth and embrace it wherever it may be.)

Did Jesus have a wife? The research on this one fragment indicates a yes answer. Before I agree, I would like to see some corroboration from another source. That may come. If there is further proof, then we may have to change some things. (Maybe they will change anyway.)

A no-brainer would be the idea of celibacy for priests. Perhaps also the place of marriage in the Christian culture, maybe elevate that higher than the priesthood. Maybe the place of women in society, since it would appear that Jesus is an egalitarian who actually, physically and emotionally, loved one.

Some discussion questions: What does it mean to have a person whom we call God actually marrying one of us earthlings? What would that say about his title? What is faith anyway that made Christians put Jesus so far beyond the human pale that we stopped seeing him as human at all? Why do some people think they have to solve God's problems by rioting and killing in his name? (As a note here: the actual number of people who protested outside American embassies around the world may have been a few thousand or less. Most of the 1.7 billion or so Muslims were carrying on their regular schedules of work, school, child care, etc. like we were doing here in America- except for Chicago.)