Becky
Bratu of NBC News uses the flap over the dubious “Jesus’ Wife” fragment as
the springboard for the question: What’s
wrong with the idea that Jesus was married?
And what follows is anything but pretty; you get the feeling
that, having “dumbed down” the technical issues for the non-specialists in the
audience, the experts left themselves with equally dumb responses. Either that, or they all learned their
material from non-Christians who had themselves forgotten the historical,
traditional Christian beliefs after years of reading Jesus Seminar-style
deconstruction.
Before going further, I need to reinforce something I wrote
last week in The
Impractical Catholic: The most
misleading aspect of the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”, which
yesterday the Vatican authoritatively rejected as a “clumsy forgery”, is
the common representation (even among some of the detractors) that the Gnostics
were a Christian sect. The people
referred to by scholars as “Gnostic Christians” — a phrase as
self-contradicting as “pastel green redness” or “masculine womanliness” — were
Gnostics who had adopted characters and terms from the Christian story and
crammed them into the Gnostic cosmology.
Cosmology, in a sense, drives theology. The differences aren’t just that the Gnostics
liked women and Christians didn’t (which is a false distinction anyway); in the
Gnostic universe, the Creator is a demiurge, a lesser emanation of the real First Principle, and a bit of a
fool for not recognizing it. Jesus is
not human at all, but rather another demiurge who can put his humanity off at any
time, like a cheap costume: no hypostasis here.
Because the cosmos of the Gnostics is built differently from that of the
Christians (and the first-century Jews from whence they came), any similarities
between the two are purely on the surface.
So we’re constantly presented with a select few scholars,
who may or may not accept the fragment, but who ought to know better than to
speak of “Gnostic Christians” without some minimal background information such
as I’ve provided. Yet not only do they
fail to make this background available, they present the Gnostics as “alternative”
Christians who were supposedly arguing a theological point with other
Christians — a second-century Diet of Worms.
Why? What’s to be gained from
blurring the boundaries?
This is where Bratu and “‘Too holy’ for sex? The problem of a married Jesus” come into
play. First, she quotes James Tabor of
UNC-Charlotte, whose works include The
Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of
Christianity, The
Jesus Discovery: The Resurrection Tomb that Reveals the Birth of Christianity,
and The
Secret Legacy of Jesus: The Judaic Teachings That Passed from James the Just to
the Founding Fathers. [Nope, no agenda
here!]
Tabor snorts, “I would say that the more conservative groups
might be more inclined to be bothered by the idea of a married Jesus, and
especially that he might have had a child, god forbid, since that would really
raise questions about his ‘divinity,’ since they see him as fully human and
fully God. ... Can God sleep with a woman and have a child? It just doesn’t fit the concept they want for
Jesus.” [Nice sideswipe at the Incarnation! If Tabor hasn’t stopped being a Christian, he
does a very good impression of a secularist.]
How would Jesus being a family guy change things? “Maybe
it makes him more human for us,” Tabor said.
Hold on to that thought; we’ll come back to it.
Then we have April DeConick, author of Holy Misogyny [ALERT! ALERT! ON COLLISION COURSE WITH POLITICAL AGENDA!],
who claims the “Jesus’ Wife” fragment would be “the second piece of evidence
from an ancient Christian gospel that early Christians were not bothered by the
idea of a married Jesus.” The other piece
is from the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, so we’re still waiting on the first piece of
evidence to come from a real
Christian source. “We have so many
hundreds of years of an understanding of sexuality that in some way sex is not
divine, it’s not sacred,” DeConick said. “It’s going to be a long hard road for
people to see a figure that they think is god as being engaged in a sexual
activity — even with a wife.”
DeConick, of course, doesn’t explain why a God who is, was
and ever shall be, who being perfect is in want of nothing, who pulls entire cosmoi into being with His
spoken flipping Word!, would need to get His Freak on (and don’t you
just love how she says, “… even with a wife,” as if it were a second-best
option?). Just as Tabor doesn’t explain
how Jesus — who ate when he was hungry, drank when he was thirsty, stank when
he labored for a full day, slept when he was tired, wept when he grieved, whupped
some moneychanger a$$ when he was angry and most likely screamed in agony when
his back was beaten into ribbons — is somehow less human than any of us for not
having had a wife and kids.
The Greeks and Romans had gods and goddesses who slept
around. So did the Irish. As far as I can tell, none of them respected
their gods more for being randy than the Jews did their God who demanded sexual
restraint. Neither did they really
succeed in making sex divine; indeed, the single most important religious
figures in Rome were the Vestal Virgins.
DeConick is free to light a candle for Aphrodite, I suppose,
even though her chambers are barren and her temple is wasted. Yet sex only approaches the divine when it’s
treated as it ought to be — as Man’s participation in God’s Act of
creation. Then it becomes not only
sacramental but Sacrament: marriage. Treated
any other way, it quickly becomes either mundane or demonic.
As for Tabor, his problem isn’t Jesus’ lack of humanity but
his possession of deity. (As they say in
theological circles, “By their ‘Lives of Jesus’ you will know them.”) You can’t prove he didn’t perform miracles;
you can’t prove he didn’t rise from the dead.
But if you can prove Jesus got himself some tail, that would fix those
bothersome Christians once and for all, wouldn’t it?
