Jesus actually had no family? Bible scholars shed light on the widespread "conspiracy theory"

Did Jesus actually have a wife and children? This sensational claim surfaces from time to time, arousing curiosity. However, it also frustrates many religious scholars because of the lack of verifiable evidence.

Despite a number of arguments, most biblical scholars agree that there is no irrefutable evidence to suggest that Jesus had a family of his own. They reject all variants, writes IflScience.

One of the most recent instances of this debate being fired up was in 2014, sparked by the scandalous book The Lost Gospel by journalist Simcha Jacobovici and historian Barrie Wilson.

Their arguments were based on an ancient manuscript that they say was gathering dust in the British Museum, written by an anonymous monk at least 1,600 years ago. The two researchers have made the first-ever translation of the document from Syriac to English, which apparently opens up new insights into the life of Jesus before he was crucified.

Among the many claims in the paper, the authors argued that the story of Joseph and Aseneth is actually the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene in disguise. If this is true, then their two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, would be the children of Jesus.

The book was not the first attempt to make this claim. One of the central plot points of the 2003 blockbuster film The Da Vinci Code is the dogma that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus and the couple had descendants whose lineage was protected by a shadowy network of secret societies.

In 2012, a historian of early Christianity from Harvard Divinity School added to the discussion by claiming to have found a fragment of a religious text from the fourth century AD that contained the phrase "Jesus said to them, ‘My wife...’". The text also contains the words "Mary" and "she is able to my disciple." It attracted considerable public attention, but later scholars discovered that the document was a forgery.

Despite a handful of claims, most biblical scholars argue that there is no evidence to suggest that Jesus had his own family, nor that Joesph was literally the historical figure of Jesus.

"For early Christians, their Bible was the same as that of Jews. Important figures in the Old Testament came to be seen as types of Jesus. Christians saw in a popular figure like Joseph some elements of Jesus’ ministry," wrote Jonathon Wright, who was then a doctoral candidate at the Oriental Institute of Oxford University, in 2014.

He also added that according to the authors of the books, this story is always about Jesus, but there is no evidence for this in the text or in any of the 90 or more manuscripts that still exist today - indeed, in the Armenian tradition, it is often in the Old Testament.

"Joseph in the story does not do anything we associate with Jesus. The story was probably often copied because it was not controversial and because Christian beliefs about repentance and conversion were portrayed in an apparently Jewish story," the scholar added.

Another central claim in the 2014 book is that the story of Jesus and his family was actively censored because the earliest Syriac manuscript is missing the first chapter and the end of a letter from the translator. They assumed that the editors deliberately removed it to hide the controversial account of the marriage of Jesus and Mary. Again, it's easy to see how this claim was made, but biblical scholars doubt that this is the case.

"We can strongly doubt this! It is much more likely that the page was lost through wear. There are several other places this has happened in the manuscript. The story was copied into another Syriac manuscript in the middle ages, and this included the opening chapter, so the page still existed hundreds of years after it was written. This later manuscript has many works of the Church Fathers which would absolutely dispute that Jesus was ever married. Probably, the copyist thought the message of the work was clear enough and not controversial," Wright explained and added that "a good conspiracy theory always helps improvable claims."

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