The Jesus-Was-Married Myth 

J. Neil Daniels

There’s a peculiar little cottage industry that springs up every few years—the claim that Jesus secretly married, usually to Mary Magdalene, and sometimes (if the imagination really runs wild) had children. You’ve seen the paperbacks in the airport bookstore, or maybe the slick documentaries with ominous background music. It’s always framed as a shocking revelation the Church tried to cover up. And yet, when you actually dig into the sources, it’s hard not to feel like we’re dealing with smoke without fire.

Maurice Casey, who was no conservative apologist but a sharp-minded historian, puts it bluntly: “Jesus is not said to have married, nor are any children recorded. It is therefore virtually certain that he did not marry, and absolutely certain that he had no wife at the time of his ministry, and that he never had any children.” That’s about as straightforward as historians get. No hedge words, no coy suggestion of mystery—just the plain reality that the texts we have are silent, and that silence in this context actually means something. First-century Jewish culture assumed marriage; if Jesus had taken a wife, someone would have mentioned it.

Part of the appeal of the “Jesus married” idea is, I suspect, modern restlessness. We want to normalize him, to make him fit our patterns. A celibate, itinerant prophet is strange to us—lonely, maybe even unsettling. So we project a wedding, a family, little children running around Galilee. But sometimes the historical strangeness is the very thing that matters. Jesus lived a short, unrepeatable life, not the kind you’d package neatly into a suburban template.

Of course, none of this will stop the rumors, because the rumors sell. But if we’re actually interested in history and not just conspiratorial fun, Casey’s remark is worth sitting with. Jesus of Nazareth, so far as we can tell, had no wife, no children, and he staked his entire mission on something larger than domestic legacy. That’s not less human—it’s just a different kind of human story than the one we keep trying to force on him.

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Source: Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Guide to His Life and Teaching (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 145.