A Married Christ?

Ask conservative Christians how they feel about marriage and they'll tell you it's a good thing. More than that, it's a sacred thing, invented by God Himself in the Garden of Eden. That's why such Christians are fighting tooth and nail against the legalization of gay marriage. Such a move, they fear, would destroy the very meaning of the God-ordained institution and must be opposed at all costs. Yet, if you ask these same marriage-devoted, conservative Christians if Jesus was or could've possibly been married, they'll react as if marriage was one of the seven deadly sins.

Jesus married?! It's blasphemy to even suggest such a thing! You're not a true Christian! Liberals have taken over the church! There's no way Christ was married!

Why do people who claim to believe that marriage is a good, even sacred, thing react so negatively to any suggestion that Jesus might've been wed? In a word, sex.

Despite the Bible's positive view of sex, most conservative Christians have mixed feelings about it, to say the least. For centuries, the orthodox Christian teaching has been that Jesus was fully God and fully man. To believe otherwise put you in the heresy camp, yet most orthodox Christians today are uncomfortable with a Jesus so human that He could've had--gasp!--sexual feelings. But let's think about this rationally.

In the Bible God never calls sex bad. He restricts sex to men and women in marriage and harshly condemns sex outside of that relationship, but He never calls sex itself evil. All you have to do is read the Song of Solomon to see how approving of sex, in it's right place, God is. So, if God didn't think sex was intrinsically evil, and if Jesus was God incarnate, then it stands to reason that Jesus also didn't object to sex itself. Thus, if Jesus was married there would've been nothing sinful about it.

But the Bible doesn't say Jesus was married, some might argue, so that proves He wasn't. No, it doesn't. All that proves is that the Bible doesn't say Jesus was married. The Good Book also doesn't say that Jesus wasn't married. So if you're going to argue from silence, you have to admit that said silence gives as much "proof" to the other side as it does to your own.

Some Christians might reject a married Christ as a way to fight against neo-Gnostic attacks on the Christian faith like the ones in the bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code. I understand that view, but the best why to fight attacks on the faith is with reason and truth. And the truth is that we just don't know the marital status of Christ. The Bible doesn't tell us, and maybe it doesn't because that information is irrelevant to Christ's mission and our response to it. Think about it: if Jesus was married, and even had children, what difference would that make to His death and resurrection? None at all. Sure, some people may be uncomfortable at the thought that there could be physical descendants of Jesus living today but you know what, there already are descendants of Jesus living today! They are the descendants of His brothers and sisters. So Jesus' bloodline is alive on earth right now, if only indirectly.

All and all, I think any Christian who really believes that marriage is a good and sacred thing shouldn't feel upset at any suggestion or hint that Jesus might've been married. Afer all, if Jesus was married, and if He really was God, then He was simply partaking of the holy sacrament He Himself ordained.