Was Jesus Married?
Is there a Case for a 'Mrs Christ’?
Of the many biblical misconceptions engendered by the Da Vinci Code,1 there is one which could hold a grain of truth…
Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene.
Contrary to headlines which followed Dan Brown’s novel, there is no good evidence that Jesus was married to Mary.2 But what of a married Jesus, full stop? Is it possible that Jesus ever married, perhaps in the ‘lost years’ before his ministry?
It is often taken for granted that he didn’t. The normative portrait of a single Jesus is one which has dominated Christian imagination for almost two millenia. The Catholic priesthood is particularly invested in the idea of a celibate saviour.3
In the academy, however, some historians have found the problem more vexing than many lay people are aware.4 As I am currently writing on Jesus’ young life, the question of a ‘lost wife’ of Jesus seemed a fitting one for me also to take up.
As I have clarified in in my posts on Jesus’ missing years and his education, so much of what we know about Jesus’ early life has to be filled in from his context and worked backwards from the Gospels. The same is true for whether Jesus was married.
I will begin, then, by surveying the key arguments that Jesus had a wife, both from the context of first-century Jewish culture as well as his ministry in the Gospels. In turn, I will survey the most powerful reasons for thinking that Jesus was single for life.
The Gospels’ Silence
The most common reason for thinking that Jesus didn’t marry is that the earliest Christian literature never mentions his wife.5 She is not found in Paul, the Gospels, nor in other canonical texts or the apostolic tradition. Surely, the argument goes, someone would have picked up on her existence.6
I am not entirely dissuaded by this line of reasoning. Arguments from silence can have force. There are a number of reasons, however, why the Gospels’ failure to mention Jesus’ wife is not an overwhelming evidence of absence.
To begin with, the Gospels fail to mention almost any of Jesus’ idiosyncrasies. As historian Helen Bond notes, Mark’s depiction of Jesus is “positively shadowy.”7 Unlike the gossipy ‘lives’ of Suetonius, or the historically rich biographies of Plutarch, the Gospels remain largely unconcerned with Jesus’ personal life or foibles.
Moreover, like most ancient texts, the Gospels are focused on male activity. We might not know, for example, that Jesus had sisters (Mk. 6:3) – whose names remain concealed to us – if their existence had not been mentioned in passing. If Jesus did have a wife, it is not inconceivable that she just slipped out of the frame of view.
It is also possible that the evangelists simply didn’t know about Jesus’ marriage. If Jesus’ wife had passed away childless before his public ministry – at a time when it was not unusual for people to die young – we would no more expect to find her mentioned than we would the details of Jesus’ craftsmanship or his trips to Jerusalem.
The argument from silence therefore does not guarantee Jesus’ singleness. In the absence of stronger arguments for Jesus’ life-long celibacy, it is not entirely decisive.
Marriage in Ancient Jewish Culture
So the Gospels don’t tell us whether Jesus was always single. But they also don’t tell us whether Jesus went to school, attended the synagogue, or played catch. If we want to answer these questions, then, we have to fill in the gaps. And we can do that, in part, by looking at contemporary norms.
In ancient Jewish culture, marriage was held in high regard and singleness was the exception to the norm. The first of God’s commandments in the Torah was to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen.1:28). Delaying marriage could therefore be viewed with suspicion – a failure to live up to divine and societal expectations. One rabbinic text highlights this concern, and indicates the age of marriage-readiness at a later period:
Rabbi Huna was behaving according to his own saying when he said: “A man of twenty who has not married spends all his days in sin” ... So too it is taught by the school of Rabbi Yishmael: “Up to twenty years, the Holy One - blessed be He — sits and watches for a man, when he should marry a wife. When his twentieth year arrives and he has still not married, He says, ‘May his bones blow away.”8
To be sure, this ideal of teen marriage may not have been practised in Jesus’ time. According to one scholar, men in first-century Jewish culture “married for the first time in their mid-to late twenties.”9 If Jesus was around thirty when he began his public ministry, it is plausible that he could have already married.10
Marriage in ancient Judaism was also closely bound up with a family’s honour. Michael Satlow writes that “For Galilean Jews, according to the Palestinian Talmud, honor was more important than money. Few events held more potential for the transfer of honor than marriage.”11 Without getting married and having children who could provide for you in old age – the primary sense of honouring your mother and father – the social support network of families would crumble.
It might be argued that Jesus did not fall in love or want to marry. Perhaps he sensed his divine call early on. Yet this misses the mark, for it projects onto first-century Judaism a more recent notion of marriage. The understanding of marriage as a partnership of equals – a decision made for individual, romantic reasons – owes more to the troubadours of medieval Europe than it does to Jesus’ collectivist culture.
In Jesus’ context, as in some cultures today, the families of the bride and groom would have played a part in arranging the marriage. It is quite plausible, then, to imagine Joseph – or Mary, if Joseph had died – fulfilling this function. If Jesus had a say in the matter, it would not have been on whether to get married, but on whom to marry.
Rabbis & Ascetics
Against the societal pressure to marry, some have suggested that Jesus may have had a special reason to remain single. While it was unusual not to marry, it was not entirely exceptional. Single life had some precedents.
Some have pointed to the rabbi, Simeon ben Azzai. According to one story, when Simeon praised the command to marry, his disciples asked him why he was not married himself. To this, he replied, ‘What shall I do if my soul yearns for the Torah?’ (Tos. Yev 8:7). Perhaps Jesus was also privileging his study of the Torah over marriage.
The problem with this parallel is twofold. First, it seems that Simeon had married and divorced at an earlier stage.12 Second, as I have explored in a post on his education, Jesus was a charismatic leader, proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God, not a formal rabbi of a later rabbinicism, teaching his students Torah.
A more contemporary model of celibacy was provided by the Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect described by the Jewish-Roman historian, Flavius Josephus. He writes:
It also deserves our admiration how much the Essenes exceed all other men that addict themselves to virtue, and this in righteousness… There are about four thousand men that live in this way, and neither marry wives, nor are desirous to keep servants… but they live by themselves and minister one to another. (Antiquities, 18.1.5)
For Flavius Josephus, a single life was not contrary to God’s law. Rather, it was to excel in ‘virtue’ and ‘righteousness.’ If the Essenes lived this way in preparation for the coming Kingdom of God, it is possible that Jesus adopted a similar lifestyle.
Although Jesus was not an Essene, his teacher, John the Baptist, is sometimes thought to have been.13 Like the Essenes, John lived an ascetic lifestyle. In the Gospels, he is first found in the wilderness and is said not to have drunk (wine) or feasted. Since asceticism renounces the body, it seems likely that John was also unmarried.
We must be careful, however, not to project these ascetic tendencies onto Jesus. Indeed, the Gospels directly contrast Jesus and John with respect to the very issue of John’s asceticism (Luke 7:33-34). If Jesus was unlike John in that he ate and drank, it seems possible that he also averred from John’s lifestyle on marriage.
The Case for a Single Jesus
We have scrutinised two weak reasons for thinking that Jesus was an exception to the norm of getting married; that he was an ascetic or a bachelor don.
Yet there is at least one compelling reason for thinking that Jesus was not married during his public ministry. That is, Jesus repeatedly refuted the notion that a man’s mission in life was to get married, have children and uphold his family’s honour.14
We see this challenge in a number of his teachings. To one would-be disciple who wants to bury his father, Jesus claims, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead,’ (Lk. 9:60). It is difficult to overstate how shocking such a teaching would have been to first century hearers, for whom burying one’s parents was at the heart of piety.15
An even more radical promise assumes that people were leaving their families to join the Jesus movement: ‘everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life’ (Mk. 10:29-30). This meant a radical cost; leaving behind the very networks which provided the bedrock of social support in antiquity.
In place of the biological family, Jesus creates a new sort of family. When told by a crowd that his family is looking for him, Jesus replies, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’ (Mk. 3:35). In similar sayings elsewhere, Jesus further relativises the importance of biological kin.
Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven
In addition to downplaying familial obligations, there may be an even stronger reason for thinking that Jesus was not married: he actively praises a celibate lifestyle.
For there are eunuchs, that were so born from their mother's womb: and there are eunuchs, that were made eunuchs by men: and there are eunuchs, that made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. (Mt. 19:12)
The eunuchs who are born eunuchs and made eunuchs by men are self-explanatory; the eunuchs who ‘made themselves eunuchs’ appear to be those who forego marriage and live the lifestyle of castrated men. Why did Jesus promote this way of life among his followers and – assuming he practised what he preached – adopt it himself?
The context for Jesus’ teaching is not the idea, sometimes propagated by theologians, that marriage is inherently less pious than a single life. Rather, it is a set of expectations he held concerning the coming Kingdom of Heaven. For a start, Jesus believed the Kingdom was coming soon. The world was about to undergo an upheaval.
Moreover, Jesus taught that marriage would play no part in the future Kingdom. When challenged on the topic by some Sadducees, Jesus answered that ‘in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven’ (Mt. 22:30). Perhaps Jesus advocated a celibate lifestyle in preparation and embodiment of the Kingdom here and now. He wanted to live like an angel.
Was Jesus Married?
We are now better placed to answer our question: was Jesus married?
Certainty here eludes us. On the one hand, the Gospels’ silence on Jesus’ wife, coupled with his subversive teachings on family, celibacy and the coming Kingdom, provide a powerful case that Jesus was not married during his public ministry.
If Jesus never married, this would not only explain why his wife is not mentioned in the Gospels, it would also explain why his children are never mentioned. While it may have been the case that an earlier wife might have gone without mention, the argument from silence is more difficult to make when kids are brought into picture.
On the other hand, nothing in the Gospels strictly precludes his marriage as a young man, perhaps around twenty. Not only is it unclear when Jesus developed his subversive views on the nature of family, it would have been fairly exceptional if he did not marry. The historical evidence therefore leaves the possibility open.
Perhaps the question behind the question, however, is why so many of us are averse to a married Jesus. Pope John Paul VI speaks for many Christians, when he explains the gap of Jesus’ missing years: ‘Christ remained throughout his whole life in the state of celibacy, which signified his total dedication to the service of God and men.’
Is it the case, however, that a married Jesus is less pious? Is an ascetic Jesus more godly? In considering this facet of Jesus’ missing years, we hold up a mirror to our own assumptions and ideals. If we cannot countenance the possibility of a Jesus who was married, this may say more about our own ethics than the historical Jesus.
Further Reading
Anthony le Donne, The Wife of Jesus. London: Oneworld, 2013.
William E. Phipps, Was Jesus Married? London: Harper & Row, 1970.
Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
On which, see Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
The Gospel of Philip twice calls her a ‘companion’ of Jesus, where she kisses him on the lips. But this esoteric text invites us not to take its meaning a face value. In any case, it was written two hundred years after the canonical Gospels.
See, for example, Pope Paul VI’s assertion that ‘This deep connection between celibacy and the priesthood of Christ is reflected in those whose fortune it is to share in the dignity and mission of the Mediator and eternal Priest; this sharing will be more perfect the freer the sacred minister is from the bonds of flesh and blood’ (Sacerdotalis Caelihatus 21).
The best popular treatment of the question, to which I am heavily indebted, is Anthony Le Donne, The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals (London: Oneworld, 2013). A more comprehensive approach is offered by William E. Phipps, Was Jesus Married? (London: Harper & Row, 1970).
The metaphor of Jesus as the bride-groom is picked up on in the Gospels and Revelation.
Maurice Casey writes that “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.” See Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Guide to His Life and Teaching (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 145.
See Helen K. Bond, The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark’s Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2020).
Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 29b-30a. Le Donne notes that this “text probably reflects an ideal and not standard practice” (Wife of Jesus, 182).
Lynn Cohick, Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 119.
One marriage contract of the period found near the Dead Sea, states that a certain ‘Jesus, Son of Jesus’ married at twenty (Wife of Jesus, 111-112).
Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 104, cited in Le Donne, Wife of Jesus, 113.
See Phipps, Was Jesus Married?, 32.
For a recent argument maintaining this connection, see Joel Marcus, John the Baptist in History and Theology (Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2018).
Anthony le Donne labels this, among other traits, as “civic masculinity” (Wife of Jesus, 119).
See Tobit 1.18.