The Jesus bloodline refers to the proposition that a lineal sequence of the historical Jesus has persisted, possibly to the present time. Although absent from the Gospels or historical records, the concept of Jesus having descendants has gained a presence in the public imagination, as seen with Dan Brown's 2003 best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code and its 2006 movie adaptation of the same name that used the premise for its plot. It is dismissed generally by scholars. These claimed Jesus's bloodlines are distinct from the biblical genealogy of Jesus, which concerns the ancestors of Jesus, and from the alleged Brothers of Jesus and other kin of Jesus, known as the Desposyni.
Jesus as husband and father
Historical precursors Ideas that Jesus Christ might have been married have a long history in fringe Christian theology, though the historical record says nothing concerning the subject. Bart D. Ehrman, chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, commented that, although there are some historical scholars who claim that it is likely that Jesus was married, the vast majority of New Testament and early Christianity scholars find such a claim to be historically unreliable.
Much of the literature of this type has a more specific emphasis, on a claimed marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. There are indications in Gnosticism of the belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene shared an amorous, and not just a religious relationship. The Gnostic Gospel of Philip tells that Jesus "kissed her often" and refers to Mary as his "companion". Several sources from the 13th-century claim that an aspect of Catharist theology was the belief that the earthly Jesus had a familial relationship with Mary Magdalene. An Exposure of the Albigensian and Waldensian Heresies, dated to before 1213 and usually attributed to Ermengaud of Béziers, a former Waldensian seeking reconciliation with the Catholic Church, would describe Cathar heretical beliefs including the claim that they taught "in the secret meetings that Mary Magdalen was the wife of Christ". A second work, untitled and anonymous, repeats Ermengaud's claim. The anti-heretic polemic Historia Albigensis, written between 1212 and 1218 by Cistercian monk and chronicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay, gives the most lurid description, attributing to Cathars the belief that Mary Magdalene was the concubine of Jesus.W.A. Sibly, M.D. Sibly, The History of the Albigensian Crusade: Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay's "Historia Albigensis" (Boydell, 1998). Quote: "Further, in their secret meetings they said that the Christ who was born in the earthly and visible Bethlehem and crucified at Jerusalem was 'evil', and that Mary Magdalene was his concubine – and that she was the woman taken in adultery who is referred to in the Scriptures; the 'good' Christ, they said, neither ate nor drank nor assumed the true flesh and was never in this world, except spiritually in the body of Paul. I have used the term 'the earthly and visible Bethlehem' because the heretics believed there is a different and invisible earth in which – according to some of them – the 'good' Christ was born and crucified." These sources must be considered with caution: the two known authors were not themselves Cathars and were writing of a heresy being actively and violently suppressed. There is no evidence that these beliefs derived from the much earlier Gnostic traditions of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, but the Cathar traditions did find their way into many of the 20th-century popular writings claiming the existence of a progeny of Jesus.
Modern works Produced during the late 19th-century were the first of several expansions of this theme of marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, providing the couple with a named child. The French socialist politician, Louis Martin (pseudonym of Léon Aubry, died 1900), in his 1886 book Les Evangiles sans Dieu (The Gospels without God), republished the next year in his Essai sur la vie de Jésus (Essay on the life of Jesus), described the historical Jesus as a socialist and atheist. He related that after his crucifixion, Mary Magdalene, along with the family of Lazarus of Bethany, brought the body of Jesus to Provence, and there Mary had a child, Maximin, the fruit of her love for Jesus. The scenario was dismissed as 'certainly strange' by a contemporary reviewer.
During the late 20th century there was a flourishing of a genre of popular books claiming that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a family. Donovan Joyce's 1972 best-seller, The Jesus Scroll, presented an alternative timeline for Jesus that purportedly originated from a mysterious document. He claimed that, after being denied access to the Masada archaeological site, he was met at the Tel Aviv airport by an American University professor using the pseudonym "Max Grosset", who held a large scroll he claimed to have smuggled from the site. Relating its contents to Joyce, Grosset offered to pay him to smuggle it out of the country, but then became spooked when his flight was delayed and snuck away; he was never identified and the scroll was not known of again. According to Joyce, the 'Jesus Scroll' was a personal letter by 80-year-old Yeshua ben Ya’akob ben Gennesareth, heir of the Hasmonean dynasty and hence rightful King of Israel, written on the eve of the capture of the city by the Romans after a suicide pact ended Masada's resistance. It was said to have described the man as married, and that he had a son whose crucifixion the letter's author had witnessed. Joyce identified the writer with Jesus of Nazareth, who, he claimed, had survived his own crucifixion to marry and settle at Masada, and suggested a conspiracy to hide the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to suppress this counter-narrative to Christian orthodoxy.Donovan Joyce, The Jesus Scroll p. 97-98 (Sphere Books, 1975; ).
Barbara Thiering, in her 1992 book Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life Story, republished as Jesus the Man and made into a documentary, The Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls, by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, also developed a Jesus and Mary Magdalene familial scenario. Thiering based her historical conclusions on her application of what she calls the Pesher technique (interpretation based on ancient commentaries) to the New Testament.For a discussion between Barbara Thiering and Geza Vermes surrounding this, see http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2065Thiering, Barbara (April, 2005). The marriage of Jesus Thiering dates the betrothal of Jesus and Mary Magdalene precisely to 30 June, AD 30, at 10:00 p.m. She relocated the events in the life of Jesus from Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem to Qumran, and related that Jesus was revived after an incomplete crucifixion and married Mary Magdalene, who was already pregnant by him, that they had a daughter Tamar and a son Jesus Justus born in AD 41, and Jesus then divorced Mary to wed a Jewess named Lydia, going to Rome where he died. The account was dismissed as fanciful by scholar Michael J. McClymond.
In the television documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus, and book The Jesus Family Tomb,Simcha Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino,The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History (HarperCollins, 2007) both from 2007, fringe investigative journalist Simcha Jacobovici and Charles R. Pellegrino proposed that ossuaries in the Talpiot Tomb, discovered in Jerusalem in 1980, belonged to Jesus and his family. Jacobovici and Pellegrino argue that Aramaic inscriptions reading "Judah, son of Jesus", "Jesus, son of Joseph", and "Mariamne", a name they associate with Mary Magdalene, together preserve the record of a family group consisting of Jesus, his wife Mary Magdalene and son Judah. Such theory has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of biblical scholars, archaeologists and theologians, including the archaeologist Amos Kloner, who managed the archeological excavation of the tomb itself.
During the same year a book was published with a similar theme that Jesus and Mary Magdalene produced a family, authored by psychic medium and best-selling author Sylvia Browne, The Two Marys: The Hidden History of the Mother and Wife of Jesus.
The Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars involved in the quest for the historical Jesus, were unable to determine whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a matrimonial relationship due to the dearth of historical evidence. They concluded that the historical Mary Magdalene was not a repentant prostitute but a prominent disciple of Jesus and authority in the early Christian community.The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (1998), Harper San Francisco, The claims that Jesus and Mary Magdalene fled to France parallel other legends about the flight of disciples to distant lands, such as the one depicting Joseph of Arimathea traveling to England after the death of Jesus, taking with him a piece of thorn from the Crown of Thorns, which he later planted in Glastonbury. Historians generally regard these legends as "pious frauds" produced during the Middle Ages.Roger Sherman Loomis (Editor),Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages. A collaborative history. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1959.Reginald Francis Treharne, The Glastonbury Legends: Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail and King Arthur, London, Cresset Press, 1969Joseph Armitage Robinson, Two Glastonbury Legends: King Arthur and St Joseph of Arimathea, University Press, Cambridge, 1926
Joseph and Aseneth
In 2014, Simcha Jacobovici and fringe religious studies historian Barrie Wilson suggested in The Lost Gospel that the eponymous characters of a 6th-century tale called "Joseph and Aseneth" were in actuality representations of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson. The Lost Gospel. New York: Pegasus, 2014. The story was reported in an anthology compiled by Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor, along with covering letters describing the discovery of the original Greek manuscript and its translation into Syriac. In one of these, translator Moses of Ingila explained the story "as an allegory of Christ's marriage to the soul". Jacobovici and Wilson instead interpret it as an allegorical reference to an actual marriage of Jesus, produced by a community believing that he was married and had children.
Israeli Biblical scholar, Rivka Nir termed their work "serious-minded, thought-provoking and interesting", but described the thesis as objectionable,Nir, Rivka (Fall 2016). Book Review, The Lost Gospel. Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. Volume 14, issue 3: page 296, 305. and the book has been dismissed by mainstream Biblical scholarship, for example by Anglican theologian, Richard Bauckham.Assessing the Lost Gospel by Richard Bauckman The Church of England compared The Lost Gospel to a Monty Python sketch, the director of communications for the Archbishop's Council citing the book as an example of religious illiteracy and that ever since the publication of The Da Vinci Code in 2003, "an industry had been constructed in which 'conspiracy theorists, satellite channel documentaries and opportunistic publishers had identified a lucrative income stream'."Lost Gospel claims Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had children, by Victoria Ward, The Daily Telegraph, 12 November 2014 The Lost Gospel was described as historical nonsense by Markus Bockmuehl.Markus Bockmuehl, Ancient Apocryphal Gospels, page 21 (Westminster John Knox Press, 2017. )
Early Mormon theology