Description
Was Jesus celibate, as the Church claims, or did he marry? If he had a wife, was she Mary Magdalene or someone completely unknown to us? In this knowledgeable and accessible book, Bible metaphysician, theologian and author Maggy Whitehouse puts forward a ground-breaking new theory; that just like any other Jew of the time, Jesus married at the age of 14. The "missing years" in the Bible are those he spent as a husband, raising his family. Given that the average life-span of a woman 2000 years ago was 27 years and two out of three women died in childbirth, Jesus was probably a widower when he began teaching. So what happened to Jesus' wife, this most forgotten of women? To find out, Maggy Whitehouse examines the legends, social and economic laws of the time on marriage and the legends of Jesus' celibacy and his marriage to Mary Magdalene. She explores the evidence in ancient Graeco-Roman and Pagan religions, the Gnostic gospels, the earliest known Christian scripts, the Jewish oral tradition and the commentaries on the Torah, demonstrating how the Christian world grew to need both the idea of a celibate God made man and the sacred union of male and female.