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Post by homeschooldad on May 5, 2021 9:51:59 GMT
I've always wondered about this. While it is fairly obvious that Jesus had no wife or children during His public ministry --- would they not have been at the foot of the cross? --- is it possible that He could have been a widower, having married sometime during the period of "the hidden life of Jesus", and then His wife died? (I am assuming no children, though the conjugal aspect of marriage is no sin.) Does the Church define this on some level, or is it just "something that everybody knows"? Something that everybody takes for granted? (And no, I didn't get this idea from any "New Age" source or anyplace like that. It is solely my own thinking.)
From infancy to the age of around 30, the only thing that Scripture notes about Jesus, is when He was found in the temple with the rabbis. There is a pious legend that He went to England as a young man with St Joseph of Arimathea (hence the Anglican hymn "And Did Those Feet"), and some say He traveled to India before He began His public ministry. It's entirely possible, then, that He could have known of Buddhism and Hinduism in His human nature. (I said "known of". I didn't say "made His religion based on them", though there is no apologetical problem with His having studied these pre-Christian religions. The Opus Dei maxim of "forget that you exist" is not at all incompatible with Buddhism. And, no, I'm not a partisan of Opus Dei, not my thing.)
Any thoughts?
(I really don't want to delve into mystical writings here, such as the writings of Sr Anne-Catherine Emmerich, Venerable Mary of Agreda's City of God or the deeply controversial Poem of the Man-God. I'm interested in doctrine and Sacred Tradition. Mystical revelations never bind in faith to believe, interesting reading, inspiring reading, perhaps, but not doctrine in any way whatsoever.)
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Post by pianistclare on May 5, 2021 17:53:05 GMT
No. Never married.
Thomas went to India.
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Post by homeschooldad on May 5, 2021 18:44:39 GMT
No. Never married. Thomas went to India. I understand this, but does Catholic teaching specifically address the matter --- do we have anything from the Fathers of the Church or the magisterium, or from some source in Sacred Tradition? --- or is it just something that is "understood" from the context of the entire life of Jesus? And as I said, Scripture is silent on the life of Jesus from the age of 12 until around 30 years old. I know St Thomas went to India, but that doesn't exclude Jesus having done the same. And there is no doctrinal reason whatsoever that Jesus could not have gone to England, or anyplace else for that matter.
This is no attempt at heterodoxy, nor am I informed by fanciful legends about the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail (think The DaVinci Code). I am simply asking whether the silence of Scripture on the life of Jesus for 18 years (give or take) leaves any room for speculation on such matters. Scripture doesn't address the death of St Joseph, when it happened, or for that matter, whether he had children from a previous marriage or not. Yet there are various ideas about this too.
I do think it's safe to assume that after the death of St Joseph, Jesus devoted his life to the care of His mother, though obviously He did have to leave her for periods of time (40 days in the desert and so on), assuming St Joseph had died by that time. Scripture is silent on that too.
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Post by pianistclare on May 5, 2021 18:59:31 GMT
I think if Scripture and Sacred Tradition bothers to tell us about his relationships with the Apostles it stands to reason that another intimate relationship would have been alluded to at least. We know about Peter's mother-in-law for example. Surely something as important as a MARRIAGE would be a source for modeling a holy marriage. The model given to us is that of Joseph and Mary, Ana & Joachim, and countless others throughout Scripture. To speculate on such for the Son of Man is frankly a bit odd to me. Why would GOD marry? As far as leaving behind His mother to visit India, who had no one else to care for her along in a patristic society to fend for herself would not exactly be a good idea either.
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Post by tisbearself on May 5, 2021 19:24:30 GMT
The Church doctrine is that Jesus, as God, was married to His Bride, the Church. If you are talking about Jesus being married to a human woman, the vast majority of Bible scholars have concluded, based on Scripture, sacred tradition, and/or knowledge of the culture of Jesus' times, that he was not married. Even Fr. Martin in America magazine doesn't think Jesus was married. www.americamagazine.org/faith/2014/04/10/did-jesus-have-wife-noThis seems to be an issue where both the conservative and progressive factions of Catholicism are solidly in agreement.
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Post by homeschooldad on May 5, 2021 21:28:33 GMT
Two excellent responses, this is exactly the kind of reasoning I was looking for, and I appreciate it. And it is not often that I find myself carrying any water for the priest of God Father James Martin, but mirabile dictu, his article reflects my own thinking exactly. Now, let me be clear that this is not going to happen, but if --- if --- the entire world came to the knowledge that Our Blessed Lord had been married for a time and was then widowed, I'd just say "okay, that's cool, sorry for His loss, I hope she made Him a good wife while they were together". I have to think that this would be a major crisis of faith for some.
And not to step on the third rail, but if that had been the case, and if indeed they had had a child or children, I want to say it was Fr Ludwig Ott who said this (Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma), but whomever it was, they said that if Our Lord had fathered children, they would not share in His divine nature, only His human one. Ott is a dense text and I haven't the patience to pore through it for hours on end looking for this passage. Maybe I just dreamed that. I don't know.
"Why would God marry?", you say? Hmmm... maybe a matter of "a man like us in all things but sin", and marriage is no sin?
To echo both of you as well as Fr Martin, there is every reason in the world to believe He never married (notwithstanding the fact that celibacy among Jewish males was seen as a bit odd, and still is, unlike in traditional Catholicism where sometimes it seems as though "getting married is what people do when they don't stay single"), and no good reason to think that He did. I don't think there is any even remotely significant support among Christians of any stripe (LDS possibly excepted, and they do think of themselves as Christian) for the concept of a married Jesus. This is one case where the familiar Protestant refrain of "it's not anywhere in the Bible" is possibly sound reasoning.
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Post by katy777 on May 5, 2021 22:40:16 GMT
My Art History Professor no less, made us read a book debunking the Da Vinci code.
Also common sense tells me that God created Mary, the Immaculate conception , pure ,and Lucifer got thrown out of heaven because he could not deal with God being human.
So I sincerely doubt that Jesus was married.
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Post by ralfy on May 6, 2021 3:22:35 GMT
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Post by jimg on May 7, 2021 21:14:03 GMT
Jesus is true God and true man. But he is not a human person. The Second Person of the Trinity took on a human nature, to be fully human. He has two natures but he is one divine Person, not a human person.
Because Mary is the mother of Jesus, and Jesus is a divine person, we can accurately call her Mother of God. If Jesus had married, then his wife would have been wife of God. But that did not happen.
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Post by homeschooldad on May 7, 2021 22:07:58 GMT
Jesus is true God and true man. But he is not a human person. The Second Person of the Trinity took on a human nature, to be fully human. He has two natures but he is one divine Person, not a human person. Because Mary is the mother of Jesus, and Jesus is a divine person, we can accurately call her Mother of God. If Jesus had married, then his wife would have been wife of God. But that did not happen. Well, I suppose this is an example of the old saying "we'd all be material heretics if we talked long enough", but I always thought Jesus was a divine Person and a human person at the same time. I do know that He had a divine nature and a human nature. For 45+ years, I may have been conflating "nature" and "person". I thought the hypostatic union applied both to natures and to personhood --- not two persons, but a person both divine and human.
If, indeed, as you say, it is true that Jesus was not a human person, then I repudiate my material (i.e., unknown and unintended) heresy here and now.
I am not being ironic. It is the hallmark of a faithful Catholic to repudiate, if they need to, any beliefs or promptings of an errant "conscience" that run contrary to Catholic Faith, Tradition, and the teachings of the magisterium. It is unworthy of a Catholic, to say once something is demonstrated to them to be true, "well, nobody ever told me that, I've always believed otherwise". Poorly catechized people --- which I am assuredly am not (though it was all basically self-catechesis, reliable teachers were few and far between in the 1970s and 1980s) --- doubtless have a lot of "aha" moments.
Learn something new every day.
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Post by katy777 on May 8, 2021 23:43:35 GMT
Hmmm. If someone believes this, they have to get a DNA sample of Jesus. Maybe from the shroud of Turin.
Then submit it to 23 and me. Science plus religion.
I'm sure another go of testing was done by the church to prove He is end of line and about siblings children etc.
The church does not mess around.
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Post by homeschooldad on May 10, 2021 22:07:00 GMT
Hmmm. If someone believes this, they have to get a DNA sample of Jesus. Maybe from the shroud of Turin. Then submit it to 23 and me. Science plus religion. I'm sure another go of testing was done by the church to prove He is end of line and about siblings children etc. The church does not mess around. I'm not a scientist, but if I were a betting man, I'd say that any DNA that ever existed on the Shroud of Turin, was annihilated by whatever physical reaction took place, to make that image "burn into" the shroud to begin with. Some have said it was like intense, concentrated nuclear radiation. I do know (or rather, I have heard) that Geiger counters and other such devices go positively nuts when they are placed in close proximity to the tomb of Jesus. (FWIW, my son and I have electromagnetic radiation field detection apps on our cell phones, and I tested mine on a girder taken from the ruins of the World Trade Center. It went absolutely off the charts. Some have said that nuclear explosions brought down the towers. Don't know if all this means anything... just saying...)
I wonder if it might be permissible to take some cells from the species of the various eucharistic miracles, and do DNA analysis on them. Some might say this would be sacrilege, but on the other hand, if tissue could be taken, and could be proven to be from a Semite in Palestine 2000 years ago (assuming a time frame could be proven), well... this would especially be interesting if the miracle took place in some far corner of the world... and then there would be the question of "how do you get 2000-year-old cardiac muscle tissue from a Palestinian Jew in Mexico or Poland?". Not impossible, but highly improbable. This might just be what it would take, to bring unbelievers from doubt to faith. Our modern world reveres science as absolute truth, when it will revere little else that way.
I mean no irreverence, but I think Our Eucharistic Lord would be okay with taking a small particle of His Body and submitting It to scientific testing. He gives His Body for us to consume in ours, unto our salvation --- how could He object to having a few cells tested, to prove that He is true and that He is really present in the Eucharist?
And another thought: assuming such a thing could be scientifically proven, what then of all the people who blithely dismiss stray visible fragments of the Eucharist as "not worth worrying about" when receiving communion in the hand?
(love or hate the SSPX, your call, but how to refute this article?)
The Church may presently permit CITH, but whether it is prudent or wise to give this permission, that, alas, is another story entirely.
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Post by katy777 on May 10, 2021 22:30:52 GMT
The DNA of Jesus is thousands of years old. There was a test with unconcrevrated hosts, where people received on the hand with black gloves. There were particles of the host left on the glove.
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Post by katy777 on May 10, 2021 22:40:18 GMT
I did 23 and me. Mostly I'm Nordic. But my maternal halogroup comes from India, and I have .o2 percent Jewish from the line of St. Thomas. Hmmm. I believe I'm a child of God. We all are. We should sing praise to Him, Our Mother and the saints before us.
I believe too I have been in the presence of living Saints both here and elsewhere.
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Post by homeschooldad on May 11, 2021 2:37:51 GMT
The DNA of Jesus is thousands of years old. There was a test with unconcrevrated hosts, where people received on the hand with black gloves. There were particles of the host left on the glove. That may be the same test for which I provided a link, a study done by an SSPX adherent and his young son, published in The Angelus. As far as why those Particles remain the Body of Christ, yet do not deserve the reverence due even to the smallest visible Fragment that retains the appearance of bread, I shall leave that to CITH advocates to explain (as well as to explain why the Church for centuries was wrong about how to treat those Particles). In the meantime, I remain unconvinced, and receive only on the tongue.
I would love to see a DNA analysis of some of that cardiac muscle tissue or coagulated blood found in Eucharistic miracles. The haplotypes would tell the whole story. Referring back to my earlier comments, I become a little hesitant to think of His Body being tested for DNA, but even as He suffered violence to His Body for our salvation, now that science has progressed to that point, I have to think He would approve of these tiny Fragments being used to show an unbelieving world that He remains with us. (And besides, assuming It were "living Tissue", the DNA test would end Its life. The same thing happens when we digest It after receiving.)
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