Fair enough, but it would not be necessary to say that the gospels lied, just that they were incomplete on the subject of Jesus’ wife. After all, nobody can claim that the Gospels are complete accounts of the life of Jesus. For instance, most notably, the time between Jesus’ birth and the beginning of His ministry is quite poorly documented in any of the Gospels. That’s because that part of the story of Jesus’ life is not important to the main message of the Gospels, namely that Jesus is the son of God who was sent to earth to be sacrificed for our salvation. Similarly, whether or not Jesus was married is unimportant to this message.
It certainly seems that the Coptic “gospels” are fakes, but it does raise a question WRT the marriage of Jesus. There weren’t too many bachelors in 1st Century AD Judea. If someone gained the notoriety that Jesus did, it would have been a very notable fact about him that He was a bachelor, so notable that someone writing an account of his life might well mention the fact. Being married, at that time, would have been very commonplace, the type of thing that might well go unnoted in an account of his life, especially if the events of that account really didn’t involve his wife.
Further, the Gospels were all written several decades after the death of Jesus. Jesus had really riled up the Jewish authorities at that time (obviously, so much so that they went to the Roman governor to have him executed). It is possible that if Jesus had descendants, the authorities would have persecuted those descendants. Maybe the gospel writers just left out the presence of a wife and descendants in order to protect them.
Please note: I don’t necessarily actually believe any of this. It’s just not necessarily true that anyone had to actually lie for any of this to be true. It also does not affect the message of the Gospels in any way if any of this actually is true.
Ah,but Jesus relatives werewell known leaders in the early church. Why hide a wife.
wouldn’t she have been at the cross with his mom, his aunt, etc?
And nothing in the early pseudo gospels or writings of the church fathers.
Read Phillip Jenkins book Hidden Gospels on how the scholarship is being manipulated.
This idea was stsrted with the davinci code...which implies Jesus was not God, merely someone with magic powers...whose decendents were Merovingian kings.
One needn’t be a christian to see bad scolarship.