Jesus wasn’t an Essene. Furthermore, his mission didn’t separate him from common, general human life, but engaged it.
You may believe as you like, but there’s nothing wrong with Jesus Christ being married. In many ways it affirms marriage and contrasts it with secular marriage which the state controls.
My experience is that the vast majority of Christians practice a form of Christianity unbounded by the Scriptures, but bounded by tradition and what they want to believe. They then read into the scriptures what they want.
For instance, what did the ark look like?
Good night to you, FRiend.
Firstly, I agree with you 1010RD, that were he to be married, I think it would cause him to be more... human - After all, He was tempted with everything we are tempted with... I don't see how that can be without the strains of marriage and child rearing - Probably the single most constant temptation toward many things in men - So I get where you are coming from.
You may believe as you like, but there’s nothing wrong with Jesus Christ being married. [...]
But there is - My foremost complaint is how that affects the betrothal contract He has with his Bride - While it is possible for a man to have two wives, and while one can argue that His death caused any marriage He had here to be terminated, it still impacts the whole idea of the ONE 'woman' he loves, and your proposal turns all of that betrothal stuff right on it's head. That betrothal is our contract with Him!
Secondly, all things being equal, a married man will no doubt produce offspring - This is a can of worms that comes right out of the DaVinci Code - what a mess if there is a bloodline heir! But we need not worry about all that, because the Bible says He was cut off - That is a particular thing, meaning no blood heir - His line is ended.
But that too suggests He was *not* married, as his brother would be obliged to take His wife and continue His heirs. Some form of the kinsman-redeemer would be enacted upon His bloodline and that bloodline would have continued in all likelihood.
And lastly, as a matter of form, it is an argument from silence - A position that I am usually loathe to take. There is no legitimate evidence that He had a wife, something the Bible would no doubt declare. But it does not. There is nothing, except one pseudo-documentary gnostic strain which one must read with a suspension of disbelief in order to give it any credence at all, not to mention any authority.
So with those points to offer, I would be hard pressed to accept that he took a wife here. While I suppose it is possible, it is not without catastrophic consequences.
Rather, to make Christ married, based on what you assume Jews would find to be untenable, is to go beyond what Scripture states and to be bound by tradition.
Your objection is not based upon what Scripture reveals but upon the limited knowledge we have of 1st century Jewish rabbis, and the tradition that developed later.
It is exceedingly obvious that Christ was not married, as what is untenable is that the Holy Spirit kept this marriage invisible, while revealing far less notable acquaintances and details of His life, as well as those of others. To make His wife as a non-person would also be contrary to how the Lord treated others, and taught us how to do the same. But perhaps you do believe in invisible wives.
More on "For a Jewish Rabbi not to be married would be a serious fault and unheard of in rabbinical tradition."
Philo describes another Jewish sect of both men and women--the Therapeutae --who were celibate in their studies and pursuit of wisdom and the holy life (De Vita Contemplativa 68f).
3. But the dominant class of individuals who were 'allowed' or 'expected' to be celibate were prophetic figures, throughout Jewish history:
"But the Essenes, Qumran, and the Therapeutae were not the only examples of Jewish religious celibates who were considered in a reverent light around the time of Jesus. The OT was not lacking in at least one celibate religious figure, and later interpretation of the OT added some others. The one case from the OT is the tragic prophet Jeremiah. Far from being some positive religious commitment, celibacy was for Jeremiah a tragic personal sign, a lived-out prophetic symbol of the destruction of life that awaited the sinful people of Judah (Jer 16:1-4)." We have, then, at least one example of an OT prophet for whom celibacy was not a minor matter, an optional life style. It was, by the order of Yahweh, a very literal and painful "embodiment" of Jeremiah's prophetic message of judgment, pronouncing imminent doom as punishment for the apostasy of God's people." [MJ:1.339]
"More well-known, though still exceptional, would have been the undoubted celibacy of wilderness prophets like Banus (Josephus Life 2.11) and John the Baptist." [DictNTB, s.v. "marriage"]
"We should not be completely surprised that another fiery prophet of judgment around the time of Jesus also seems to have been celibate, namely, John the Baptist. Granted, our sources do not speak explicitly of John's celibacy; as usual, we are left with arguments from indirection and inference. But, even apart from Luke's picture of the boy John being raised in the wilderness until the time he began his ministry (at Qumran?),"' the mere fact that this ascetic prophet feeding on locusts and wild honey roamed up and down the Jordan Valley and the Judean wilderness, apparently with no fixed abode as he proclaimed a radical message of imminent judgment on Israel, makes it probable that John was a celibate (Mark 1:4-8).... It may be no accident that Mark closes the story of John's execution by Antipas with the words: ". . . his [John's] disciples came and took his corpse and laid it in a tomb" (6:29). Without intending to reflect on the fact directly, Mark may be in effect seconding what Luke implies: there was no wife, children, or other family around John to see to one of the most sacred obligations incumbent on family members in Judaism: arranging for and participating in the obsequies of a husband or parent. In his radical itinerant prophetic ministry, John may have consciously been imitating Elijah, an OT itinerant prophet of judgment, who not only was interpreted as an eschatological figure in later Judaism (as early as Malachi and Ben Sira) but was also interpreted as a celibate by various patristic writers (e.g., Ambrose and Jerome). [MJ:1.339f]
4. Although the Rabbinic writers stressed the importance of marriage for procreation, it is noteworthy that this prophetic ideal of celibacy still showed up in the rabbinics:
"Judaism saw nothing wrong in portraying as celibate the great primordial prophet, seer, and lawgiver Moses (though only after the Lord had begun to speak to him). We see this interpretation already beginning to develop in Philo in the 1st century A.D. What is more surprising is that this idea is also reflected in various rabbinic passages. The gist of the tradition is an a fortiori argument. If the Israelites at Sinai had to abstain from women temporarily to prepare for God's brief, once-and- for-all address to them, how much more should Moses be permanently chaste, since God spoke regularly to him (see, e.g., b. Yabb. 87a). The same tradition, but from the viewpoint of the deprived wife, is related in the Sipre on Numbers 12.1 (99). Since the rabbis in general were unsympathetic--not to say hostile--to religious celibacy, the survival of this Moses tradition even in later rabbinic writings argues that the tradition was long-lived and widespread by the time of the rabbis. We should note once again the typology seen in Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and the recycled Moses figure: the prophet who directly receives divine revelation that is to be communicated to his beloved yet sinful people Israel finds his whole life radically altered by his prophetic vocation. This alteration, this being set apart by and for God's Word, is embodied graphically in the rare, awesome, and--for many Jews--terrible vocation of celibacy....While accepting the idea of an ancient figure like Moses as celibate (at least during his ministry to Israel), the rabbis did not as a general rule allow celibacy among their rabbinic colleagues and disciples. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (end of 1st century A.D.) is said to have equated a man's refusal to procreate offspring with murder. One rare exception, according to the same rabbinic passage, was Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai (a younger contemporary of Eliezer ben Hyrcanus), who paradoxically recommended marriage and procreation, though he himself remained unmarried. When accused of not practicing what he preached, he replied: "My soul is in love with the Torah. The world can be carried on by others" (b. Yeham. 63b).65
"That such a 'deviant' tradition could be enshrined in the Babylonian Talmud may suggest that celibacy, though frowned upon by the rabbis, was not totally stamped out in Judaism during the centuries immediately following the Baptist and Jesus. More to the point, though ben Azzai is hardly a Jeremiah or a Baptist, his rationale for celibacy is at root similar to that of the more overtly prophetic figures: an all- consuming commitment to God's word in one's whole life precludes the usual path of marriage and child-rearing. In view of this "marginal" tradition in early Judaism, it is hardly surprising that the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes has no difficulty in seeing Jesus as celibate and explaining his unusual state by his prophetic call and the reception of the Spirit." [MJ:1.340f]
- http://christianthinktank.com/singlejesus.html; References http://christianthinktank.com/bookabs.html#MJ
If the sole reason for Jesus' incarnation was to just be a good example to others, you might have a point. But, Jesus came to earth as a man to be the once-for-all sacrifice for sin. He knew why He came, how long He had and when He would die because He is Almighty God. Getting married and having a family would have circumvented that purpose and would have been completely irresponsible leaving a wife and children destitute. No, Jesus was NOT married and had He been, there wouldn't be any reason for omitting the record of it in Scripture. A good place would have been Paul's letter to the Corinthians when he said:
Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? (II Cor. 9:5)