Posted on 05/25/2006 10:45:12 AM PDT by Mike Bates
DOES JESUS have a secret line of descendants who are living today? It's an oddly appealing idea. We tend to think of ancestry in terms of bloodlines, in which some individuals are descended from famous ancestors and others are not. And the idea echoes deeper religious themes of individuals and groups favored by God.
But this is one idea in "The Da Vinci Code," which opens today in theaters worldwide, that just won't wash. Jesus couldn't have just a few descendants living today. If anyone alive today is descended from Jesus, then so are most of the people on the planet.
This absurd-sounding statement is an inevitable consequence of the workings of ancestry. People may have just a few descendants in the two or three generations after they lived, but after that the number of descendants explodes. For a population to remain the same size, every adult has to have an average of two children who grow to adulthood and have children. So the number of descendants for the average person grows exponentially two children, four grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and so on. In just 10 generations roughly 250 years an average person can have more than 1,000 descendants.
SNIP
In real genealogies, a person's descendants either peter out within a few generations or begin to grow exponentially. That's why people who came to America on the Mayflower now have thousands of descendants. People who lived just a few centuries earlier have many millions of descendants.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Yup.
Seems he read the book by Riley Martin titled "The Coming of Tan".
*barf*
Supposedly co-authored with him by an alien named "Tan".
Quite bizarre.
Mr. Riley Martin was/is a regular caller to the Howard Stern show.
The idea of Jesus bloodlines in france will sure pick up a slacking tourism there since they are being overrun by Muslims. How ironic (or well planned by ant-Christians). LOL.
This quote doesn't seem to align up with what the Word tells us. The Bible shows that it is a GIFT of God; NOT a 'participation in the life of God'.
It's clear to me that a false dichotomy has been set up here, and I ain't even a Roman Catholic. The gift of grace will bring a person into participation in the life of God. I.e. sanctification. Protestants and Catholics agree on this one.
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