re: #172 William Barnett-Lewis

I always thought that he was married during the years prior to his ministry. Disease, Romans, bandits - lots of reasons they were no longer there later. Doesn’t matter to me either way.

I have no problem with such tentative hypotheses about the supposed historical Jesus from “the general sociological principles” (like, “Jesus probably belonged to a class A, it was customary for the members of this class to do/be B, therefore, probably, Jesus did/was B”).

It’s how one arrives at the conclusions that matters. Taking a late apocryphon, substituting “Jesus” for “Joseph” and “Mary” for “Aseneth” and saying this proves something is just intellectual fraudulence. Even if one found a 5th century apocryphal book explicitly saying that Jesus was married, it still would not prove anything about the real Jesus.