Was Jesus Married?

Under Jewish marriage law, men were to marry between the age of puberty and 18, but 20 years of age was the maximum limit age for getting married., before being cursed by God.

Jewish Marriage Law for Men! The first positive commandment of the Bible, according to rabbinic interpretation, is that concerning the propagation of the human species (Gen. i. 28).  It is thus considered the duty of every Israelite to marry as early in life as possible. Eighteen years is the age set by the Rabbis (Ab. v. 24); and anyone remaining unmarried after his twentieth year is said to be cursed by God Himself (Ḳid. 29b). Some urge that children should marry as soon as they reach the age of puberty… A man who, without any reason, refused to marry after he had passed his twentieth year was frequently compelled to do so by the court. To be occupied with the study of the Torah was regarded as a plausible reason for delaying marriage; but only in very rare instances was a man permitted to remain in celibacy all his life (“Yad,” Ishut, xv. 2, 3; Shulḥan Aruk, Eben ha-‘Ezer, 1, 1-4; see Celibacy).

The duty of marriage is discharged after the birth of a son and a daughter (Yeb. 61a). Still, no man may live without a wife, even after he has many children (ibid.).https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10435-marriage-laws

There were certain grounds that prohibited some people from marrying Israelites, such as a Mamzers (persons born of incest or of adultery); Eunuchs, imbeciles, Idiots, Moabites, Egyptians and those that were not of Israelite blood. [Ibid] This information came down to us today, from ancient scripts re-scripted in the 12th-century, no different from the Roman codes or the New Testament, which is still being retranslated today.

If Jesus was not married, then he was a Mamzer or an imbecile, an Idiot, as Peter and John were classed in any of the Greek NT pertaining to Acts 4:13. However, if he was as the ancients said, a Homosexual, then this could have assisted his trial outcome as a Malefactor, in giving the age-old subject of homosexuality.  Which in Judaism dates back to the Torah. The book of Vayikra is traditionally regarded as classifying sexual intercourse between males as a to’eivah that can be subject to capital punishment by the current Sanhedrin under halakha.

However, the scholar Cresswell, states that Jesus was married, and to Mary Magdalen, whose father was none other than Joseph (of) ?

The scholar Cresswell, writing on the subject, wrote:

The next observation is that there are three women at the cross in all the versions, including the Gospel of John. The final point to note is there is correspondence between John and the prototype of Matthew, just as was found in the exercise conducted a little earlier on the received text. Mary the mother of James equates with Mary, the wife of Clopas, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee (Salome) equates with the sister of Mary, the wife of Clopas. That leaves Mary (of) Joseph, who we suggest will have been Mary/Mary Magdalene. This is an identification that might have been hard to make at the outset, but which is supported by the evidence. It is now not at all surprising.

Our reconciliation has restored to the group present at the cross, characters who would have been, as the original writer doubtless intended, the three most significant women in Jesus’ life. These were his mother, his wife, and his aunt Salome.

These women were described in Mark and Matthew through a Christian author’s circumlocutions, designed to avoid giving information on the real relationships that the Jewish Jesus had. Thus, Mary was described as the mother of James. But James was Jesus’ brother, and Mary was also Jesus’ mother. Salome was left as an unexplained female, or described circuitously as the mother of the sons of Zebedee. But she was Mary’s sister and so also Jesus’ aunt. In John, these relationships were described with great frankness, though in a Greek construction that allowed for misinterpretation and was so misinterpreted, the reason perhaps that the text survived. But when it came to Mary/Mary Magdalene, even John could not be explicit because this was for the early Church a sensitive topic. It is only because of getting on for two thousand years of habituation to a prudish perception that something so normal and usual; either now or in Jewish society at the time, could still today produce anything remotely approaching a reaction of shock. Jesus would have been married and the strong and most likely candidate as his wife, from the evidence in the gospels, is Mary Magdalene.

So how did she (Magdalen) come to be described as Mary the (of) Joseph in the original passage in Matthew?  The mother of Jesus is here described sufficiently in terms of just one of Jesus’ brothers, James. The name ‘Joseph’ is attached to the other Mary.  The evidence suggests two possibilities.

One is that Mary was the daughter of someone called Joseph.  That Joseph, we have argued, may have been Joseph of Arimathea, a corruption of Hebrew/Aramaic Yusuf ab Maria (Joseph, father of Mary). [Peter Cresswell (2013), The Invention of Jesus: How the Church Rewrote the New Testament, pp.192/3, Watkins Publishing, London]

What do you say, was Jesus homosexual or married or both?

P.P. Jero Jones