FRESH evidence indicating that Jesus Christ got married to Mary Magdalene and they had children has been revealed in a new book called The Last Gospel which was launched in London yesterday.
Authors of The Lost Gospel unveiled the book at a ceremony yesterday, basing their claims on a new translation they have made of an ancient manuscript held in the British Library and two accompanying letters. Called Joseph and Aseneth, the manuscript elaborates on the story of Joseph as recounted in the Book of Genesis and is thought to date back to the sixth century.
Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli-Canadian documentary filmmaker and Canadian academic Barrie Wilson say they found a code in the document and believe it refers to Jesus. Their claims are similar to those published in Dan Brown's book The Davinci Code, which indicates that Jesus and Mary got married and had at least one child.
“It presents the courtship, marriage, children and an attempt on his life in coded, symbolic terms. Because the early years of the Church were so rife with conflict, important manuscripts were disguised in this way to protect it from those who sought to alter or destroy it,” Messer's Jacobovici and Wilson said in a joint statement.
Critics, however, have rounded on the new book, which is accompanied by a television documentary. Already, the Church of England has dismissed the claims and Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of church history at Oxford University, said the claims were based on a mistaken reading of the text.
Professor MacCulloch said:“What they’ve tried to do is say it’s an allegory of the life of Jesus. But it isn’t.”
Professor Wilson, a religious studies academic at York University in Toronto, dismissed the off-the-cuff negative comments, however, saying they were motivated by theological protectionism. An ancient piece of papyrus found in 2012 also contained a mention of Jesus’s wife but did not name her and it similarly caused a stir, as Christian tradition has long held he was not married.
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