Two people have independently asked me whether it would have been possible for Jesus to have married and had children. (The idea behind the question being that there might be a theological reason why this should be unthinkable). This is the sort of question I don’t tend to bother answering, as hypothetical questions often cannot be answered with any degree of certainty, and the answer is in many ways quite irrelevant. But since I was asked, I provide a few thoughts here.

He Didn’t

The most important answer to this question is to say “he didn’t”. Thanks to books such as “The Da Vinci Code”, the idea that Jesus could have secretly got married and had children has far more credibility than it deserves (which is precisely none). As Craig Blomberg says in his review of the book “there is not a shred of historical evidence that Jesus ever married Mary Magdalene (or anyone else) or ever fathered children.”

Personal Reasons

There were, of course, some very obvious reasons why Jesus would not want to marry and have children. He believed he was sent by God on a mission to die. Caring for a wife and children in the way that God intended a good husband to do would not be merely inconvenient, but impossible. Also, he required that people loved him more than their own families (Matt 10:37). This would hardly be an easy thing for his own wife to put up with!

There is no reason however to suspect that Jesus was in any way anti-marriage. The marriage service famously takes Jesus’ miracle in John 2 as an endorsement of marriage, but even without this episode we have evidence that he believed it was good. His thoughts on divorce showed how seriously he took it, and he appealed to creation as its basis (Matt 19:4-5). He was fine with Peter being married, and happy to visit and even heal his in-laws (Mark 1:30,31).

What God Has Joined Together

So what are the potential theological problems that Jesus getting married might cause? The first is that we don’t know what it would mean for the incarnate Son of God to “become one flesh” (Mark 10:8) with a finite fallen human being. The problem is not with the Jesus “becoming flesh”. He had already done that (John 1:14). In fact John argues forcefully against those who found this idea unpalletable in his epistles (1 John 4:2, 2 John 1:7).

Neither is the problem that that the sex inherrent in “becoming one” is sinful. Though the Christian church may have been influenced by those who taught that the body was sinful and the spirit pure, this type of idea has no basis in Scripture. Sex was created by God, and is a good thing in the context of marriage. And the idea that Jesus should have close physical contact with sinful humans is also not a problem – he was a baby in Mary’s womb and nursed at her breasts. He touched the lepers and the children, he let a woman wash his feet with her hair and John lay his head on his chest. There was nothing distant about the way he interacted with humanity.

So it boils down to what exactly is meant by the husband and wife being “no longer two, but one”. This is more than just the oneness of a physical relationship – it is a joining by God, and somewhat mysterious. It is therefore not easy to say whether Jesus could theoretically have been joined to someone in this way. It is however, quite helpful that he was not, as Paul contrasts in 1 Cor 6:16-17 the ‘oneness’ that comes from having sex, and the oneness we have with Jesus. It would be awkward to say the least to have a wife that was “one with him” in one sense, and others who were “one with him” in another.

Grandson of God?

The second difficult issue is – what about the children? Would they be in some sense “divine”? Would they be born with “original sin?”. We might say that children born of sinners are sinners, just as people who touched an unclean man became unclean themselves. But Jesus had a power that transcended those normal rules. He touched the lepers and they became clean, rather than polluting him. And what would be the spiritual status of someone who was the son of the son of God? How would they then relate to both Jesus and God the Father as father? Answering these questions requires a good deal of unsubstatiated guesswork and I’m not even prepared to try.

Conclusion

So I’m pretty much back where I started. The important point is – it didn’t happen, and it’s probably a good thing. This means that all human beings must relate to Jesus in exactly the same way – as their Saviour and Lord. Salvation means for each one of us to become “one with him” and to be adopted into his family, relating to his Father as our own also, and to love him more than anything else.