Recently, on a facebook page dedicated to answering questions LDS missionaries who are currently serving have about the Gospel, one Latter-day Saint argued that Jesus was a “rabbi” and, as a result, was not only married, but a polygamist (according to this person, he had three wives).
An appeal to Jesus being married due to his being called a “rabbi,” while rare, is not unheard of among some Latter-day Saints, such as Michael Griffith in his Was Jesus Married? article (where he relies on, sadly, the hack “scholarship” of Michael Baigent et al.) and Ogden Kraut forwarded, not just this, but the thesis Jesus was a polygamist in his book Jesus was Married.
My friend, Allen Hansen, wrote the following in response, which he kindly gave me permission to quote on my blog:
Not to pile on, but I would like to add a few things. so that you can avoid spreading the folklore to members and investigators. We have far too much of that thing going on. I think it also helps in better understanding the New Testament.
Ben is right, I'll round out his observations. I was born and raised in Israel, have known a great deal of rabbis, but I'm also very keen on Jewish history and religious texts.
Myth #1: Jesus was a rabbi.
He wasn't. Not only did the office as such not exist in his day,it took centuries to become the central institution of Judaism. There is no evidence that Jesus received ordination, and in his day the religious authorities among the Pharisees and the groups loosely connected with them were more usually termed sages. Their function was to issue rulings on matters of ritual purity. Now, you might counter that Jesus was called rabboni, but that was a honorific title (literally, master) that was not applied to a particular role. Just as someone calling you sir out of respect is not claiming that you are a lord or knight. The early rabbis had no authority in the community beyond what people chose to give them. That is, unless you were popular, or were considered impeccably knowledgeable in matters of purity, no one had to listen. Synagogues were run by the community for the community, and many rabbis chose not to pray or set foot in them. We also know from archaeological findings that even when the rabbis prescribed rules for synagogues they were ignored. Before the temple was destroyed, the main religious authorities were priests.
Myth #2: A rabbi must be married.
That was true neither in the first centuries CE, nor is it true today. There are passages in the Babylonian Talmud (a central text of Judaism compiled several centuries after Christ) and other texts that present the ideal stages of progression in a man's life including marriage at a certain age, but that was never reality. They prescribe the reality that many rabbis wished to see, but not actually how things were. In Jesus' day, for example, men tended to marry in their late twenties to early thirties, something common to the rest of the Greco-Roman world. Josephus himself was not married until later in life, when he surrendered to the Romans and the empire decided to marry him to a Jewish captive. Josephus was a priest, the son of the priest, and lacked for no opportunity to marry. Two of the most popular and beloved early rabbis or sages were Ben Zomah and Ben Azzai. The only thing preventing their ordination was their untimely deaths. Even when other sages criticized Ben Azzai for preaching the necessity of marriage and childbearing while himself refusing to take a wife he responded that he loved studying Torah too much. Despite the vast corpus of authoritative Jewish texts, no one has yet been able to find an authoritative source laying down the rule that a rabbi must be married.
Now that we have established that rabbi did not run synagogues and did not need to be married either, you can guess how credible the claim is that a rabbi had to be married polygamously to three women. There are almost no references to rabbis being married to more than one woman, but when they do occur, such as with the celebrated rabbi Akiva (born long after Christ's death) it is not clear if he was married to more than one woman at the same time, or whether he was widowed or divorced. Polygamy continued to be permitted in Judaism until the 1950s, but it was rare in the Greco-Roman world, even rare among scholars, and died out in Europe hundreds of years ago. It really only persisted in the Muslim world, where it was a cultural norm among Muslim.
Now, was Jesus married, and was he a polygamous? I'm not going to say that he wasn't, but you have to argue that he was based solely on certain interpretations of church doctrine and teaching. Nothing necessitates it, and Jewish teachings and history provide almost no support for that notion at all.
Some have also appealed to John 2 and the wedding at Cana being the wedding of Jesus, including Orson Hyde. However, this is simply wrong. For more, see The Wedding at Cana was NOT Jesus’ Marriage.
For an interesting text on the debate about Jesus and whether he was married, see Anthony Le Donne, The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals