Jesus’s Marriage Status
The question of whether Jesus was married
sometimes arises not only out of curiosity and doctrinal assumption (some
deduce that if eternal marriage is required for exaltation, and surely the Lord
is exalted, He must be married) but also due to the teachings of some early
Latter-day Saint Apostles. Elder Orson Hyde taught in the October 1854 general
conference that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that the wedding at Cana of
Galilee was Jesus’s own (Journal of
Discourses, 2:81-82), to which President Brigham Young arose and gave an “amen”
(Journal of Discourses, 2:90).
Apostle Orson Pratt also wrote in The
Seer that the Savior was married, suggesting that perhaps He had more wives
than one (Orson Pratt, The Seer,
October 1853, 105). There is also evidence of Joseph F. Smith teaching in 1883
that Jesus was married (Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 1833-1898, 8:187, July 22,
1883).
Does this make Jesus’s marriage status an
authorized Church teaching? Using our proposed models to evaluate doctrine,
Jesus being married could be described as a doctrine of the Church in the mid-
to latter-nineteenth century based on the cumulative teachings of General
Authorities of the time. However, there is no known revelation on the subject,
nor is there a united statement from the First Presidency and the Twelve, and
the cumulative standard works seem to evade the issue. Like other early doctrines,
Jesus’s marriage status fades from public teaching over the next decades and
moved into the realm of the unknown or undeclared. In 1912, Charles W. Penrose,
then a member of the First Presidency, broached the subject in the Improvement Era and said: “We do not
know anything about Jesus Christ being married. The Church has no authoritative
declaration on the subject” (Charles W. Penrose, “Peculiar Questions Briefly
Answered,” Improvement Era, September
1912). Decades later, a 1997 Ensign article
suggested that the question, “Was Jesus married?” was “inappropriate to discuss
in a classroom setting” (Wayne Lynn, “I Have a Question,” Ensign, June 1997). In 2006, due primarily to the popularity of the
novel The DaVinci Code, which posited
that Jesus was married and had children, the Church officially released a
statement through its spokesperson, saying, “The belief that Christ was married
has never been official church doctrine. It is neither sanctioned nor taught by
the church” (“LDS
do not endorse claims in ‘Da Vinci,’” Deseret
News, 17 May 2006). Thus, while once perhaps promoted in the mid-nineteenth
century, using the model of official
sources of doctrine, Jesus’s marriage status is no longer an authorized
teaching of the Church. It’s absent in the Church’s current official
publications, it is not taught cumulatively by the modern General Authorities,
and it is not declared by the united voice of the modern First Presidency and
Apostles. Using our model of types of
doctrine, Jesus’s marriage status now seemingly belongs to the esoteric ring of
doctrine—something once known or taught by others and that one day may be
taught again, but it is not known, taught openly, or declared authoritatively
today. It is now an unauthorized, esoteric teaching. (Anthony Sweat, Seekers Wanted: The Skills You Need For the
Faith You Want [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019], 35-36)
