Thursday, August 8, 2019

Anthony Sweat on the Question of Whether Jesus was married



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)