The Valley of Fire - Chapter Three.

Lake Mead lies below the Hoover Dam and is the focal point of the one-and-a-half million acres of

The Valley of Fire, Nevada, where Josh spent 40 days.

Lake Mead National Recreation Area. It includes twenty-five miles of the Colorado River and a smaller lake, Lake Mohave.

It is a man-made lake, a large, flooded area of desert. Far below the surface lie the ghostly remnants of several small villages as well as relics of even older settlements. Thousands of visitors go boating, fishing, camping, swimming and hiking there every year; the weather being sunny and hot, rising to 110 °F in midsummer. All around the lake there are hidden coves and flooded canyons that can only be reached by boat.

To the north end of Lake Mead, the Valley of Fire is composed of an ancient and un-nerving landscape of petrified dunes, fossilized trees, strangely shaped rocks and sandstone cliffs. At sunset here, the rocks glow and blaze like Uluru, Australia and, away from the tourist trails, canny wild animals blend easily with the shadows cast by vermillion, scarlet and golden rock.

In the beginning, Josh was in hell. He lived in a world composed of all-pervading torture, simultaneously fire and ice. Every fear and inadequacy he had ever experienced engulfed him; every uncomfortable memory from birth to the present day came back multiplied, torn apart, amplified and filled with remorse, anger, anguish and hopelessness. He — and he no longer knew who or what “he” might be — was consumed by hatred, terror and uncertainty. How long that lasted in our time, no one could know. In his time it was a terrible, terrible eternity. It seemed as though he was being attacked by demonic forces from all sides, the agony unbearable and irredeemable. Then, one crystal-clear thought emerged. “This is not outside of me; this is within me. I am attacking myself.”

Then it cleared and the demons were resolved. A deep harmony spread throughout the Universe that was Josh and Josh himself was healed, whole and at peace.

Most of the time that he spent in the desert, he slept or dreamt. Sometimes he walked and sometimes he sat. Much of the time he sat on one particular rock; it seemed to him to be a very nice rock. Every night he lay on his back on the ground out in the open air and watched the stars turn in their courses with a wonder that consumed him. A city boy, he had rarely seen the glory of a sky without light pollution. But this one was magical. Every star seemed to be a living being with a story to tell. There was so much to learn. The music of the spheres played in every atom of his being.

A part of him knew that he was crazy. Some of him remembered coming out of some water and standing, breathless and confused about whether those who had rescued him were actually there. He was sure there had been presences — someone, something? He had been cushioned in the fall and pulled up from the deeps by a thousand gentle hands. But on the red sand of the beach there was nothing.

There was nothing anywhere.

Nothing but the desert and the no-thing-ness.

He walked until he was tired, then sat until he slept. He dreamt until he woke, hungry, thirsty and stiff and aware, too, that he had some kind of a head injury and that there was dried blood all over his face and neck.

Gingerly he touched the wound but he could only feel it for a second and then there was what seemed to be a rush of light and air and laughter and he knew he must be mad because it was no longer there.

Thoughts of food assailed him. Water there seemed to be in plenty: the cave behind where he was sitting contained a spring of cool, running water. He frowned for a moment; had that been there earlier? Did it matter? He went in and drank and it was cool and fresh and delicious.

A small part of his brain tried to warn him about tainted water. He ignored it.

He slept on the floor of the cave and dreamt of the pink-icing cup cakes with a bright red cherry on top that his mother had made for him in England when he was a boy. He had loved them until he discovered that they were made with cochineal — crushed beetles. Then he would never touch them again. She made the cakes with Ribena icing after that but it wasn’t the same.

In the cool dusk, when he woke, there was a canvas rucksack — of a kind of a camouflage color — sitting by the rock at the entrance of the cave. He looked around but no one seemed to be claiming it so he opened it up.

Inside was a Tupperware box of pink iced cakes each with a cherry on the top.

He had eaten three before he remembered the dream.

He had eaten four before he remembered the cochineal.

He ate the rest.

“Well I’m over that one,” he thought, dispassionately observing the Tupperware box disappearing.

The tiny thoughts inside protested about that; added that this was an appalling diet and insisted that he got up and found vegetables or fruit or protein.

“What a daft thought,” he said.

Instead, he lost himself in the night sky for seven hours, orbiting the great gas giant, Jupiter before discovering the even greater mysteries of Orion and, at one point, just west of Betelgeuse, the thought of bacon sandwiches drifted across his mind. Now Josh was not a totally observant Jew but he didn’t eat pork or shellfish unless he was being polite. It had always seemed unkind to others to maintain an ancient law in the face of unwitting hospitality. After all, loving-kindness was greater even than truth — his Dad had taught him that in synagogue.

So he wasn’t surprised to find bacon sandwiches in the rucksack at dawn when the light show was over and the angels had left. They were sandwiched in British white bread, still warm and totally, totally delicious.

“Okay, I’m over that one too,” he thought.

From then on, food was not a problem, though he did sometimes find that the canned orange soda got up his nose.

When they asked him later, he would sometimes speak of the demons and the incredible release when he had gone from them but he would never tell anyone all about the magic of this time. It was indescribable and, more importantly, it was none of their business. There was such joy in the memory of this ultra-real, impossible, existence in the desert that often helped in the face of the imaginary world that everyone seemed to live in outside of it. He had learnt as a child not to take out treasure only to watch others tarnish it before his eyes. And how could anyone who had never experienced what he had experienced ever understand? Of course, afterwards, he still spoke with and listened to those light-forms who had talked with him in the desert and he would give a taste of what he had experienced to anyone in his new life who genuinely sought a real understanding, but they were in the minority. The phrase “casting pearls before swine” was politically incorrect so he just said “ask me again in a year” when questioned, which usually filtered out those seeking a quick spiritual fix or a thrill.

On some days, he talked with a bobcat that made him chuckle with its tempting suggestions. On others he talked with Gemma, his Uncle Frank and people he had known before … before … well, earlier. Sometimes he spoke with the wrens or the eagles. Mostly he just listened.

If anyone had asked him then if he knew that Gemma was dead, he would have said, “Nobody dies” and dismissed the question. In the desert everything is very much more real.

Eventually, with a sigh and the realization that it was time to begin the work and, anyway, that his legs were getting stiff from sitting, his beard was itchy and he really fancied some pancakes and maple syrup, he got up in the dark before the dawn and walked the seven miles to the Valley of Fire Visitor Centre.

The Miracle Man - Chapter One.

The Miracle Man Chapter One                                             © Maggy Whitehouse 2009

Gemma Goldstone died on Friday at 12.37pm when her Aston Martin V8 Vantage crashed over the Hoover Dam. It was just three days before the long delayed, state-of-the-art Colorado Bridge bypass was due to open.

News like that spreads around the world within minutes; the headlines harsh and filled with excitement

“Glamour Queen of Talent dies in horror crash”

“Final Curtain for the lady with the Midas touch”

“Crisis as multi-million-dollar Miracle Mile show threatened.”

Etc. etc.

And that was just what happened, but despite the Hoover Dam tourists’ blurred cell phone images, uploaded to the Internet within the hour, the news that it was Gemma who had been killed could not be confirmed immediately. No matter how frantic or voracious the media might be, the police were not releasing the victim’s name until next-of-kin were informed.

Next-of-kin was Gemma’s husband, Josh. But he was not at any of the celebrity couple’s homes in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, London or the South of France, nor at the offices in London, Vegas or New York. Nobody knew where he was and nobody — to start with at least —noticed whether or not there might have been a passenger in the royal blue Aston Martin.

People often didn’t notice Josh; he was more of a peaceful space than a person. Someone once described him as “slippery” but that wasn’t exactly it. He just sometimes wasn’t there.

Gemma’s entourage never took much notice of the husband; he was the quiet accessory who accompanied their Matriarch everywhere. He had to be tolerated because, let’s face it, she operated better when he was around and he was the only one who could deal with the occasional tantrum, which could shake the building with its violence. He had to be present for every public or TV appearance as her support and her Muse; without him, she was uncomfortable and prickly. Exactly what he actually did with himself at other times — apart from getting slightly in the way of course — nobody knew. Wasn’t he some kind of a landscape designer or something? Some years ago, some bright spark had called him “the Gardener” which about summed up his status and the turnover within Gemstone Inc was so high that very few of them nowadays realized that actually was his surname. Everyone called him “Mr. Goldstone” and if he ever bothered to contradict, no one took any notice.

Staff didn’t stick with Gemma for long; they didn’t quarrel, they just moved on to even bigger and better things. There was never a whiff of controversy: she was the opposite of a jinx; self-esteem bred in the air around her. Not that she would suffer fools gladly (and those tantrums were legendary) but that was just it: Gemma was a legend; an icon, loved worldwide — and rightly so because she was a ball of golden energy, talent and, unexpectedly, kindness. Gemma Goldstone was exceptional and she expected her staff to be the same. She would always say that she needed the talent to be better off-screen than ever it was on-screen. In fact, efficiency was the bare minimum required to work for Gemma. If you put a foot wrong there would always be dozens of production wannabes begging to take your place.

But if you fulfilled her criteria for an outstanding employee, once you had paid your dues, any other media company would go down on its knees to headhunt you and you were guaranteed to go far. 

That was, it seemed, everyone except Josh. He didn’t even have style despite the couple’s money and superstar status. His shoes were slightly scuffed; his shirts always seemed crumpled on his lanky body and he looked as though he wore clothes from Wal-Mart. And, my dear — his fingernails! People in Gemma’s world noticed that kind of thing. Okay, the nails in question didn’t actually have dirt in them (as a real gardener’s probably would have) but Josh obviously had never seen a manicurist in his life even though Gemma traveled with her very team of beauticians. And per-leez don’t mention the color of his teeth! What was going on with that? Appropriate flouncing would indicate group opinion of a man who had access to everything but chose not to use any of the tools provided to make himself look good.

Gemma, on the other hand, was exquisite on every level. A touch of Botox, of course, and a little lipo-suction. And, of course, breast enhancement. But nothing else was needed yet — she was only 36 and at the peak of her physical attractiveness. Not beautiful exactly but pixie-faced and arresting with just the right way of looking up at you through her eyelashes and just similar enough in attributes and charitable works to be compared with the long-lamented Princess Diana. Some commentators even speculated that Gemma had filled the long-empty hole in the hearts of those who sought a human icon in order to worship the Divine Feminine. Gemma herself snorted with derision in private and cooed modestly in public when confronted with that one.

What this megastar didn’t have in physical stature, she had in buckets-full of magnetism and simmering fire. She was a media phenomenon; a power-ball of energy, sometimes even traveling back and forth across the Atlantic every single week when both the Las Vegas-based Miracle Mile and her own X-rated, mega-successful late-night British chat show were in production.

Right now it was holiday time, twelve weeks before the re-start of auditioning and just time to begin slowing down on the personal appearances, the book signings and the charity galas and to begin thinking about gearing up again. Time to hone the diet, check out a startling new hair color and style and pull focus before beginning a new season of spotting the extraordinary performers that her show always found, to the continuing amazement of the whole of the Western World. The Miracle Mile had been Gemma’s idea and it remained Gemma’s not only because she owned the brand and was majority shareholder of the global entertainment franchise that ran it but also because of her style and wit and her ability to choose co-judges who complemented her perfectly. Not only could Gemma scent the very aura of talent in the smallest mouse but she could make even the rejected candidates laugh with her precise and profound assessment of exactly why they were useless.

In the end, it was one of Gemma’s fellow judges on The Miracle Mile, Sam Powell, the former PR and media executive, who found Josh — or, perhaps more accurately, definitively located him as lost. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police called at Sam’s Hacienda-style home in Spanish Hills with a “routine enquiry” to see if he knew where Mr. Goldstone might be. There had been an accident, they said, but no details were being released as yet.

“Josh is with Gemma!” said Sam. “I spoke with her this morning — when she was on her way back to Vegas from Phoenix. They were in the car together.”

“What time would that be, Sir?”

“About twelve, I guess.”

“And was Mrs. Goldstone driving?”

“Yes, it was her beloved Aston Martin. Look — what’s happened?”

The sergeant sighed. It was a big story and it was going to break soon whether they found the husband or not. Now it looked very much like they weren’t going to find him alive.

“Mrs. Goldstone’s car was in collision with a pick-up on Highway 96 in Nevada just on the Hoover Dam.”

“Oh my God! Is she alright?”

“Mrs. Goldstone’s car went over the barrier and into the lake, Sir. We have no more than that right now.”

“Jesus Christ.” Sam fell backwards against the wall; sweat beads forming on his face. “Jeezus!”

“And you are saying that her husband was with her? Are you sure, Sir?” the officer asked.

“Jesus Christ!” Sam’s mind was reeling. “What? Yes, yes. She said so.”

“Thank you Sir.”

“Wait — wait. Have they found her?”

“A woman’s body has been found, Sir. We have no formal identification as yet. We need to find someone who could identify her as soon as possible.”

“Oh God. You’d better take me there. Jesus wept. I can identify her. Oh Christ...”

“Thank you Sir. There’s a car outside.”

Sam looked at the tiny, empty body, its cold, elfin face strangely blank, white and totally unscathed. She would have died swiftly, they said, from multiple injuries to the spine caused in the collision and, if not then, as soon as the car hit the water.

He nodded, curtly, holding back unexpected emotion. “That’s Gemma.”

They offered him terrible coffee from a vending machine. “Don’t you guys know that you can get machines now with coffee that tastes like coffee?” he said, irritated but craving the caffeine and throwing the obnoxious mix down his throat as though it were a shot of tequila. The grimace that followed was familiar to anyone who knew him — Sam Powell was known as much for his hard drinking and high life as for his TV personality. Tequila was his drink of choice and there was a running joke that when he bit the lime afterwards it was the fruit that reacted to the bitter taste of Sam.

“Jeez, I never thought I’d end up family,” he muttered as he ransacked his cell phone address book for people who needed to know the news before it hit the headlines. He gave seventeen names to the police to deal with; the remaining six he called himself.

Outside the mortuary, the press was already lining up. The accident itself was news but Sam’s involvement and the cell phone footage of the Vantage were quite enough evidence with which to go live: the story was breaking all over the world.

The truck-driver, Frank Morrison, was dead too, his neck broken like a stick in the impact. Frank’s truck didn’t go over the impossibly high wall but its contents — boxes of crisps and cocktail snacks — did. They floated pathetically over large areas of the lake all that day with all the accessible ones being salvaged by tourists before the police cordoned off the entire area. After that, they sank, slowly and dismally, to be investigated without much enthusiasm by fish and small crustaceans.

Police examined the truck and found that the brakes had failed for no apparent reason; it had the appropriate service history; the driver’s body tested negative for alcohol and drugs; there was nothing to apportion blame. It was just a freak, impossible, stupid accident.

Gemma’s face was on every front page in the Western World every day until the funeral and her presence lived on perpetually, across Internet forums, conspiracy sites and tribute websites. In the first week after her death, Josh was sometimes in the picture too. Gemma would have said herself that the coverage was the best she had ever had. She had never actually written the long-planned autobiography but her brother Paul, who lived in London, England, arrived at the Goldstone’s Los Angeles home within 48 hours of her death and brought in a team of researchers and ghostwriters. Together they started working through Gemma’s own notes and the contents of her computer. A book contract was a foregone conclusion with publication being set for as soon as possible, ready to compete with a rash of unauthorized biographies.

Gemma had been a phenomenon. She had risen from what most people chose to see as humble Jewish beginnings (but which were actually perfectly comfortable lower middle-class) in London to become a dancer, briefly a singer in an all-girl band and then a talent agent. The girl bands she promoted were tacky, it’s true, and hardly ever lasted more than one album containing three hit singles, but who minded that when the money kept rolling in and there were always more ingénues who were queuing up to become the next, greatest thing?

Gemma’s great coup was to be the first one to take talent-seeking TV back to the tradition of vaudeville, opening doors to both old and new-fashioned acts alike and the first to take the show to Las Vegas. The theatres and casinos in Vegas always needed new stars and The Miracle Mile provided them in bucket-loads. And Vegas had fallen on the idea of its very own talent-seeking show where nothing was too glitzy and nothing too outrageous. The Miracle Mile was followed up by Miracle Camp for teenagers each summer, touring shows and a year-long Las Vegas-based series of concerts, circus gigs and theatrical extravaganzas from that year’s contestants. Gemma’s company, Gemstone Inc, was now as integral a part of the Las Vegas profit-making machine as any of the casinos, its conscience salved by Gemma’s billion-dollar children’s charitable foundation.

Others, of course, followed her — the world was flooded with talent shows — but there was no one like Gemma and nothing with as much kudos as The Miracle Mile.

She was married, all the time, to her childhood sweetheart. Their 15^th anniversary renewal of vows was featured in Celebrity Star magazine (which re-decorated their Las Vegas house for free and donated five million dollars to the charitable foundation). Gemma looked golden and glorious in a series of designer outfits with her husband in the background looking vaguely bemused and uncomfortable. He had been shoehorned into designer clothing, which made him feel ridiculous.

Josh was always the boy next door, the son of an American who worked at the US Embassy in London. He was her rock, Gemma said, her best friend, her reality-check. Professionally, he was an academic and theologian and an expert in ancient languages. He had even written a textbook on Bible translations, which was published by Oxford University Press and read by virtually nobody. He probably even had a PhD in something obscure but nobody ever called him Doctor.

Josh worked somewhere in Unicef at the start of Gemma’s fame but, once the roller-coaster of talent shows took off, he didn’t need a job and Gemma wanted him by her side wherever she went. There was never a sniff of scandal on either side.

They dredged the whole of Lake Mead but, although they found his wallet, suitcase and cell phone, Josh’s body was not found. Sam swore blind that Gemma told him he was with her; the hotel staff in Phoenix confirmed that they had left together in the car that morning; CCTV confirmed that a man looking very like Josh was in the car moments before the crash (raising a lot of understandably awkward questions as to why he hadn’t been noticed the first time anyone looked). He had to be somewhere. But he was not. 


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The Marriage of Jesus Chapter One

The Marriage of Jesus by Maggy Whitehouse investigates the historical, cultural background of marriage in Biblical times and discusses all the theories as to whether Jesus of Nazareth was married or not.

Foreword

For any student of spirituality it is Jesus’ teaching, rather than his marital status, that is truly important. But his words on marriage and divorce have shaped our thinking and social practice for more than 2000 years, and it would surely be useful to know whether he spoke with the benefit of experience. As for the traditions of celibacy and the veneration of virginity that became so important for the Christian community – did that teaching come from Jesus, or from his later followers?

This book addresses two issues. Firstly, what is the most likely scenario concerning Jesus’ celibacy or marriage, given the social, religious and political mores of his time and place? Secondly, why does it matter so much? What drives the search to find this lost wife, or the compulsion to deny her existence? Why is there this contemporary fascination with identifying her with the (inaccurately portrayed) reformed prostitute, Mary Magdalene?

Hopefully this book will help you to work out what you believe for yourself and, if it enables you to see more clearly the relationships between God and Jesus of Nazareth, our humanity and the divine, it will have succeeded in its aim.

The narrative in this book of Jesus’s wife, Tamar, is fantasy. However, it is an accurate historical portrait of what would have been the experience of hundreds of Jewish girls living at that time. Throughout this narrative I have used the Aramaic versions of most of the characters’ names, as these would have been used by friends and family.

Jesus would have been known as Yeshua, Mary as Mariam, Miriam or Miryam, James as Yakov, John as Yohanan and Joseph as Yoses or Yosef. The letter ‘J’ is not used in either Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke) or New Testament Greek (the language of the Gospels). As all male names in ancient Greek end with the letter ‘s’, Yeshua became ‘Yeshuas’ as his fame spread. By the time the New Testament had been translated from Greek into Latin for the official Catholic bible version called the Vulgate, at the end of the fourth century, the name was set down as ‘Iesus.’ The pronunciation of ‘Jesus’ with a ‘J’ only became standard in the seventeenth century.

However, although Aramaic was the common language of the time in Galilee, the language of trade and the military throughout the Roman Empire was Greek. People living in larger towns such as Sepphoris would have to have had a working knowledge of Greek and some of the local people might well have adopted Greek versions of Aramaic and Hebrew names for their children.

Chapter One

Legend, supposition and belief

The question

No one will ever know for certain whether or not Jesus of Nazareth was married. Even if an intrepid archaeologist were to discover an ancient jar containing a wedding contract between Yeshua, son of Joseph of Nazareth, and his wife, Tamar (or Sarah or Rebekah or Leah or Rachel), it would only become a hotly-contested issue as to whether or not it was that Jesus of Nazareth.

The assumption that he was not married has been implicit in Christian belief for many centuries. The idea of Jesus as the only Son of God, born to a virgin mother, sits uncomfortably with the notion that he could have had sex, sons and daughters. After all, if he were divine, wouldn’t his children be also?

However, there is no biblical evidence anywhere that he was unmarried. Certainly, there is no mention of a wife in the Bible or in any historical texts, but that proves nothing. Most of the women of those times are invisible in historical documentation. We only know that the disciple Simon Peter had a wife because Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14); the Gospels do not mention the wives of any the disciples. That is no reason to suppose that there were none.

Indeed the reverse is the case. Jews and Muslims assume Jesus was married. The issue is seen as unimportant but both groups deem it ridiculous to suppose either that Jesus was celibate or that marriage could ever be a bar to spirituality. The Prophet Muhammad was married and, what’s more, married to a wealthy and powerful woman. His teaching states that marriage is a religious duty, a moral safeguard and that an Imam (priest) should be married.

Most of the Hebrew Bible prophets were married. Jeremiah wasn’t allowed a wife by God, and there’s no sign of Mrs Elijah or Mrs John the Baptist, but Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, Ezekiel and Isaiah all had wives. Samuel certainly had sons, which implies a wife. Given the importance of the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” to the Jewish people, the most likely scenario is that Jesus was both part of an extended family and had one of his own.

The New Testament itself calls Jesus Mary’s first born and refers to his having both brothers and sisters. James, who referred to by Paul in Galatians 1:19 as the Lord’s brother, becomes leader of the apostles after Jesus’ death and resurrection. When Jesus preaches in the synagogue in Nazareth and sets the town by the ears with his words, the angry Nazarenes cry, “Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary? And his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?” (Matthew 13:55).

Even so, this has been discounted for centuries with the Greek words adelphos and adelphe, here translated as “brethren” being assumed to mean “cousin”. It can also mean countryman or fellow believer. It is quite true that there is no exact ancient Greek word for “cousin” and it is possible that, with the close bonds of families living together, relationships could get confused but there is a word for “kin” or “related by blood” and that word is sougenes. It is used to describe Elisabeth, mother of John the Baptist and translated as “cousin” of Mary.

That Jesus had brothers and sisters who were married seems fairly certain, and is generally accepted by scholars. The case for his own marriage is still stronger. All orthodox Jewish Rabbis from the first century to the present day have to be married to even be considered as eligible to teach others. Interestingly, although Jesus is frequently referred to as “Rabbi” in the Gospel of John and as “Rabboni” by Mary Magdalene, these were relatively new titles 2000 years ago. The word “Rab” or “Rav” meaning Master or teacher was originally a Babylonian title given to scholarly men who had received the laying-on of hands in the rabbinic schools. It was developed into “Rabbi” approximately half a century before Jesus lived and used for men who had had the title bestowed by a laying-on of hands by the Sanhedrin, the priestly class of Israel. A Rabbi was given a key and a scroll as a symbol of his authority to teach others and he was expected to have disciples who, in turn would draw new disciples. “Rabboni” or “My Great Master” was only used when the teacher had two generations of disciples. Neither a Rabbi nor a Rabboni could have been an unmarried man as marriage was a requirement of any man who wished to study Torah.

What we do have is a tantalising gap in the information available about Jesus between the ages of approximately 12 and 30. Interestingly, these are exactly the years when a Jewish man in those times could expect to be married. Over the last hundred years or so, many theories have sprung up as to what Jesus was doing in those hidden years – did he go to India and study there? Was he in Alexandria investigating the mystery schools? Where did he go and from whom did he learn the mystical knowledge that he later displayed?

Interpretation

In fact, when it comes to Jesus’ knowledge of spiritual matters, he didn’t actually need to go anywhere; all the sayings ascribed to him are inherent in the Jewish traditions of his homeland. What he taught is not necessarily clearly stated in the Old Testament (although several of Jesus’ teachings are re-iterations of words from the law-giving books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy) but it is clear that the driving force behind Jesus’ belief is the monotheism of the Israelites.

In Jesus’ day the Hebrew Bible had only recently been compiled. The texts themselves had existed for hundreds of years but they are first known to have been pulled together as a complete entity in the first century BCE. Better known, to most people, was an oral tradition that had been passed down by word of mouth through generations. This was used by the Pharisees to interpret Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) in Jesus’ day. Scholars and teachers recognised that writing down teachings crystallised them and made them inviolable rather than adaptable. They believed though that, although the structure of the teaching was always valid, the form of it needed interpretation according to the times.

This was particularly so after the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem, when the Jewish people lost their homeland and spread far and wide. The commentary on Torah, the Talmud, was then itself written down in an attempt to record the oral interpretations of the Laws. This became crystallised in turn, and debate on how to interpret it continues to this day. There is a Jewish joke that says “two Jews, three opinions,” and another that says that if a Jew were to be shipwrecked on a desert island he would have to build two synagogues: one he went to and one that he didn’t go to. This demonstrates the importance to the Jewish faith of the continuation of debate over which interpretations are right and which are not.

An example of this might be seen in a modern interpretation of the seventh commandment “ thou shalt not commit adultery”. This is traditionally seen as referring to sexual infidelity, but “to adulterate” has a much wider meaning, as in two different things corrupting each other. In a particular case, it could equally be interpreted that a husband and wife who remained together when their relationship had fallen apart so seriously that they were affecting each other’s emotional and spiritual growth could be committing adultery by staying together.

A less controversial modern example of interpretation of the written law might be the way that orthodox Jews nowadays adapt to the Sabbath law which says that no fire may be lit in the home (Exodus 35:3). Igniting a cooker or flicking a light switch counts as creating fire so, if Jewish people followed the Law exactly, they would have to sit in the dark all evening. However, it is now regarded as quite acceptable for electrical appliances such as ovens and lights to be put on timers – because then the spark is not struck by a Jewish human hand. This law was previously addressed by hiring non-Jews to do the work on the Sabbath day. The command not to light a fire is therefore followed but in a different way according to the times and social convention.

The oral tradition of Jesus’ time has come down to us through the Talmud (Hebrew for “Learning”) and the other Biblical commentaries, but also through a mystical system that was originally called Merkabah and is now known as Kabbalah.

What is so useful about this ancient tradition is that for its structure it uses an object – the seven-branched candlestick known as the Menorah which first appears in the book of Exodus. Priests and scholars were able to assess the essential balance of their spiritual teaching by comparing it with the structure of the Menorah. Nowadays this is known as the Tree of Life and Jewish mystics can, and do, still use it to interpret the Great Laws of life.

It is worth mentioning here that the best-known form of Kabbalah in the modern age, known as Lurianic Kabbalah, is not essentially the same as the teaching in Jesus’ time. It was re-developed by a charismatic Jewish teacher in Safed, Israel, in the sixteenth century. He followed “the great heresy” that when God created the world, he created it imperfect, which gave rise to an external evil, which Christianity would call the devil.

In Jesus’ day this belief did not exist; they followed the original teachings of Genesis “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31). So, if we are to refer to the oral traditions of 2000 years ago we must move away from the Kabbalah of most modern Jews – and of the Kabbalah Centre – to the older tradition. This still exists. Nowadays, it is known as the Toledano Tradition after a time in the twelfth century when the Spanish City of Toledo was a centre for interfaith and study. It is not the perfect system for examining knowledge of the time of Jesus because it was influenced by the Neo-Platonic schools of Alexandria, but it is still a good tool worth using in exploring the teachings both of, and by, Jesus of Nazareth, not least because some of its precepts can be seen quite clearly in the Gospels (see Chapter Seven).

Different branches of Judaism have different interpretations of both Torah and Talmud. But the one thing that all the Jewish texts and teaching do agree on is the subject of marriage. It was considered essential for men and for women. The commentaries on Torah state clearly that an unmarried man was incomplete and, 2000 years ago, had Jesus of Nazareth not been married by the age of 18 he would have been considered a very odd fish indeed. Worse, he would not have been taken seriously as a teacher by any other Jew.

But was he still married at the time of his ministry? Probably not. There’s a simple reason for this. Two thousand years ago the life expectancy of men and women in the Middle East was very different from today. A woman who survived childbirth could live as long as a man did – approximately 40 years. But two thirds of woman died in their teens or 20s from complications in pregnancy or childbirth. Jesus as a widower would have been nothing unusual.

There are plenty of other theories of course. In the twenty-first century we live in a world of easily accessible controversy where arguments proliferate, from Jesus as a celibate Essene to a light-being from another planet. The only thing that we can be sure of is that old certainties are continually being questioned. Although Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code was nowhere near the first book to suppose that Jesus was married and had children, it was the one that caught the attention of the wider public. The film of the book became the largest grossing movie of all time on its first weekend of release and it is now a part of popular culture. The idea of a bloodline of Jesus still existing somewhere will now never leave the realm of possibility.

The Divine Feminine

Far-out ideas and conspiracy theories have of course always been with us, often fuelled by a natural suspicion of overweening religious and political authorities and their pronouncements. For Christians, and for Catholics in particular, it is vitally important that Jesus was not married; if he had a wife, not only would St Paul’s and the Early Church Fathers’ teaching on celibacy as a preferred option for a religious life be open to question but Christian doctrine down the centuries would be threatened.

But it’s also true that today’s heresy is tomorrow’s orthodoxy. That stalwart of the Catholic faith, the thirteenth century St Thomas Aquinas, was once condemned by the bishop of Paris for heresy because he took account of new scientific knowledge coming from the East through the Crusades. Galileo was condemned to house arrest for knowing that the Earth revolved around the sun and Darwin was denounced for his theory of evolution (and, currently, is being attacked again by Christian Creationists).

For the last 20 years a theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene has gained steady ground, even though this is just as speculative as the view that he was celibate. The Gnostic gospels, discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, do demonstrate that Mary may well have been a much-loved follower of Jesus but they do not offer any convincing evidence that she was his wife. Indignation is expressed at Jesus’ affection for Mary in the Gospel of Philip and this would make no sense at all had they been married. The disciples might not have liked it but they would not have expressed open surprise that Jesus might kiss his wife, nor ask him why he loved her more than he loved them.

In one verse, in the Gospel of Philip, we are told that Mary was Jesus’ “companion” which many people have taken to mean wife. The gospel is written in Coptic rather than Aramaic (as incorrectly stated in The Da Vinci Code) but uses Greek words including the Greek term koinonos in reference to Mary as well as the Coptic term hotre (also meaning companion). Koinonos, means associate, companion or someone with whom one spends time; the Greek for wife is always gunay.

But if Jesus of Nazareth did marry Mary Magdalene before the crucifixion, then she could well have been his second wife. If he left a bloodline, it’s most likely that they came from the first wife; the lost wife of the hidden years.

Mary Magdalene or not, the possibility that Jesus could have been married is now gaining general acceptance amongst scholars. Nowadays we live in a secular world where interfaith options are normal. We have a wider knowledge of world religions, including those with female deities. We have female Buddhist monks and women vicars. The idea of celibacy as a religious norm is in retreat. We realise that just because women did not officiate at Synagogue services in Jesus’ day did not mean that they did not live holy lives of service. They just lived different holy lives. There was an acknowledged Divine Feminine aspect in their lives, known as Shekhinah.

This aspect lives on in the icon of the Virgin in the Catholic Church. Roman Catholicism is seen as being anti-women in its stern insistence that no woman may be a priest but, ironically, it is a faith that venerates the feminine more than almost any other. It is as much the religion of the Virgin Mary as it is of Christ. The Church itself is seen as being the Bride of Christ. The veneration of the Virgin fulfils a deep human need for the balancing of the Divine Masculine and Feminine. The Protestant Churches lost that link with the feminine during the Reformation, and although it does have some monastic communities for women and, nowadays, has female clergy, it does not have a feminine focus for the Divine. The lack of this in the Protestant tradition may be one reason why The Da Vinci Code and the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene have become so very popular.

Paul

So when did the tradition of seeing Jesus as unmarried begin? It is generally acknowledged that it was St Paul who first implied that Jesus was celibate.

The early followers of Jesus were working with an oral tradition. The Gospels were written years later than Paul’s letters. And the New Testament, mostly gives us the teaching of Paul and his followers, and their interpretation of who Jesus was. The original leader of the early Christians, Jesus’ brother James, gradually got written out of the picture. By the end of the first century, after the fall of Jerusalem, the death of a good proportion of the Jewish people, the dispersal of most of the rest from Palestine, and the spread of the Pauline version of the faith amongst the Gentiles, the original Christian Jewish sect had turned into a different faith. The Church was now taking Paul’s word as final on many subjects, although he never even met Jesus in person.

We know surprisingly little that is definite about Paul, considering the extent of his writings. We do know that in the first years after the crucifixion he was an active campaigner against the apostles and their messianic Judaism. Then, on the road to Damascus, he was struck down by a powerful vision where Jesus asked him why he was persecuting him. The conversion was swift and from then on, Paul spoke with authority that came from this contact with Jesus’ spirit alone. This seems little different in substance from the New Age channeling which is prevalent today. Teachings from ascended beings such as Seth, Lazaris and Abraham are redolent with good sense and a great number of people have benefited by them. But there is also much channeling which is unhelpful, to say the least, and/or dubious in its origins. The information from any psychic or spiritual source is also filtered through the personality of the person channeling it. There are enough people still claiming to be exclusively channeling the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene or Jesus himself to view them all with a generous pinch of salt.

For Paul, the fact that he had received inspiration directly from Jesus’ spirit was more important than Jesus’ teachings on Earth. He claimed to be a student of a Rabbi called Gamaliel, who was himself a student of the famous teacher Rabbi Hillel – and both of those men were conversant with the Merkabah/Kabbalistic oral tradition. It would have appeared logical to Paul to update the form of Jesus’ teachings for the benefit of the Gentiles. Although it is clear in Acts, from Paul’s encounters with the Apostles who had known Jesus that they were uncomfortable with his interpretation of their teacher’s views from the higher worlds.

Paul is not very clear on the question of whether Jesus was married or not. One of the best-known passages is 1 Corinthians 7:3 7 where he writes: “For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I.” This definitely implies that Paul is not married at the time of writing, but it’s just as likely that he was a widower as a lifetime celibate.

Later, in 1 Corinthians 7:27 he says, “Art thou bound unto a wife? Seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife;” so we can get a clear feeling that he didn’t think that marriage was a good idea for beginners or in the difficult times that they anticipated (there was a strong implication that the world was about to end). It’s not clear whether “loosed” means widowed or divorced but Paul was preaching to Gentiles where divorce was common, so it could be either.

There are even some who suggest that Paul was still married. In Philippians 4:3 he writes, “And I entreat thee also, true yokefellow, help those women which laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my fellow labourers, whose names are in the book of life.” The trouble here is that the word for “yokefellow” (which is not used anywhere else in the New Testament) is suzugos which can equally mean wife, partner or comrade. It is typically irritating of Paul that he couldn’t use a word less ambiguous such as sunergos or philos which can only mean friend or companion.

Just to confuse us even more, in 1 Corinthians 9:3, Paul writes, “Have we not power to lead about a sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and the brethren of the Lord, and Cephas?” Now that’s also unclear because of the nature of Koine (New Testament Greek). Given the language’s frequent and confusing loopholes in the linking of words – not to mention lack of punctuation – it could just as equally mean “a sister who is a wife” as not. Clement of Alexandria, one of the early Church Fathers, who had access to much earlier translations of the New Testament than we do, did take this passage to mean that Paul had a wife.

Epiphanius, a Church Father from the fourth century, and a fervent investigator of heresy in the Christian Church wrote (Panarion 30,16) that the Ebionites (a group of early Christian heretics) claimed that St Paul was a Greek who had visited Jerusalem and wanted to marry a daughter of the high priest. He was circumcised as a Jew but the girl was not impressed and refused to marry him. He became angry, and wrote against circumcision, the Sabbath and Jewish law out of spite.

Maybe this rejection explains Paul’s tendency to misogyny, but, again, it is only hearsay. He does say clearly in Corinthians 7:25 that he has no command from Jesus concerning celibacy, but he goes on to give his own opinion – which is the one that has been adopted by the Catholic Church: “Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgement, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful.”

Later interpretation

When examining ancient teachings, particularly commentaries on religious texts, it is vital to observe them through the old journalistic practice of noting the six following facts. Who wrote it? Where? When? Why? For whom? And finally, Who was listening? The social, economic, religious and sexual views of the times are all relevant and need to be peeled away from the actual evidence like rings of an onion.

Of the great “founding fathers” of Christianity, Tertullian (d circa 220 CE), the originator of the idea of the Christian Trinity, the first person to refer to the “Old Testament” and the “New Testament” and the first great Christian writer in Latin, was the only one who publicly stated that Mary would have had sex with her husband. Perhaps that’s the reason why he never got his sainthood.

The view of sex as being impure or distasteful gained ground in the early centuries of Christianity. It was the first monks – men who lived celibate lives in the desert outside Alexandria in Egypt – who were the important scribes. Their own views about sexual behaviour would make a married Jesus intolerable. Worse, so distasteful was the idea that Jesus’ mother might have gone on to have a relationship with her husband Joseph after the birth of her son, that she was declared to have remained a virgin her entire life. This is a doctrinal truth of Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Christian Churches and dates back to the third century.

The idea that Jesus and Paul were celibate was taken up by St Jerome (331-419 CE) who considered marriage an invention of the devil and encouraged married couples who had converted to Christianity to renounce their marriage vows and separate. St Augustine (354-430 CE), having had what’s politely called an active sexual life in his early years, later became a strong supporter of celibacy, teaching that sex was always tainted, even in a marriage, because it passed on the sin of Adam. He came to believe that the only way to redeem humanity was through abstinence, rather like the ex-smoker who is fanatical about banning cigarettes. Jerome and Augustine were certain that the Virgin remained just that, and the Council of Constantinople in the sixth century referred to Mary as “ever Virgin”.

Later on, Martin Luther and Calvin agreed. It does rather perpetrate the idea that the only good woman is a dead virgin. No wonder feminists get so very angry about it.

The first documented official Christian Church discussion about celibacy was at the Council of Elvira in 309 CE and it appears to have been sparked by concerns about clergy having mistresses rather than a problem with their wives. The councils of Neocaesarea in 314 CE and Laodicea 352 CE ruled that priests must marry virgins, and get rid of unfaithful wives.

The fifth Council of Carthage Five in 401 CE was the first to actually promote celibacy saying that it would be a good idea for priests to separate from their wives and live as celibates. However, no penalties were suggested if the priests didn’t take up this tempting offer and the vast majority ignored it. Only 19 years later, the Pope, Honorius, went on record to praise wives who supported their priest-husbands in their ministry. The next 400 years were marked by several attempts to impose celibacy, all with mixed results and the Church shot itself neatly in the foot with the election of the married Pope Adrian the Second in 867 CE.

It wasn’t until the twelfth century when the Church won power over the crowned heads of Europe that marriage itself came under its jurisdiction. Until then civil marriages were common and divorce was also a non-religious event. But, at the Second Lateran Council in 1139 CE, Pope Innocent the Second declared that all clerical marriages were invalid and any children of such marriages illegitimate, and so the die was cast. If Jesus, whose life-story is, allegedly, the basis behind this doctrine, turned out to have a wife at home – and maybe children too – then the foundation of the Church’s teaching on celibacy would be rocked.

All this anti-sex theological feeling and, eventually, legislation certainly meant that the leadership activities of women in the early Church began to tail off very early on. For them, Christianity had started out brilliantly – allowing women far more freedom (whatever we may think of St Paul) than most other religions of that time. But by the time a priestly order had been established, women were pretty well sidelined. Deaconesses did exist but they were not priestesses. Where women did shine in the early years was as martyrs… so we are safely back with the dead virgins again.

Today

The discovery of the Nag Hammadi scrolls brought Jesus’ marriage back into the realm of the possible and books of theories slowly began to be published, the most famous before Da Vinci being Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. This introduced the popular world to the idea that the Holy Grail was not a cup used at the Last Supper but the womb of Mary Magdalene and the bloodline of Jesus.

In The Last Temptation of Christ, the controversial novel by Nikos Kazantzakis which was made into the even more controversial film by Martin Scorsese, Mary Magdalene arrives on the scene again. Opposition to the film failed to notice that it never said that Jesus and Mary actually were married – only that this was an option offered to him as a temptation as he was dying on the cross. If he would give up his role as the Christ, the devil would save him and allow him to live an ordinary life, including marriage and children. Jesus lives – or more accurately – visualises the fantasy and then turns back from the world to take up his cross again, having realised that the temptation is destroying both him and all that he taught.

So how close can we get to the truth?

Ultimately, no one can determine whether the lost wife of Jesus of Nazareth ever existed. But we can discover what is the most likely scenario by cutting through the centuries of Christian interpretation and grinding down what evidence there is into simple piles of possibility. What you believe by the end of this book, is up to you.

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Kabbalah and Interfaith Conference

La Convivencia* presents

Kabbalah and Interfaith

A three-day conference of international speakers examining how mystical beliefs can promote harmony between faiths.

Location: St. Columba URC, Alcester Road, Moseley, Birmingham.

Dates: 15th-17th April 2011.

Speakers include:

Megan Wagner PhD, provost of the California Interfaith Chaplaincy Institute and author of The Sapphire Staff.

Rev. Maggy Whitehouse, author of Kabbalah Made Easy, The Illustrated History of Kabbalah, The Marriage of Jesus.

Paul Salahuddin Armstrong, co-director of the British Muslim Association.

Michael Hattwick, MD, health advisor to the Obama administration and author of The ABBA Tradition.

Mohammed Nazam, co-founder of The Berakah Project, an inter-faith music initiative dedicated to crossing boundaries of race, religion and culture through the arts. Berakah will be playing on Saturday.

Topics include: The Western Mystery Tradition; How to Read Scripture without Religion; The Spirit of Inclusion; The Ancient Origins of the Tree of Life. The Tony Blair Faith Foundation will also give a presentation.

Price: Full conference £185. Early bird tickets (until March 31st) £150. Day tickets: £65.

Please contact 0121 449 0344 or email info@la-convivencia.org for booking details.

More details are available here.

*La Convivencia means ‘a coming together of souls.’ It refers to a period of 400 years when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together in relative peace in medieval Spain. Scholarship and mysticism thrived in Spanish towns such as Toledo, Cordoba and Granada as students and teachers in all three disciplines helped each other to learn, translate and understand ancient teachings. This “convivencia” has permeated esoteric teaching to the present day