After all, what is this story about Jesus being married and father of two?

You may have seen news circulating in recent days about the release of a book based on an ancient manuscript that allegedly reveals that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had two children with her. What's more, the document would also point out that the original "Virgin Mary" would be Mary Magdalene and not Mary the mother of Jesus.

According to Fiona Keating of the International Business Times, this bombastic manuscript is almost 1500 years old and would have been discovered in the British Library. All the controversy over Christ's hypothetical marriage life came after the pair formed by religious studies professor Barrie Wilson and writer Simcha Jacobovic spent several months translating the text - into Syriac - into the new book.

The work - released under the title "The Lost Gospel" - still makes other interesting revelations, such as the fact that Jesus had political connections with the Roman emperor Tiberius and Sejanus, one of his most powerful generals, and that Christ survived a attempted murder when he was only 20 years old.

Forgotten manuscript

According to Discovery News Rossella Lorenzi, the manuscript that served as the basis for Wilson and Jacobovic, though forgotten in some dusty corner of the British Library, is an old acquaintance of historians, and has been translated countless times.

The document was written on parchment in Greek and translated into Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic, and gained English in the title "The Ecclesiastical History of Zacharias Rhetor" - or "The Ecclesiastical History of Zechariah Rhetoric" in free translation. The 29-chapter material was sold by an Egyptian monastery to the British Museum in 1847, and 20 years ago was transferred to the British Library.

New interpretation

According to Rossella, several historians have pointed out that the manuscript refers to the story of a man named Joseph and Aseneth - the daughter of an important Egyptian priest - and the problem is that the text does not even mention Jesus and Mary Magdalene. As he explained, it is a Jewish tale possibly edited or even written by Christians, and there are several translations of it. There is even a website dedicated to the couple's story since 1999.

What seems to be the case now, however, is that Wilson and Jacobovic have given a new interpretation to the tale of Joseph and Aseneth, considering that it is a coded account referring to the married life of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. According to Rossella, the authors relied on a newly translated passage describing the couple's wedding ceremony, which was celebrated by Pharaoh himself at the time.

In this passage, the text reports that the Egyptian monarch would have told Aseneth that she was blessed to marry Joseph, the first son of God, and that she would henceforth be called the Daughter of the Most High God. The excerpt would also reveal that the couple had sex and that Aseneth gave birth to two boys, Manasseh and Ephraim.

Controversies

However, many scholars argue that the passage simply tells the story of the couple and does not hold any encrypted messages. This is not the first time that the translation of ancient manuscripts points to the possibility that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene - not to mention the famous books "The Last Temptation" by Níkos Kazantzákis and "The Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown, based on the same idea.

Incidentally, this is not the first time Jacobovic has been embroiled in controversy either. The writer has created much controversy in the past when he said he discovered the location of the tomb of Jesus and his family in a suburb of Jerusalem, and found the nails that were used in the crucifixion.

Robert Eisenman, one of the historians consulted by Discovery News, said that so far there is no conclusive evidence that Christ was married or had children. In addition, the gospels suggest that he was celibate and encouraged his followers to be as well.

Other than that, according to Eisenman, first of all it is necessary to prove that there really was a "Jesus" and if this man corresponds to the one described in the gospels. Finally, the historian pointed out that the sole reason that several writers point to Mary Magdalene as Christ's wife is because she is one of the few women to play a significant role in the gospels, and no one is sure who she was. .