6. Perhaps you shouldn't be doing comedy.

It was always going to be scary becoming a comedian. I only did it because I had had too many people for it to be a coincidence tell me that I ought to try stand-up. One of them was my friend Nick Williams who knows a lot about shadow inspiration.

Shadow inspiration is where you help other people to do what you would most like to do yourself.

Anyway, when three people in just one week said 'you should try stand-up' I thought that I should, at least, check out whether there were any courses that taught this weird and wonderful thing. There was one of course, starting a week from then and just two miles from my home. Dead cheap too.

So I went ... and was greeted with 'what are you doing here, you're like, old! I don't like old people' from one other participant. I told her that she'd get over that in time and everyone laughed. That was odd.

So, I did the course, I enjoyed it ... and I was surprised at how well I did. At the end of the six weeks we did a performance at the Queen Victoria Pub in Birmingham and I started getting gigs around Birmingham. And then in London. And then all over the place.

I really, really enjoyed it. The great thing was that my bishop just loved it too - and called me his 'Fool for God.'

But my former spiritual teacher wrote me a letter warning me that I was bringing the clergy into disrepute. That felt really, really horrid.

So when Nigel turned up, nine months after the comedy course, it was a frightening thought that maybe the comedy was the wrong direction. Maybe I was being shown that it was the wrong thing to do? Maybe I was being punished? (hang on, don't I believe in a loving supportive God?)

Or perhaps it was my inner self-scupperer?

I promptly enrolled on another comedy course run by Mirth Control in Bath and the Universe conspired to help me get there. And what's more, Geoff Whiting liked my act. And when Britain's Got Talent came to him for recommendations for people to approach for the 2014 competition, he recommended me.

So lesson no. 2 is to deal with the inner self-scupperer. Careful consideration showed that this had been around for quite as long as shame.

I can't tell you when I'll be on BGT - as I type there's no known scheduling but I am confirmed on the televised auditions in February. But I have to spend January practicing and laughing. And laughter is the best medicine. So if you do watch that programme and spot me - give me a wave.

5. That's a pretty horrid message isn't it?

So ... does this mean that if you get happy - really happy - then you're going to get sick? Yikes. That's a pretty foul message to put out isn't it?

Please be aware that this blog is just my musings. And to you it may be total ********. Your life is your life and my truth isn't your truth.

But there is something in this which is worth noting. You may have heard of the 'Happiness Set Point.' Marci Shimoff wrote of it in her book Happy for No Reason. It's also known as the 'Emotional Set Point.'

In a nutshell, it's exactly how happy your ego is going to allow you to be before it organises something to scupper a feeling that it feels you don't deserve.

Can a human ego do that? Hell yes. The ego is our automatic responses. It's trained when we are children (the Jesuits know what they are saying with the phrase 'give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man'). We have a set point of exactly how happy we are permitted to be so that it doesn't piss our parents off too much.

If your parents aren't happy (as mine weren't), your happiness set point isn't going to be very high.

I've done a lot of work on mine - and had to do a lot more when Lion and I got married because my ego thought I didn't deserve to be that happy and organised some new and exciting financial issues. And guess what...? Sorted all that. Wrote some excellent books - and arranged to be criticised for them by people I loved and admired.

Sorted all that. Wrote another couple of books ... decided to become a comedian and moved to paradise.

As I said earlier - never been so happy.

So could it have been the Happiness Set Point kicking in? Quite possibly. It's never just one thing is it? But it's not working this time because apart from the horrid days and the scary days, I am actually happier with this life-enhancing dis-ease. That's because it is enhancing my life. And I couldn't be anything but happy living in Devon. So even if it was that, it's not working.

Good.

But I would suggest you might like to take a look at your own happiness set point. It can be raised but it's slow, diligent work. Excuse the advertisement but there's a lot about it on my Soul Wisdom website. And trust me, learning to raise it so that you can create and maintain bliss is a really, really good idea.

You may of course say 'what the **** do you know about that?' All I know is that in heart and soul I am a very happy woman.

4. Why this? Why now?

Henry's terminal diagnosis came seven months after our marriage and he died two weeks after our first wedding anniversary. It was the first marriage for both of us - he was 42 and I was 32 and apart from loving each other we were so relieved to have broken that duck.

I don't actually believe that there's 'a shelf.' I know lots of people, my Dad included, who found true love very late in life. And Lion and I didn't discover each other until we were in our mid 40s.

So, if Henry was finally happy, why did he get cancer?

Well, these things take a while to grow in the body. I had a pathologist friend who told me that pretty much everyone has small cancerous tumours in their bodies which have been sealed off and aren't hurting anyone. Then a trauma or something happens or some genes mutate and suddenly what was no problem at all starts to grow. He said that often the very worst thing for anyone was a diagnosis of something that was minding its own business because then the fear and interference would certainly make it grow.

In Henry's case, there had been trauma enough in his life and lots of inner angers too. I think - I don't know - that it came out simply because he was happy; maybe he was settled and he relaxed and let go. And he was in the perfect place with someone who would care for him and love him every moment of it, and research stuff for him and, frankly, replace the mother he had never had.

One of the reasons why he didn't recover, although he'd changed his diet drastically and was changing his life too - and the cancer had stopped growing - was because chemotherapy killed him.  His doctor encouraged him to stop his Vitamin C therapy and diet simply because they needed the cancer to grow to treat him with chemo. So, he stopped it. The cancer started growing again and he had chemo. The registrar at the QE hospital, Oliver Rose, told me that we were 'lucky' because the death from the chemo would be easier than death from that cancer. Oliver was trying to be helpful and I did see that.

I wasn't angry with God about it but I was very angry with the doctors as well as grief-stricken. But people in my family didn't show anger (though a few shop assistants got it in the neck over the next few months). And I married again very swiftly - two years later - which made me very happy. However, I don't think I'd dealt with all the grief and certainly the second marriage had its own fill of traumas.

Anyway, my dis-sease arrived exactly seven months after Lion and I had moved to paradise. We had decided to decamp to Devon and begin living the kind of life we had always wanted to live - away from the city, working via the Internet and able to walk on Dartmoor every day.

I can honestly say, I'd never been so happy. I had a new book coming out that was probably the best I'd written, I loved my husband and our home, I was delighted with my new career as a comedian, I was just filled with joy.

I wrote daily appreciations on my Soul Wisdom page on Facebook (I still do). I was absolutely certain that health was all about loving life.

Lion and I went on a lovely holiday to Tunisia for a break - our birthdays are two days apart so we thought we'd go away and just celebrate for a full week. It was just wonderful - best holiday in years.

Two days before we came home the lump arrived. It literally came overnight - you're pretty much in tune with your body in sunshine and swimming costumes. And I knew that life had changed forever.

So why, why, why when I was so happy? So fulfilled? So full of joy?

I asked God about that while I was home and walking on the moors. The answer came immediately from left field (which is when you know they are real answers). 'So it would happen somewhere where you were safe and surrounded by exactly the people you need to work this through. It's time. You are happy enough now to heal this old, old rubbish that has been sitting in you for years.'

And it is true. Four therapists/healers within 30 miles in this brand new land became my mentors and the moor became my bones and my guidance. It happened here because I am strong enough now, it happened where I could still be happy and in my happiness is my healing.

3. Signs and Portents

When you have a ‘bad’ diagnosis you feel very alone. No matter how lovely people are, they are not you and they can walk away. However, I have been showered with signs and portents and blessings from day one. I just had to learn to believe them.

For a minister, a healer, a teacher that should be simple, right?

Yeah, right.

I did believe each and every one of them – for about a week. And then I would go down into fear again. It took a shaman who lived just down the road from me (thank you God!) to tell me that I had to start believing at a deeper level and holding that belief. And as an amazing sign occurred against all the odds in her healing room at the beginning of the session, I really had to start listening.

Here’s an example of one of the signs.

When my first husband, Henry, was given a terminal diagnosis with melanoma, back in 1989, and we were both reeling with the shock, I went to the bible that we had been given on our wedding day and opened it at random, asking for a sign from God.

My finger fell on a line from psalm 118 ‘I shall not die; instead I shall live to praise the Lord my God.’

It felt so good – of course I interpreted it that Henry wouldn’t die. But it meant me. I would not die from this time of trauma, rather I would get through my life-time of being an armchair Christian and start to discover what I truly believed. It didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a barrow-load of crud to get through first.

Move the story on by a decade and my second husband (whom in this blog I’ll call Jay) had just decided to end our marriage. He unadvisedly told me that it was for my good and that I’d thank him eventually and he was absolutely right but at that specific time I was, to say the least, a little bit sore.

I went up to Birmingham to stay with my Mum and we went to Evensong at the church where Henry’s ashes had been buried. I remember standing by his grave and thinking ‘where did the hope go? This is the second time my world has been destroyed.’ Then I went into the church, opened my hymn book and a sheaf of paper fell out. It was the 118^th psalm with a sentence underlined. Which line? ‘I shall not die, instead I shall live to praise the Lord my God.’

A bit of a hint, I would say.

A few months back (three months after diagnosis), I went on retreat to the Poor Clare’s Monastery in north Devon. It was a much-needed time to myself to meditate and pray and I was able to join with the nuns in their daily liturgy. On the last morning, after communal mediation, I left the nuns’ chapel ... I paused at the back of the main church to look at some leaflets and heard them begin to sing again. I realized that I had missed the final part of that morning’s prayer.

It would be about five minutes’ worth and I was hungry for my breakfast so there was really no point in returning but even so, I knew I must. I retraced my steps and went quietly back into the chapel. There, I fumbled a bit, trying to find the place in the prayer book and Sister Maximilian came over to help me.

One of the sisters is Swedish and I had noticed that she sometimes sang verses of the liturgy out of order. Just as I got to the right page in the book, it was her turn to sing. She sang one particular line and the rest of the nuns stopped dead because it was the ‘wrong’ line.

They started again at the beginning of that psalm.

Which one?

Psalm 118.

Which line did the sister sing out of turn?

‘I shall not die, instead I shall live to praise the Lord my God.’

I'd say that was probably time to start listening to what God had been trying to yell in my ear all along.

2. Shame

The very first thing I did when I was told that I had a dis-ease was not tell people about it.

I’ve always been a bit of a hermit – and I’m married to another hermit. Even in my early 20s when I was at journalism college, a friend said ‘If I ever see a job advertised for “hermit – optional social life” I’ll let you know.’

I guess there were three main reasons apart from that. Firstly I had to get used to the idea myself and I had to find out who I was now as opposed to who I had been and I didn’t think other people’s opinions on the matter would necessarily help. Selfish? Hell, yes. And about time I started being a little bit more selfish. WBX would call it self-full.

My husband knew of course, my two best friends, my homeopath and my healer but that was enough for the time being.

The second reason was because I had to learn how to deal with being in the medical system. I’ve not had a stroke of illness in my life that needed hospital treatment apart from a couple of broken bones. I hadn’t even been to a doctor in 18 years.  I found it incredibly difficult because it was all about Nigel and the only bit that was about me was that I was carrying Nigel around for all the appropriate tests. 

Suddenly others believed that they had complete autonomy over my body. That did not sit well.

The third was because I had to process shame.

Why shame? Because I’d been an holistic teacher for years; I had (I hoped) helped many with sessions, workshops and books. I ‘shouldn’t’ have got something like this. I should have walked my talk and been healthy until I was 100 when I’d have died in my sleep.

That feeling was fuelled by some of the holistic community’s reactions to Gill Edwards’ and Gerry Hicks’ deaths a year or so back. People seemed to think that someone in spiritual work had to be perfect. I guess I thought that too in a way (though Gerry was 89 – and something really does have to take you out eventually).

But I thought it meant I was a failure; I felt like a failure. And to start with, I couldn’t understand because I thought I had done all I could. In fact, just like Brandon Bays, when I found the emotional root cause of Nigel I said ‘but I’ve dealt with that.’

Obviously, I hadn’t.

What was wonderful – and life-enhancing – was that those I did tell as the weeks went by did not judge me the way I had been judging myself. They were shocked sometimes, but never other than loving. 

One wonderful lady, who’d been a client as well as a friend for years said ‘Maggy, you’ll lead us all through this. You’re still an inspiration.’ That made me cry.

Maybe it's true. I do know that the phrase 'I have been there' is often of great comfort. It means someone understands your journey. I have understood the journey of those who were in financial difficulties because of psychological and spiritual blockages. Now I can understand the journey of those who sick or in fear for their life. Ho hum. As the Buddha says, “Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it.”

It made me think about where I was familiar with shame ... I wrote a list of times when I had felt humiliated during my life. It turned out to be a very, very long list. That was a bit of an eye-opener.

So, lesson one – of so, so many, lessons – was "you were carrying shame and you didn’t even know it. Shame alone is a dis-ease. We could do with dealing with that."

1. The Life-Enhancing Dis-ease.

Welcome to 2014. I wish you a wonderful happy year.

Last year was pretty awe-full.

There were times too that I thought it was awful. Lots of them. 2013 was the year that I was diagnosed with a life-enhancing dis-ease.

That’s not what the doctors called it, of course. That was something entirely different.

But a life-enhancing disease it is. 

It took a few months to realize this fully ... because I am entirely human. It also took a few months to realize that I am incredibly grateful for it. Please do try not to vomit when you read that. I do realise it's a bit on the wanky bollox side. (WBX, as it will be referred to from now on, is my favourite way of describing over-the-top, unicorn-friendly, fluffy pink, holistic positive-speak).

This blog is about the journey I’m on with this life-enhancer. It will probably get pretty weird; it will definitely contain a fair amount of WBX. But I’ll try to keep it grounded. And I will tell the truth about the processes – glorious and painful.

Why am I writing it? Well I’m a writer anyway; it’s therapy for me and, if it just for one moment, helps someone else with a life-enhancing dis-ease or helps someone enhance their life without having to manifest such a dis-ease then that’s pretty good.

The dis-ease will get named on and off during this blog but not a lot. That’s not because I’m trying to hide anything but because the dis-ease itself is not the story, it’s the symptoms of the story.

I called it Nigel because as soon as the doctors decided that I had it they made all sorts of plans for Nigel (Google XTC Making Plans for Nigel if you’re too young to know the song). But apart from allowing me six holistic therapies for free, there really wasn’t anything the doctors could say about making plans for Maggy. After all, that’s not their job.

I’m responsible for Maggy. I’m a spiritual being, incarnate as a human being. I also have a body. Nigel is not me. Nigel is an it. Nigel is something that came along to teach me something important. It may well have come along to save my life not to destroy it.

It’s also annoying, uncomfortable, has required serious life-changes - and will probably require more - and made me one of those annoying people who doesn't eat gluten or sugar or half the stuff that's really, really nice and everyone else adores (oh that has been such a challenge!). But most importantly of all it’s a dis-ease that I went down on my knees and begged for. 

Yes, I did. I am entirely responsible for it. No, not because I ate badly (too much sugary stuff for sure but home-cooked organic food, locally sourced and not a KFC in more than a decade), and not because I have been a ‘bad person’ (though I am sure there are some who would disagree) and not because I haven’t meditated or prayed or been kind to others (though I’m sure I could have done more) and not because I ‘haven’t worked hard enough holistically or spiritually’ (ditto).

It’s here because I went down on my knees and begged God to clear out all the inner resentments, angers, hatreds, fears and blocks that could possibly have been inside me at any level that were stopping me from being the person I am meant to be. I asked to be a clear channel of Grace. I asked to be cleansed in mind, body and spirit. And I meant it.

And the answer was ‘Let’s do it together, Maggy.  I will give you the means, the process and all the support you could possibly need to do what you ask.’

Bugger.

Be careful what you ask for, you may get it.

The Marriage of Jesus. Chapter One

Copyright Maggy Whitehouse 2005.

Chapter One:  Background, 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 considered to be so 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 would have been married. The issue is unimportant to them 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?” (Matt 13:55).

Even so, this has been discounted for centuries with the Greek words adelphos and adelphe translated as “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 most probably married seems fairly certain, and 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

No one will ever know the truth but, when it comes to Jesus’ knowledge of spiritual matters, he didn’t 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 monotheistic background 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 which 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 realised 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 what is right and what is 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.

Another 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 not writing but 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. The tradition was re-developed by a charismatic Jewish teacher in Safed, Israel, in the sixteenth century and followed “the great heresy” that when God created the world, he created it imperfect and that this caused 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.” (Gen. 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 for 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 which 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 totally denounced for his theory of evolution (and, currently, is being denounced 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 only ever have been his second wife. A Jewish man who was willing to marry (and that would have been 99 per cent of them) would not have left it until his late 20s or early 30s to tie the knot. If he had married Mary in his youth, she would never have been known in the Gospels as ‘Magdalene.’ A woman, in those days, was always identified by her father’s or her husband’s name or town. She would have been ‘Mary, wife of Jesus’ or ‘Mary of Nazareth’ not Mary of Magdala. To be referred to as “Magdalene” she must have lived in Magdala recently or have been married to a Magdalan man. And, if Jesus left a bloodline, it’s most likely that they came from the first wife; the younger; the lost wife of the hidden years.

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 – and that he, himself, followed his master in being so.

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, as a result, mostly gives us the teaching of Paul and his followers, and his interpretation of who Jesus was. The original leader of the early Christians, Jesus’ brother James, gradually gets 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 is actually 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. Though 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.

Even so, Paul is not very clear on the question of whether Jesus was married or not. One of the best known is 1 Cor 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 1Cor 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 Cor. 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 judgment, 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 CD), 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) 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), 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 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 and Laodicea 352 ruled that priests must marry virgins, and get rid of unfaithful wives.

The fifth Council of Carthage Five in 401 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 it was ignored by the vast majority. 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, 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.

The Marriage of Jesus, by Maggy Whitehouse is available for purchase in book and e-book here.