In my previous post, I noted that the most obvious
contribution of Anthony Le Donne’s
The
Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals is its offering of a
coherent narrative, showing how different socio-historical contexts have led to
various portrayals of Jesus’ sexuality, including his marital status.
That is the most
obvious contribution
of the study.
What I wish to focus upon
here, though, is his most
important contribution, not only to studies of
Jesus and gender but specifically to studies of the
historical
Jesus.
In my opinion, the most important contribution is his
convincing demonstration that historical silence is a knife that cuts both
ways. Indeed, I’m not sure that I’ve
come across a study of Jesus that makes this particular point in such an
emphatic fashion. Let me demonstrate how
this works by interacting with two interrelated claims of the book.
First, and to cut to the chase, Le Donne
does not think
that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, but not for the reason typically
given.
Scholars typically argue that
Jesus was not married to Mary Magdalene because nothing in the Gospels really
would make you think that he was.
Certainly, she seems to be one of his disciples, and a particularly
important one of his female disciples.
But there’s really nothing to suggest a sexual or romantic
relationship.
Le Donne points this out
and shows how this type of speculation really only emerged much later in ancient
Christian and medieval reflection on Mary Magdalene.
Supporting this point, he argues that the
concept of “romance” isn’t entirely comfortable in Second Temple Judaism and
that, when it comes to Jesus’ sexuality or marital status, one should think not
in terms of “love” of the hearts-and-butterflies variety but in terms of
family, honor, and duty.
Citing Jesus’
tense relationship with immediate family (especially the interchange in Mark
3:31–35) and Jesus’ teaching that his disciples should abandon family and
family obligations on various occasions (“Let the dead bury their own dead,”
etc.), Le Donne argues that Jesus seems to have been something of a
non-conformist when it came to family.
Thus, it seems very unlikely that Jesus would have settled down into a
family role with a spouse
during his public ministry.
That last part is italicized because it’s an important
nuance that Le Donne has added to the discourse on Jesus and Mary and the
second matter I want to mention. In
short, he thinks it is possible that Jesus was married at some point in time
earlier. Indeed, Le Donne goes so far as
to say that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, our default setting
should be that Jesus was married earlier in life. In support, he cites Paul, rabbinic evidence,
the Dead Sea Scrolls, life expectancy studies, and also Roman evidence. He demonstrates that there was societal
pressure to marry, pretty much regardless of which society you’re using to
approach Jesus.
On the first point, Le Donne’s observations that typical default
thinking about marital relationships in Second Temple Judaism belongs more
comfortably in the modern world than the ancient world is convincing. It’s also clear to me that Jesus acted at
least occasionally in manners that were contrary to society’s familial
norms. The second point is, in my
opinion, less convincing, but it depends upon the degree to which you
interrogate it. Le Donne forwards this
only as a possibility that has to be taken seriously; he never forwards it as a
conclusion he has reached. But, Le Donne
mentions it so often that rhetorically I think he might give even the
possibility more credit than it is due.
I don’t think the evidence about the normalcy of marriage in Jewish
society is so strong that we must constantly think that it’s just as likely
that Jesus was married earlier in life (“perhaps in his early twenties”; 128)
as it is that he wasn’t. Le Donne’s
appeal to Paul’s celibacy is interesting here (as is his frequent appeal to
Peter’s marriage), but suffice it to say that I’m equally unconvinced that it
is “quite possible” (106) that Paul was married earlier in life. There’s an issue here that his study raises
but doesn’t fully address, although it does address the larger methodological
matter to which it relates: If Jesus (or
Paul) was a non-conformist on these issues later in his public ministry, upon
what grounds can we say that this outlook was confined to that period of his
life? Could he not have been a
non-conformist earlier, which would lead us to conclude or suspect that—most
likely—he was not married later and also was not married earlier? Stated otherwise, how are we to decide
whether the later practice was a change from earlier practice or in continuity
with earlier practice? How do we
speculate upon the unknown in light of the known?
We’re dealing with the role of silence in historical
argument, but for me there’s not enough to tip the scale from “possible” in the
sense of we-really-have-no-idea-one-way-or-the-other to “quite possible.” This is the splitting of hairs, of course,
but in this instance I think it’s important because it’s the role of these
types of questions that Le Donne’s study highlights as crucial to historical
study of Jesus of Nazareth, and more crucial than we often recognize.
Indeed, this is, in my opinion, his most important
contribution, which earlier I described as demonstrating that historical
silence is a knife that cuts both ways. Le
Donne uses the historical silence that scholars typically employ in order to
reject the idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene in order to affirm
that he likely was, or at least very well could have been, married to someone
else before his public ministry. In
short, according to Le Donne, Jesus wasn’t married to Mary, but that doesn’t
mean that he wasn’t married. The
discomfort that many throughout history have had with a married Jesus is one
focus of the book, but this other contribution is directed further toward those
who feel that discomfort: Why, in what
we all recognize as an issue clouded by historical silence, are some people
happy to invoke that silence when it helps affirm their preferred perspective
but marginalize that silence when it would suggest a number of other
possibilities that are not particularly welcome for whatever reason(s)? Le Donne’s study argues persuasively that these other
possibilities must be seriously entertained. At the end of the day,
one may not think the case for a married Jesus is that strong—it’s not entirely
clear just how strong Le Donne himself thinks it—but one can no longer
think that there is no case to be made.
Le Donne has shown that there is.
As I mentioned in the first post, I was wrong to think there
was nothing for historical Jesus scholarship in this topic, and I’ve rarely so
enjoyed being proven wrong.
I've had occasion to revisit some of Günther Bornkamm's work recently. His Jesus von Nazareth first appeared in 1956 and was already in a second edition seven months later. Like his contemporary and fellow Doktorsohn of Rudolf Bultmann, Ernst Kaesemann, Bornkamm was a little annoyed that form criticism's success in Gospels studies had led to a stagnation of historical Jesus work in Germany. He was one of the architects of the so-called New Quest for the Historical Jesus in Germany. (Yes, yes, I'm all too aware that this tripartite division of the quests doesn't reflect all the research of the period.) 
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With your academia.edu account, you can read chapter three of my The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David. Here I explain some historiographical elements of Social Memory theory. The previous chapter (ch. 2) surveys modern hermeneutical theory in the philosophy of history at large. The following chapter (ch. 4) offers my theoretical adaptation of Social Memory for historical Jesus research. The second half of this book demonstrates my adaptation of Social Memory with a specific method that I call "triangulation" via "memory refraction." I do so by focusing on the exegetical problems presented by the title Son of David in Second Temple Judaism(s). When I completed this book as my dissertation in 2005, it was the first book-length treatment of Social Memory for historical Jesus research.
I'm also appreciative of the review that Horacio Vela of University of the Incarnate Word published in Choice 52.5 (2015). He highly recommended the book and, though (rightly) noting that there might be disagreement over the "memory approach" methodology, says: "Keith creates a plausible account of a conflict rooted in Jewish social and religious practices that culminated in Jesus' death at the hands of Roman authorities. This book serves as a great introduction to studies of ancient literacy and historical Jesus research for theology/religion courses at the undergraduate/graduate level."
With the help of the good folks at Baylor University Press, we're starting 2015 with perhaps the best giveaway we've ever done on the Jesus Blog. You can win three books: Jens Schröter's From Jesus to the New Testament, Jens Schröter's Jesus of Nazareth: Jew from Galilee, Savior of the World, and Matthias Konradt's Israel, Church, and Gentiles in the Gospel of Matthew. So that's two Schröters and a Konradt, and the first and last of those books are both volumes in the Baylor-Mohr Siebeck Studies in Early Christianity series.
Timothy H.
thisistimm@gmail.com"