Christianity

The Roman Catholic Church, headquartered in Rome, Italy, has its own powerful City-State, the Vatican, and claims over 968 million members worldwide and 60 million in the U.S. and Canada (as of 1996). (Catholic membership figures are considerably misleading, though, in that they count as members every person who has been baptized Catholic, including millions of people who were baptized as infants but who are not practicing Catholics.) The Roman Catholic Church, in its pagan form, unofficially came into being in 312 A.D., at the time of the so-called "miraculous conversion" to Christianity of the Roman Emperor Constantine.

Although Christianity was not made the official religion of the Roman Empire until the edicts of Theodosius I in 380 and 381 A.D., Constantine, from 312 A.D. until his death in 337, was engaged in the process of simultaneously building pagan temples and Christian churches, and was slowly turning over the reigns of his pagan priesthood to the Bishop of Rome. However, the family of Constantine did not give up the last vestige of his priesthood until after the disintegration of the Roman Empire -- that being the title the emperors bore as heads of the pagan priesthood -- Pontifex Maximus -- a title which the popes would inherit. (The popes also inherited Constantine's titles as the self-appointed civil head of the church -- Vicar of Christ and Bishop of Bishops.)

Prior to the time of Constantine's "conversion," Christians were persecuted not so much for their profession of faith in Christ, but because they would not include pagan deities in their faith as well. Then, with Constantine's emphasis on making his new-found Christianity palatable to the heathen in the Empire, the "Christianization" of these pagan deities was facilitated. For example, pagan rituals and idols gradually took on Christian meanings and names and were incorporated into "Christian" worship (e.g., "saints" replaced the cult of pagan gods in both worship and as patrons of cities; mother/son statues were renamed Mary and Jesus...

The following article appeared in The Observer on 28 March 1971. Written by Charles Davis, the headline asked 'Was Jesus Married?'. The author had been Britain's leading Roman Catholic theologian before leaving the priesthood and the Church in 1966, and marrying the following year. At the time of writing this article, he was Professor of Religion at Sir George WIlliams University, Montreal.A married Jesus? Not an unmarried virgin, but a married man as the incarnate Son of God for Christians.Why not? Does the immediate reaction of many Christians against the idea come simply from a conviction that it is historically untrue, that in fact Jesus was a celibate? Hardly. The reaction is toostrong to spring from a mere concern with history. In any case, as we shall see, the historical evidence is, to say the least, indecisive.

Well, are there sound reasons of doctrine for a celibate Jesus? There is certainly a tradition to that effect, but whether it is sound is another question. However, it is difficult to see that any inherent incompatibility between marriage and divine son-ship excludes a married Jesus. Scholars have usually been shy of raising the question of the marriage of Jesus. However, a recent author, William E. Phipps, has dared to tackle it - in Was Jesus Married? (New York, Harper & Row). He does so in a serious fashion, assembling and arguing from the data and taking account of the views of other writers on the relevant points. Unfortunately, the author's strong personal views are so clearly present andoperative from the outset that the book at times reads more like a lawyer's brief than a scholarly investigation. Moreover, his views on sex are simply an uncritical acceptance of the modern concern with sexual health and fulfilment, and so his outlook is too naive and one-sided to appreciate the celibate ideal. On the other hand, I do not find any notable omission or serious mishandling of the evidence. What, then, are the reasons for and against the present view that Jesus was unmarried? The first reason for thinking that he was unmarried is that we can find no reference to his marriage in the Gospels, and no mention there of any wife or children. But this is not a very strong reason. As modern scholarship has made abundantly clear, the Gospels are not biographies but writings with a doctrinal purpose, gathering together material used in thereligious life......

A married Jesus? Not an unmarried virgin, but a married man as the incarnate Son of God for Christians. Why not? Does the immediate reaction of many Christians against the idea come simply from a conviction that it is historically untrue, that in fact Jesus was a celibate?Hardly. The reaction is too strong to spring from a mere concern with history. In any case, as we shall see, the historical evidence is, to say the least, indecisive. Well, are there sound reasons of doctrine for a celibate Jesus? There is certainly a tradition to that effect, but whether it is sound is another question.However, it is difficult to see that any inherent incompatibility between marriage and divine son-shipexcludes a married Jesus. Scholars have usually been shy of raising the question of the marriage of Jesus.

However, a recent author, William E. Phipps, has dared to tackle it - in Was Jesus Married? (New York, Harper & Row).  He does so in a serious fashion, assembling and arguing from the data and taking account of the views of other writers on the relevant points. Unfortunately, the author's strong personal views are so clearly present and operative from the outset that the book at times reads more like a lawyer's brief than a scholarly investigation. Moreover, his views on sex are simply an uncritical acceptance of the modern concern with sexual health and fulfilment, and so his outlook is too naive and one-sided to appreciate the celibate ideal. On the other hand, I do not find any notable omission or serious mishandling of theevidence. What, then, are the reasons for and against the present view that Jesus was unmarried? The first reason for thinking that he was unmarried is that we can find no reference to his marriage in the Gospels, and no mention there of any wife or children. But this is not a very strong reason. As modern scholarship has made abundantly clear, the Gospels are not biographies but writings with a doctrinal purpose, gathering together material used in the religious life of the Church. They omit many facts about Jesus which we should like to know and which a modern biographer would have included without hesitation. We cannot even determine the length and sequence of his ministry with certainty. Only the inclusion of Peter's mother-in-law in a miracle story informs us that the chief disciple of Jesus was married. The mere silence of the gospels leaves the questionopen. ......

©2002 Probe Ministries

Introduction: At the Council of Clermont in 1095 Pope Urban II called upon Christians in Europe to respond to an urgent plea for help from Byzantine Christians in the East. Muslims were threatening to conquer this remnant of the Roman Empire for Allah.

The threat was real; most of the Middle East, including the Holy Land where Christ had walked, had already been vanquished. Thus began the era of the Crusades, taken from the Latin word crux or cross. Committed to saving Christianity, the Crusaders left family and jobs to take up the cause. Depending on how one counts (either by the number of actual crusading armies or by the duration of the conflict), there were six Crusades between 1095 and 1270. But the crusading spirit would continue on for centuries, until Islam was no longer a menace to Europe. There is a genuine difficulty for us to view the Crusades through anything but the eyes of a 21st century American. The notion of defending Christianity or the birthplace of Christ via military action is difficult to imagine or to support from Scripture, but perhaps a bit easier since the events of September 11th.So when Christians today think about the Crusades, it may be with remorse or embarrassment. Church leaders, including the Pope, have recently made the news by apologizing to Muslims, and everyone else, for the events surrounding the Crusades. In the minds of many, the Crusades were an ill-advised fiasco that didn't accomplish the goals of permanently reclaiming Jerusalem and the Holy Lands. Are history books correct when they portray the Crusades as an invasion of Muslim territories by marauding Europeans whose primary motive was to plunder new lands? What is often left out of the text is that most of the Islamic Empire had been Christian and had been militarily conquered by the followers of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th and 8th centuries. Islam had suddenly risen out of nowhere to become a threat to all of Christian Europe, and although it had shown some restraint in its treatment of conquered Christians, it had exhibited remarkable cruelty as well...