postscript: who isn't in the Gospels

[sistawendy]

Much ink has been spilled about how Mary Magdalene is really Jesus's wife in disguise. Seeing as how Jesus was said to be thirty years old when he started his preaching, it does seem unlikely in that society that he was never married and had no children.

But he's also on record as not being a family man. Did he divorce his wife? He was against divorce unmotivated by "sexual immorality". Did he simply walk away, as Buddha did? That seems awfully tacky for him. Or did she die before his story really starts? Or was she simply edited out? If so, was it out of misogyny or concern for her and her children's safety?

I think of Muhammad, who by all accounts was a model husband and father. Sadly, his eldest child and her husband were at the center of the earliest, most significant, and bloodiest schism in Islam, that between Sunni and Shia.

Comments

[tylik]

His eldest child and her husband on the one side, and his youngest wife on the other.

[staxxy]

What happened in his childhood and youth was largely edited out, or just never written down. There are some texts that include the miracles he performed as a child, but they are harder to find. I personally think the majority of those records were destroyed by people motivated by politics (be they directly like burning scrolls or just translators who decided they didn't want to include any of the human parts of Jesus, or even asshats who decided to trim anyone out that didn't fit with their own agendas).

I like the younger son of Muhammad, personally. He was the one who went to Spain and built the Alhambra where Jews, Christians, and Muslims all came to worship their god in their own ways at the same building. There's a really wonderful book about his effect on Spain called "The Ornament of the World" (Amazon listing - https://www.amazon.com/Ornament-World-Christians-Tolerance-Medieval/dp/0316168718 ).