A new book claims that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married with children.
The authors of The Lost Gospel claim that an ancient Syriac manuscript called 'Joseph and Aseneth', which found its way to the British Library in London back in 1847 from a monastery in Egypt, is the lost gospel that shows Jesus as a human being who courted and then married his wife, had children and even survived an attempt on his life.
"The manuscript helps fill the 30-year gap in Jesus' resume," co-author Professor Barrie A Wilson said at a press conference in London on Wednesday.
"What the Vatican feared and Dan Brown only suspected has come true. There is now written evidence that Jesus was married to Mary the Magdalene and that they had children together," authors Wilson and Simcha Jacobovici write in the Preface of the book.
The authors claim that the manuscript is already known to experts in the field of early Christianity, but only in the later Latin and Greek translations.
They claim to be the first to work with a Syriac version, which they have translated and "decoded" to reach their conclusions.
The authors claim the manuscript is dated to roughly the third century.
Its content was a direct threat to the authority of the Christian establishment and canonical literature, which by then had succeeded in sanitising Jesus, denying him a family life, and portraying Mary the Magdalene, who was actually his wife, as a prostitute.
{{/usCountry}}Its content was a direct threat to the authority of the Christian establishment and canonical literature, which by then had succeeded in sanitising Jesus, denying him a family life, and portraying Mary the Magdalene, who was actually his wife, as a prostitute.
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