Little Thunder

Ruminations on "The Book of Longings" Part 1

“Lord our God, here my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”

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Thus begins Sue Monk Kidd’s epic novel, The Book of Longings. In this book, Kidd asks a startlingly simple question: If Jesus of Nazareth had had a wife, what kind of woman might she have been? Ana, Kidd names her; a force of a woman, a name to sing in the ears of generations of women after her. When I first picked up the book I found the concept beautifully sacrilegious; those were my words, and they stopped me. Huh, I thought. I didn’t realize I would still find such an idea sacrilegious. Most Christians would be instantly put off, if not utterly inflamed, by the merest suggestion that Jesus might have been human enough to have sex. I was raised to believe that Jesus was a Nazarene not by hometown but by creed, in that he had taken the vow of the Nazirite not to cut his hair or drink alcohol (or even eat grapes of any kind), and to remain ritually clean for the entire period of consecration onto God. I was taught that remaining celibate was part of this vow, although that is not the case according to the source (Numbers 6:1-8). Considering that Jesus is recorded as drinking wine freely and touched the unclean with some regularity, that seems unlikely. Kidd writes in her Authors Note at the back of the book:

Claims that Jesus was not married first began in the second century. They arose as Christianity absorbed ideas of asceticism and Greek dualism, which devalued the body and the spiritual world in favor if the spirit. Closely identified with the body, women were also devalued, silenced, and marginalized, losing roles of leadership they’d possessed within first-century Christianity. Celibacy became a path to holiness. Virginity became one of Christianity’s higher virtues. Certain that the end-time would come soon, believers in the second century hotly debated if Christians should marry. Considering the accretion of such views into the religion, it struck me as not particularly acceptable for Jesus to have been married¹.

The Bible itself is silent on the matter. Why is that? Kidd writes:

“If Jesus had a wife, it would have be recorded in the Bible,” someone explained to me. But would it? The invisibility and silencing of women were real things. Compared to men in Jewish and Christian Scriptures, women rarely have speaking parts, and they are not mentioned nearly as often. If they are referenced, they’re often unnamed.

She continues:

It could also be argued that in the first-century Jewish world of Galilee, marriage was so utterly normative, it more or less went without saying. Marriage was a man’s civic, family, and sacred duty. Typically undertaken at twenty (though sometimes up to age thirty), marriage was how he became an adult male and established himself within his community. His family expected him to marry and would have been shocked, perhaps even shamed, if he didn’t.

Not that Jesus particularly minded being counter-cultural, but still. And to prove Kidd’s final point, here I am rambling on about why it shouldn’t be shocking that Jesus might have had a wife instead of talking about the book and the fictional woman who so inspired me: “If Jesus actually did have a wife,” Kidd concludes, “and history unfolded exactly the way it has, then she would be the most silenced woman in history and the woman most in need of a voice. I’ve tried to give her one.”