If Jesus had kids, would they be half-God?
Short answer: No.
Middlesized answer: God ain't in the genes (or jeans).
Longish answer: God is spirit, or more
properly, the Ground of Being, that which sustains all of creation and
the Universe. That is rather too large a concept to cram into
the tightly-wound spirals of human DNA. They have a big enough
job, just guiding and regulating the growth of the physical organism.
Even longer answer: Christianity teaches that Jesus Christ is both God
and man. Fully God, and fully man. If you don't believe
this, you're not a Christian.
What that means, from one perspective, is that Jesus
is the conduit and connection between us, who are caught in time and
space, and the infinite glory of God, who is beyond, before, and
beneath all we perceive and imagine. If Jesus were not God, he
would not be able to bridge that gap; equally, if he were not
man, we would be up the proverbial creek, because what or who would there be
to connect with?
In the Gospels, Jesus says a couple of times:
"You who see me, see the Father" -- he unequivocably identifies himself
with God. Yet he obviously and painfully suffers the
uncertainties of human life, and also suffers a human death.
Yeshua ha-Nazri (Jesus the Nazarene) was fully man
-- he had a real physical body, with all its component parts in working
order, and ate and eliminated (no jokes about the Holy Outhouse,
please, but he did use one when he was on earth) just like we do.
And if his mission had (which it did not) included
being married and having children, they would have been quite ordinary
Jews of their day. They would have had a really impressive and
scary dad -- can you imagine somone who really knows exactly
what you have been up to? (He would have been pretty outstandingly
loving, too -- and minded to forgive and create interesting learning
experiences for his kids. Come to think of it -- we ARE his kids. :)
Likewise, presuming the Shroud of Turin is the
actual burial shroud of Jesus (It does not matter to the Faith either
way -- but I will leave that discussion for later), say in 50 years or
so, when science has gotten to the point of being able to clone a person
from individual cells (the technology will probably get there, but
whether we SHOULD do it or not is another story).
So they go at the Shroud of Turin, and find
dried-out human cells with a full compliment of DNA that is not
completely scrambled. They take them off, do mystic passes with
their technology (all sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic), stuff the result in a Uterine Replicator
(artificial womb), and 9-10 months later -- POOF! -- they have a kid.
So what have
they got? Assuming that the DNA they found was actually from
Jesus, and not from anyone who has handled the Shroud since, they have
an entirely normal Jewish boy, who would have fit right in with any
crowd of kids running the streets in 1st Century Judea.
Normal human child -- body & soul. Not
god. No supernormal powers. No choirs of angels. No
three kings of Orient.
You can bet that the apocalytpic wackos would be all
over him, touting him as the "Second Coming of Christ", but there is no
rational reason to think that. Christ came once, to save us, and
there will be no doubt in aybody's itty-bitty head when He comes again.
Back to the original question -- which was prompted
by reading "The Davinci Code". The "Code" is a re-write of the
book "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" published in 1982. Rather better
that the original, since it has a plot and some action, BTW.
There exists exactly NO evidence, from Apostolic times to 1982, that Jesus was married. And none since, either.
There exists exactly NO evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was anywhere on earth after 30 A.D.
The whole incident goes to illustrate that when
people don't have anything real to believe in, they will believe
absolutely anything -- no matter how far-fetched.
Click here to comment