Jesus and His Wife

When I was in Montreal last summer (beautiful city - beautiful time of year) I was sitting in a park when a guy came up to me and sat down. People usually do not come up to me like that so I was surprised. Not as surprised as when he asked me the next question:

"Do you think Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene?"

Now to me the question was quite hilarious. First of all it was not 2005, and I thought people would be over it by now. Secondly because I had done some research into conspiracy theories discovering how many of them come from an anti-semitic, anti-liberal text called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a poor excuse for a plagiarized text by the Tsarist secret police in the early twentieth century.

Now this year I realized that such weirdness happens more often than you think. In fact it has always happened. Take Acts 17, where Paul explains the Christianity to some of the people of Athens. In the end some of the Athenians reject Christianity on the basis that it puts it's hope in the resurrection. An interesting thing I found out is that the Greeks, confused about what Paul had meant, believed that resurrection was in fact the consort, or wife, of Jesus (a la Zeus and Hera).

It seems like these types of confusions have a long history.