JESUS HAD A WIFE AND TWO CHILDREN - CLAIMS BOOK

 Christian orthodoxy doesn't really consider Jesus to have been much of a family man — he told his disciples to leave their families and follow him, after all. But a new book based on a 1,500-year-old manuscript would dispute that characterization.

According to The Lost Gospel, Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had two children. 

Jesus, Mary, and their children also escaped an assassination attempt years before Jesus was crucified.

The authors of this story are Barrie Wilson, a professor of religious studies at Canada's York University, and Canadian-Israeli screenwriter and documentarian Simcha Jacobovici, and they are basing their tale off the Ecclesiastical History of Zacharias Rhetor (of Mytilene), an Aramaic-language text that has been in the British Museum then the British Library for almost 170 years.

The Lost Gospel takes its cue from a new translation of a historical document, The Story of Joseph and Asenath, which was originally written in Syriac — a 1500-year-old language that is believed to have been Jesus’s mother tongue.

"Before anyone gets his/her theological back up, keep in mind that we are not attacking anyone's theology," the authors say. "We are reporting on text." Reporting is a little modest.

Wilson and Jacobovici, who has made discredited claims about the historical Jesus before, more accurately "decoded" the text, which is about a man name Joseph and his wife, Aseneth — characters that the authors say are stand-ins for Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

While most religious and historical experts think the Syriac manuscript chronicles the life of a Hebrew patriarch named Joseph, authors of The Lost Gospel insist that it is in fact a coded chronology of Jesus’s personal life.

“It returns Jesus to history, it returns Mary Magdalene to the story,” Jacobovici said during the launch of the book at the British Library in London last month.

“Not only is he married — but [the manuscript] celebrates his sexuality.

“The book also describes Jesus’s alleged connections to top political figures in the Roman empire such as Emperor Tiberius and his best friend, the soldier Sejanus. In addition, it explains why Jesus was constantly on the move to avoid Herald Antipas,” writes Richard Brooks, The Sunday Times Art Editor.