He lived happily ever after...

The Discovery Channel, in its search for appropriate Lenten fare, has produced a "documentary" which, if true, would destroy the central doctrine of Christianity. Da Vinci Code redux. Captain's Quarters comments:

The finding ... purports to show that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a son named Judah, also buried at the tomb with his own ossuary:

New scientific evidence, including DNA analysis conducted at one of the world's foremost molecular genetics laboratories, as well as studies by leading scholars, suggests a 2,000-year-old Jerusalem tomb could have once held the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and his family.

The findings also suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have produced a son named Judah.

The DNA findings, alongside statistical conclusions made about the artifacts — originally excavated in 1980 — open a potentially significant chapter in Biblical archaeological history.

... The DNA analysis...does not identify the Jesus of the ossuary as the same Jesus in the Bible. All it does is show that the bones in a tomb that the researchers speculate belonged to Mary Magdelene have no familial relation to the bones in the Jesus ossuary. That is how the archeologists assumed that the two in this crypt were married, and that the Judah ben-Jesus of the ossuary had to be their offspring. ...

... Jesus was a well-known agitator whose crucifixion creates a cult following in the eyes of the Romans and the leading Jews of the time. The basis of that cult formed around the notion that Jesus rose from the dead. If the Romans knew where his body was buried, why then did they not produce it as proof of his immutable death? In order to be placed in an ossuary, he would have to lie in the tomb for a year, decomposing to skeletal remains. During that time, the Romans could easily have produced the body - or the cult followers could have stolen it and buried it elsewhere to prevent it.

... In the first generation of Jesus, no one mentions his marriage or family. Yet his family and followers - ossuaries of Matthew and James are supposedly among the discoveries - supposedly felt it of no moment to bury him with his wife and son, despite their refusal to acknowledge a marriage. By the time his son would have died, the Gospels would already have been written and prophesied in the region and further to Greece and Rome.

And all of this evidence would have been left in the open, in a tomb in the middle of the largest city in the region, where anyone could have discovered it....

Source: Captain's Quarters

Ben Witherington on the subject.

And Darren Hewer.