Dad sent me a rabbinic article on The Da Vinci Code. It contains a fascinating passage that makes a certain amount of sense to me and is certain to ruffle feathers. I’m interested to hear what you lot think:
So Jesus was married! Well why shouldn’t he have been? Reared as a Jew, celibacy would have almost certainly been an idea totally foreign to him. “Be fruitful and multiply” was the biblical creed that all Jews considered sacred. Celibacy as a Christian ideal wouldn’t become law until the Council of Elvira (300–306) decreed (Canon 33): It is decided that marriage be altogether prohibited to bishops, priests, and deacons, or to all clerics placed in the ministry, and that they keep away from their wives and not beget children; whoever does this, shall be deprived of the honor of the clerical office.
Christian scholars explain the reason: The Church wanted to ensure that the wealth of its leadership would not be dissipated by way of family inheritance. A non-married clergy would always return their possessions to Rome.
Historians have pointed out the chilling effects of this doctrine. The “best and the brightest” were invariably encouraged to enter the prestigious life of the priesthood. That effectively condemned their genes to hereditary oblivion. Jews, on the other hand, turned those with the greatest intellectual potential to rabbinic lives of learning and teaching combined with an emphasis on large families. That, claims Will Durant in his classic The Lessons of History, is what in all probability accounts for the statistically unbelievable preponderance of Jewish Nobel Prize winners and achievements. — Rabbi Benjamin Blech