Catholicism For Dummies. Rev. Kenneth Brighenti
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alt="Warning"/> Despite what you may read in some modern novels, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were never a couple, legally or romantically. Counterfeit Gnostic Gospels were written a few hundred years after the legitimate ones that alleged such a relationship with the intent to undermine the Church. No one ever took them seriously, and no accredited scholar today gives them any credibility.
Medieval literature is filled with stories on the Holy Grail, which was the alleged chalice Jesus used at the Last Supper. Folklore and legend imply that the Knights Templar may have found it while on Crusade, but there has never been any evidence whatsoever to establish or even suggest that the Grail symbolizes a bloodline running through European monarchies going back to the supposed offspring of Christ and Mary Magdalene. These stories are all fiction; there is no historical or biblical evidence to suggest otherwise.
Whenever the Bible is silent or ambiguous, Sacred Tradition fills in the gaps. So to Catholics, a written record in the Bible is that He was a man, His name was Jesus, and His mother was Mary, and a revealed truth of Sacred Tradition is that He never married and had no children either.
Did Jesus have any brothers or sisters?
Some Christians believe Mary had other children after she had Jesus, but the Catholic Church officially teaches that Mary always remained a virgin — before, during, and after the birth of Jesus. She had one son, and that son was Jesus.
Another belief among some Christians is that Joseph had children from a prior marriage, and after he became a widower and married the mother of Jesus, those children became stepbrothers and stepsisters of Jesus. Those who believe that Jesus had siblings invoke Mark 6:3: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon and are not his sisters here with us?” And Matthew 12:46 says, “His mother and his brothers stood outside.”
So who were these brothers and sisters mentioned in the Gospel, if they weren’t actual siblings of Jesus? The Catholic Church reminds its members that the original four Gospels were written in the Greek language, not English. The Greek word used in all three occasions is adelphoi (plural of adelphos), which can be translated as “brothers.” But that same Greek word can also mean “cousins” or “relatives,” as in an uncle or a nephew.
An example is shown in the Old Testament. Genesis 11:27 says that Abram and Haran were brothers, sons of Terah. Lot was the son of Haran and thus the nephew of Abram, who was later called Abraham by God. Ironically, Genesis 14:14 and 14:16 in the King James Version of the Bible refer to Lot as the brother of Abraham. The Greek word used in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, the version used at the time of Jesus, is again adelphos. Obviously, a word that denoted a nephew-uncle relationship was unavailable in ancient Hebrew or Greek. So an alternative use of “brother” (adelphos in Greek) is used in those passages, because Lot was actually Abraham’s nephew.
EVEN JESUS GOT SOME DOWNTIME
Jesus wasn’t a workaholic. He got some rest and recreation while visiting His friends Martha, Mary, and Lazarus (John 12:2), and He attended the wedding feast of Cana with His mother (John 2:1–2). Jesus took a nap in a boat while the apostles stayed awake on deck (Luke 8:22–23) and went to an out-of-the-way place to pray (Matthew 14:23). So, too, God the Father rested after creating the whole world (Genesis 2:1–3).
The Catholic Church reasons that if the Bible uses brother to refer to a nephew in one instance, then why not another? Why can’t the adelphoi (brothers) of Jesus be his relatives — cousins or other family members? Why must that word be used in a restrictive way in the Gospel when it’s used broadly in the Old Testament?
The Church uses other reasoning as well. If these brothers were siblings, where were they during the Crucifixion and death of their brother? Mary and a few other women were there, but the only man mentioned in the Gospel at the event was the Apostle John, and he was in no way related to Jesus, by blood or marriage. And before Jesus died on the Cross, He told John, “Behold your mother” (John 19:27). Why entrust His mother to John if other adult children could’ve taken care of her? Only if Mary were alone would Jesus worry about her enough to say what He did to John.
And the Church asks this: If Jesus had blood brothers, or even half-brothers or stepbrothers, why didn’t they assume roles of leadership after His death? Why allow Peter and the other Apostles to run the Church and make decisions if immediate family members were around? Yet if the only living relatives were distant cousins, nieces, nephews, and such, it all makes sense.
The debate will continue for centuries to come. The bottom line is the authoritative decision of the Church. Catholicism doesn’t place the Church above Scripture but sees her as the one and only authentic guardian and interpreter of the written word and the unwritten or spoken word, or Sacred Tradition.
The divine nature of Jesus
Catholics believe that Jesus performed miracles, such as walking on water, expelling demons, rising from the dead Himself and raising the dead (such as Lazarus in Chapter 11 of the Gospel According to John) — and saving all humankind, becoming the Redeemer, Savior, and Messiah. He founded the Catholic Church and instituted, explicitly or implicitly, all seven sacraments. (The seven sacraments are Catholic rituals marking seven stages of spiritual development. See Chapters 8 and 9 for more on the seven sacraments.)
Jesus is the second person of the Holy Trinity — God the Son. And God the Son (Jesus) is as much God as God the Father and God the Holy Spirit.
The divine mind of Jesus was infinite, because He had the mind of God; the human mind of Jesus was, like the human mind, limited. The human mind could only know so much and only what God the Father wanted it to know. When asked about the time and date of the end of the world, Jesus’s apparent ignorance in Mark 13:32 “of that day or that hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father,” is proof that the human intellect of Christ was not privy to all that the divine intellect of Christ knew.
To the Catholic Church, overemphasizing Jesus’s humanity to the exclusion of His divinity is as bad as ignoring or downplaying His humanity to exalt His divinity. To understand the Catholic Church’s stance on Jesus’s divinity even better, check out the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union in the later section “Monophysitism.”
The Savior of our sins; the Redeemer of the World
The study of Christ evokes two key questions. The first is “Who is Jesus Christ?” So far in this chapter, we’ve been addressing this question like this: Jesus is the Son of God, and He is both God and man, divine and human. The second question is “Why did Jesus become man?” This question is answered by the Cross.
Catholics firmly believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world and the Redeemer of the human race. Jesus died for our sins and ransomed us from sin and death. As we explain in Chapter 3, the first (original) sin of Adam and Eve incurred guilt and punishment on all human beings. Their act of disobedience resulted in a serious wound to human nature. Because of original sin, humans lost God’s sanctifying grace; were expelled