Editor’s Ink -- By: William David Spencer

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 21:1 (Winter 2007)
Article: Editor’s Ink
Author: William David Spencer


Editor’s Ink

William David Spencer

Reporting a conversation he had with Martin Luther between April 7 and May 1, 1532, John Schlaginhaufen quoted the great reformer as contending:

Christ was an adulterer for the first time with the woman at the well, for it was said, “Nobody knows what he’s doing with her” (John 4:27). Again with Magdalene, and still again with the adulterous woman in John 8, whom he let off so easily.1

Editor and translator Theodore G. Tappert has sought to explain this startling statement by paralleling it with remarks Luther made in a sermon from 1536 when he observed, “Christ was reproached by the world as a glutton, a winebibber, and even an adulterer.”2 That interpretation makes sense, since it uses Luther’s own words to interpret these few thoughts delivered without a context. But Professor Tappert admits that others, like Arnold Lunn in The Revolt Against Reason,3 take the statement at face value and attack Luther as contending Jesus was sexually promiscuous. What sort of evidence could possibly lead a reader to suppose Luther meant such an outrageous conclusion? The final words that Luther added: “So the good Christ had to become an adulterer before he died.”4 Luther’s reasoning might involve an extreme interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:21, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (TNIV) to coincide with his dependence on grace. If Luther is actually positing Jesus had to do all the sins of humanity in order to bear them on the cross, then Galilee must have been a dangerous place to live during the years Jesus ran around loose, since he would have been a serial killer as well!

Mormon president Orson Hyde, preaching on Isaiah 53:10, “He shall see his offspring,” made an honest man of Jesus, speculating the marriage at Cana was actually our Lord’s. In 1876, one of the wives of Brigham Young explained that Young agreed and identified Jesus’ harem as including Mary, Martha, and Mary Magdalene.

In a 1970 book, Was Jesus Married?, Davis and Elkins College Professor William Phipps gathered up these ideas and concluded, “Jesus most probably was married to a Galilean woman in the second decade of life.”5

As so often happens, the idea morphed over to fiction writing and, in a 1928 short...

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