Although there is no evidence in the New Testament to indicate whether Jesus was married, it would have been almost unthinkable for a thirty-year-old Jewish male in Jesus's time not to have a wife. Celibacy was an extremely rare phenomenon in first-century Palestine. A handful of sects such as the aforementioned Essenes and another called Therapeutae practiced celibacy, but these were quasimonastic orders; they not only refused to marry, they completely divorced themselves from society. Jesus did nothing of the sort. Yet while it may be tempting to assume Jesus was married, one cannot ignore the fact that nowhere in all the words ever written about Jesus of Nazareth - from the canonical gospels to the gnostic gospels to the letters of Paul or even the Jewish and pagan polemics written against him - is there ever any mention of a wife or children. Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Reza Aslan, The Westbourne Press, 2013, p37
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