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Now that I’m trying to avoid creating AI depictions of deity I feel like a Muslim.<\/em><\/p>\n The \u201cQuest for the Historical Jesus\u201d is a scholarly endeavor to try to suss out details about Jesus\u2019 life from a naturalistic worldview without any religious priors. Given the extreme scarcity of hard data you have to think deep and hard about what evidence to accept if you\u2019re going to be exclusively relying on standard historical methods, and even then your confidence intervals are going to be huge. It\u2019s kind of interesting and they make some good points, but it all kind of feels like trying to reconstruct a working Saturn V in a backyard based on watching <\/span>Apollo 13<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Still, it can be kind of fun and if nothing else it motivates a very close reading of the New Testament text even if it sometimes feels like Christ is specifically excluding the Jesus Seminar types when he refers to \u201cthey who have ears to hear.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n From a Latter-day Saint perspective, much of what they say clearly crosses some fairly bright red lines for all but the most heterodox among us. For example, the idea that Jesus thought that the End of Days was going to come in the next couple of years, or the idea that His crucifixion was a surprise to Him and that the die-for-their-sins angle was a post-hoc move to make sense of his death. (Although one silver lining of all that is that we can point out that if liberal Protestant scholars that believe that are Christians then by any objective standard so are we).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, I can think of two cases where the \u201cHistorical Jesus\u201d approach actually supports or sheds light on the Latter-day Saint perspective. One is more of an established if edgy take, and the last one is a little more eccentric, but for which there\u2019s a stronger case to be made than some think.<\/span><\/p>\n The first is the idea that the Savior was married. Dan Brown thrillers aside, there\u2019s actually a decent argument to be made that this was the case.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While a lot of Latter-day Saints are a little too quick to assume some evil redactor was pulling doctrine out of the scriptures they didn\u2019t like, there actually is a case for something along those lines happening here. Princeton New Testament scholar James Charlesworth\u2019s <\/span>The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide <\/span><\/i>(p. 83) states that \u201cMany Christians would stress that Jesus could not have been married because he was divine. New Testament theologians would point out that perhaps Jesus\u2019 marriage might have been suppressed by the claim that he was the bridegroom of the community he was forming with God\u2019s help. The historian and sociologist might stress that since almost all Jews were married, and Jesus was a devout Jew, he was most likely married (see Phipps).\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Our favorite speculative theologian Orson Hyde\u2019s case that the wedding at Cana was Christ\u2019s wedding is actually a very mainstream hypothesis among historical Jesus types. The same Charlesworth chapter goes on for several paragraphs suggesting that it was plausible: Jesus\u2019 mother had authority, his mother had to tell him that the wine levels were low instead of him seeing it for himself, the bridegroom is not identified, his brothers are not mentioned even though they are there. \u201cBefore its editing by the Evangelist, the story of the marriage at Cana may have preserved a tradition that Jesus was being married.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n