Jesus, the Historical Husband, Father, and Messiah

A personal, idiosyncratic study of Jesus Christ and Christianity.

In his latest book, Marchitelli (In the Land of the Birds, 2012) presents a sprawling, highly ambitious new program of Christian understanding that will likely fascinate many readers. Others, however, may feel it revives the ancient heresy of Nestorianism, which holds that Jesus had two separate, largely unshared natures: one human and one divine. Marchitelli’s Jesus, as his title suggests, wasn’t the distant, semihuman rabbi and prophet enshrined in Catholic orthodoxy but rather a fully committed man of the world, a passionate husband and a loving father. The author doesn’t turn the historical Jesus into a full-blown deity: “Making Jesus God the Creator,” he writes, “is like stripping our Messiah of his individual spiritual achievements and diminishing his sacrifice on the cross.” He maintains that Jesus’ wisdom and sacrifices only warrant respect if he was a human being. His Jesus is spiritually perfect but also very much a man and the father of the disciple John. Marchitelli’s unorthodox ideas extend even further; he asserts, for instance, that the Virgin Mary was not only impregnated by a mortal man, but that he was Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist—and that Adam and Eve must also have had physical parents. The author is well-aware of the controversial nature of his assertions, but he also believes that “spiritually adult people” can give new theories a fair hearing. However, some of the premises are extremely questionable; some readers, for example, won’t like his declaration that only heterosexual married couples can enter into a relationship with heaven, and others will object to the odd assertion that until 50 years ago, most people “either had a low education or were even illiterate.” However, the bulk of this energetic, engaging book compensates for such lapses.

A sometimes-startling and always thought-provoking new look at the fundamental tenets of Christianity.