Whatever happened to the descendants from Mary and Joseph of biblical fame?

Wow, more humans than are estimated to have ever existed. That’s pretty impressive.

There are some beautiful works of iconographic art in medieval churches that represent the descent of Jesse’s line to Jesus. They are often depicted as an actual tree and are call Trees of Jesse. I did a paper on them in art history.

not an answe to your question but fun facts.

Seems like there’s a big risk of hereditary gene mixing

Where did you get “we are told that Mary and Joseph had several other kids; at least four other sons, named James, Joseph, Simon and Judas and a couple of daughters” ? I have never heard taht before.

I have only heard speculation of James being a possible brother, no other relatives.

By the way, The DaVinci Code is speculation about descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

According to the Gospels (Mark 6:3 and the Matthew 13:55–56) Jesus had several brothers, named in these references, and several unnamed sisters. The “official” stance of the church is that the reference to “brothers” was actually to “cousins”, and that Jesus had no brothers or sister, and was chaste throughout his life, therefore there are no other descendants of Joseph and Mary.

In recent decades, A “Holy Bloodline” theory has become popular, partially through “The DaVinci Code) (which posits that Jesus had a daughter with Mary Magdalene, to whom he was married. According to some versions of this theory, the daughter was brought to the south of present-day France, where her descendants came to be known as the Merovingian Dynasty. According to some “scholars” of this theory, the bloodline can be traced through the Merovingians, through the House of St. Clair (Sinclair), through Princess Diana, and to her son Prince William. Since Jesus was of the House of David, it is suggested in this theory that William’s accession to the throne will restore the biblical House of David.

Any scholarship based on The Da Vinci Code is highly suspect in my book. What a bunch of hooey that is!

@janbb notice the quotation marks around the word “scholars” in my post above.

Also, notice that I didn’t say anything about “Ancient Astronaut Theorists”!

People with blue eyes are descendants of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

@kritiper Do you have a source for that theory?

The way I’ve always understood it, is that Mary’s sister, Elizabeth, and/or her descendants (members of the House of David) followed that portion of the diaspora west to the important merchant port city that we today call Marseilles. By 300 c.e., there was a significant and successful Jewish community there. As I’ve never studied this seriously, I really can’t cite the references for the above statement, but if I were to pursue this line, I’d consult academia and also see what Jewish historians have to say about it.

I’ve always assumed somebody knew because we’re talking about a group of people who survived 3,000 years of Egyptian slavery and came out the other end with their history, culture and religion relatively intact. I imagine that keeping their history intact in the 2,000 years since Christ wouldn’t be much of a problem for a people who can accomplish such a feat.

Back in the ‘70s there began to appear books that put forth the theory that Magdalene and Christ were married and had descendants. The Jesus Scroll was the one most often found on the University student’s bookshelf, as I remember (right next to Be Here Now and The Whole Earth Catalogue). This theory was supplemented and elaborated upon in later books, both fiction and historical hypothesis/theory, that used as reference a mixture of authentic historical documents, legends such as the Priory of Sion, the psuedo-historical Dossiers Secrets (Fr) and even such despicable pieces of trash as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which was said to be written by Jewish historian Josephus Flavius in the first century c.e,, but has since been revealed to be an invention of the Tzarist secret police, the Okhrana, as a spectacular piece of fin de siècle anti-Semitic propaganda).

These theories and books were manna for a generation who felt a strong distrust for all authority whom they had discovered had lied about everything from the Vietnam War; the Kennedy, King, and Kennedy (again) assassinations; the deleterious effects of Marijuana; the My Lai Massacre, the initial investigations into the Kent State and Jackson State student shootings, American foreign policy; CIA operations outside and inside the U.S.; Vatican policy; Christian history, Watergate, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum. A new genre was born: Conspiracy Theory.

My all-time favorite was Holy Blood, Holy Grail, from the early eighties, the first one to make a believable connection between the descendants of the House of David through the children resulting from the Christ-Magdalene union, Christ’s aunt, Elizabeth, and the Merovingian Dynasty—as suggested above by @Yetanotheruser. The combination of good source documentation, pseudohistory and questionably interpreted but entertaining empirical evidence was enthralling and so confusing that many people were quite convinced of the book’s veracity. It stimulated in me a plethora of ideas for novels and short stories of which I never wrote because at the time I was too busy living life to write about it. I, evidently, wasn’t the only person thus stimulated. Dan Brown has attributed this book as the one that started his journey into the lore, symbolism and theory for which his novels about the Church are based. He stole my ideas, dammit.

I wonder what the Jewish historians have to say about this.

Except there’s no evidence at all that the Jews ever were slaves in Egypt.

@Darth_Algar

Although this has very little to do with my scribling above, there is extra-biblical evidence of the Jewish enslavement in Egypt. (Which is a link to a good introduction to the subject with many references to extra-biblical docs, and This you might find enlightening.

What is absent is extra-biblical evidence of the Exodus from Egypt, including the ten plagues, which are described as so widespread, horrific, economically debilitating and lasting for so long that historians question why papyri describing such significant events have yet to be found. This puts the reason for Passover, the existence of Moses and thus the story of the Ten Commandments in question and therefore is culturally important to both Jews and Christians.

@Yetanotheruser There was a program on PBS covering the blue eyes thing.

@Espiritus_Corvus

You’ll pardon me if I don’t take “jewishbible.org” as the most objective source on the subject. Now where is the real evidence? A population of hundreds of thousands of people living in a country for thousands of years would have left some archaeological trace of themselves behind.

@Darth_Algar, another way to look at that number is to consider that that is the number of 110x great-grandparents that you or I would have in 112 generations OR that number, 2,596,148,429,267,410,000,000,000,000,000,000, is the number of successful copulations that had to occur for you to stand here today.

Revising the survival rate of offspring from two to 1.1 persons per generation. reaching breeding age and successfully producing further offspring brings the number of descendant down to 43,249; still a respectable number. At 1.2 the number jumps to 738,413,379.

@Darth_Algar

After devoting about five unsuccessful hours to this, I am ready to concede that I can find no firm, contemporaneous, extra-biblical evidence of the Egyptian enslavement of the Jews as described in the books of the Torah and the Old Testament. At the moment.

I must say I am surprised that I could live so long and not know this. It shows once again the effectiveness of cultural indoctrination. I really am shocked at this. I thank you.