Amedeo

You are raising an issue that at once involves Paul, the Apostles, and the Gospels. I'll try to disentangle it instead of replying directly to your question.

-- We know that Paul was not acquainted with Jesus of Nazareth, whom -- as it has been pointed out -- never calls "Jesus of Nazareth." But

-- Paul heard ABOUT Jesus from the Apostles. He had heard that Jesus had died an was resurrected, alleged facts on which he built his theory of salvation (the Christic atonment of sin, etc. etc.). He obviously knew very little about Jesus [as we can say from the standpoint of the Gospels] and missed entirely the mission of Jesus the Messiah [which is clear from the Gospels: to bring the stray sheep into the fold, and to prepare Israel for the imminent end of the world and the kingdom of God]; he invented his own version of the messiahship. // From what is said of Paul in the Acts, he understood Jesus to be a descendant of King David (as in the Matthew genealogy) and he proved that Jesus' body was not corrupted after death by appealing to certain Scriptural verses that the "messiah-king" would be so. As Jesus was supposed to be born in the town of David, it would be misleading to call him Jesus of Nazareth or the Galilean. Hence, Paul may have intentionally omitted ever calling him the Nazarene.

-- A strong point is made in the contention that if Paul knew of the celibacy of Jesus, he surely would have mentioned it, since, in his preachings, he could only appeal to his own life as a model. But your question is perfectly valid, Why, was there any theological reason why, the Gospels [the biographies of Jesus] should omit mentioning that Jesus was married?

It will not do to say that the Gospel deal exclusively with the "spiritual" life of Jesus (his teachings, his being the son of Mary and God, his miracles, and his miraculous resurrection); he is also said to be the son of Joseph, in the bloodline of David; a man who was prosecuted and killed as a human king; and a man who had brothers. But what is said of the human Jesus is either extremely little or is contradicted by other accounts. King Jesus, son of Joseph, who is called Nazarene on the cross, was fathered by God in some Gospel anecdotes, and there is no information as to whether his brothers were true brothers or sons of Joseph. No mention is made in the Gospels as to whether Jesus was married and had children. The Son of Jesus (Elymas Bar-Jesus) whom Paul and Barnabas met at Paphos (in Cyprus) was considered a sorcerer or false miracle-worker without any stated connection with Jesus of Nazareth. (If Jesus died around the year 33 and if Paul was in Paphos around 40-50, Bar-Jesus could have been 20-30 years old. If Mary Magdalene was pregnant when Jesus died, she could have been shipped out to a distant Jewish community in the west to take the "royal blood" there -- the sang real or san-greal. But of course, there is no evidence for these possibilities.)

If the brothers of Jesus are mentioned, and if Mary Magdalene is often mentioned in the Gospels, why indeed should the Gospels not mention, incidentally on some occasion, that Jesus was married to the Magdalene or anybody else? (We could expects terms like "Mary, his mother," "Mary, his wife," and the other Marys so-and-so.) There is actually an argument that can be made from the Gospels that Jesus never married: There are clear statements in the Gospels that Jesus-the-Messiah predicted the end of the world within one generation, that many would witness what will come to pass. (His message of salvation was clear and urgent.) In the light of this Jesus, two things are extremely unlikely: that Jesus would be interested in continuing the Davidic dynasty, since his child would be the last king; and that Jesus founded a new People ( a new church) of God or of himself, since this new People would come to an end within one generation. (So, when the Gospels include anecdotes which have Jesus found a new church, or Jesus establishing a new Covenant in his last supper, we have a lot to learn as to who originated those anecdotes.) However, from from we learn about the Apostles in the Gospels and in the Acts, the apocalyptic Jesus was never clearly understood or taken seriously. The end of the world, said Peter, is something of which no man knows the hour or the day; it is something in the remote future, not the imminent end which the Gospel-Jesus preached. So, Jesus became an icon behind the apostolic messianc mission to the Gentiles and a Jesus-wife would have been a desecration of the male divinity. (The Apostles did not pay heed to Jesus. So, Peter will repeat the old story: woman is to man, as man is to God. They put women back to their place.)

So, the probability argument that I presented as to why Jesus would not get married does not hold for what the Apostles (and Paul) believed. WHAT EXACTLY DID THE APOSTLES (companions of Jesus) KNOW OF JESUS?

We tacitly assume that the Apostles and some of the followers of Jesus personally KNEW the Jesus that we read in the Gospels. We have been fooling ourselves! The Gospels are nor reports made by the Apostles or any eye and ear witness. The Gospels are compilations of stories or anecdotes pertaining to the life of a person called Jesus. Most of the anecdotes look like reports/accounts from people who saw and heard Jesus. Some of them are such that they cannot be reports of eye/ear witnnesses (like the story concerning Jesus and the devil, who took him to pinnacles and mountain tops, etc.). So, these stories were either preached by jesus or they were invented by anybody about Jesus.

Most of the anecdotes about Jesus are practically identical in the 3 synoptic Gospels. John presents anecdotes he himself selected and, as he says, there are many more stories that he does not present. We can generally say that the 4 evangelists made their own selection for a large body of anecdotes about Jesus. This large body, which has not been written down, is what some classical scholars called the Proto-Gospel. (Actually, it is quite possible that somebody collected oral stories and wrote them down. So, a Hebrew/Aramaic proto-Gospel may have existed in writtem form. This would have been a source-book for all the Greek evangelists who gave us the Gospels.)

If Jesus was married, now the question becomes, why did the evangelists omit from their particular compilation of anecdotes any anecdote that referred to Jesus' married life? And why do the other canonical works (the epistles, the Acts) omit any such a reference?

Of course, we know that many Gospels or biographies of Jesus were written in ancient times [none by eye/ear witnesses]. They have been rejected by the Church as unathentic, apocryphal, precisely because they contained anecdotes about Jesus that were not consistent with the canonical Gospels. But to us, the distinction between canocical and apocryphal scriptures is irrelevant, since all of them are expressions of earsay, and since the canonical gospels themselves contain episodes with are inconsistent with one another. All the biographies of Jesus cannot be about one and the same man.

Granting all the inconsistencies, and granting that we do not know which, if any, anecdote is a true [albeit partial] account of a real man -- hence speaking of a literary character called Jesus -- is it true that none of the scriptures mention Jesus being married?

If none of the scriptures mentions a married Jesus, one could say, As they refer to a real person, then obviously this real person never married. If some of the scriptures mention or allude to a married Jesus, then either the Proto-Gospel suppressed the fact, or somebody invented the marriage anecdote.

The bottom line is that there cannot be any evidence that Jesus ever married, just as there cannot be any evidence that God impregnated Mary, or that he was born before Herod the Great died, or that the entombed Jesus was dead, or that that he was dead but not subject to decay.

There is no way of formulating an accurate comprehensive biography of Jesus from all the that have been written of him and about him. (The literary Jesus is in the same boat as the literary King Arthur.)