The Nazareth Family Reunion

posted 11/30/2006
If you haven’t read author Dan Brown’s "The Da Vinci Code" (or seen the movie) you must have been living in another star system for the last several years. Theologians, scholars, authors, courts, historians and conspiracy theorists have exhausted themselves in debate over the book’s major premise – to wit, Jesus of Nazareth fathered a child and, thus, created a holy lineage that has survived to this day.

Presumably, this has been a secret closely guarded by the Church (you know, THE Church), the Templars, the Masons, Crusaders, mystery cults and museum curators for a couple of millennia. There were so many fraternities, zealots and cryptographers wandering through “The Da Vinci Code” involved in this ultimate cover up, that I lost track.

The tenets of the book require us to accept that approximately one hundred and eleven generations of an unbroken line of ancestry terminate with one French granddaughter. Some critics found the whole idea quite disturbing, and maybe even sacrilegious. Apparently, Jesus’ divinity set Him above such earthly pursuits as courting a woman and having offspring.

Myself, I rather like the idea. We are told that Christ’s life was relatively brief and that His death was painful. I like to think that He may have found some comfort in a loving wife and a baby, however, that’s just romanticism on my part. The book is a rousing work of fiction, but its true improbability is based in biology, rather than the obscurity of Scripture or historical records.

When I started thinking about this a few months ago, I noted-to-myself that although with God all things may be possible, not all things are likely. Biologically speaking, each generation would have to produce a single child who would overcome risky childbirth, infant mortality, disease, hereditary problems, genetic predisposition, accidents, starvation, violence and infertility long enough to mature and find a fertile mate. They would in turn have to produce a single child who could survive to do the same, and so on. Short of Divine Intervention, the odds for this sort of reproductive success are mighty slender.

The only hope for Jesus to continue his direct bloodline was to have lots of children who grew up and established secure families with lots and lots of children. Exponential increase would take care of the rest (more on that in a few paragraphs…hold on…it’s amazing). In the normal order, one baby every eighteen years does not a dynasty make.

In my original article, I planned to ignore biological reality and suggest that IF Jesus has descendants in the current era, I’m pretty sure that I am one of them. In recognition of my Holy Bloodline, I’m taking on the last name of ‘Nazareth’. (I thought of hyphenating Gabriel-Nazareth…how cool is that?) I’ve got a lot of royalties coming to me, (from Dan Brown, alone) and a number of cousins whom I’ve never met. My shtick continued with my taking Aramaic lessons at the community college and starting a website to keep track of who’s attending the Nazareth Family Reunion, and what covered dish they were planning to bring.

Then I read a series of articles from Associated Press journalist Matt Crenson, and realized that, well...I probably AM related to Jesus. Me, you, and a lot of other people. The math is a bit startling at first, but pull out your calculator and follow along with me for only 30 generations.

Each of us has two parents, four grandparents and eight great grandparents. This doubles with each generation back so that by the 13nth century, you are a direct descendant of over one billion grandparents. If you go back even further, only 40 generations, that number is at a trillion. Cast back two thousand years into Jesus’ time…well, it boggles.

You may protest that there weren’t a trillion people back in the day, and you would be right. Around the 8th century, there were maybe only 200 million people in the entire world, and only some of them produced offspring who reached maturity. The way this works is that our family trees cris-cross so that we share common ancestors who overlap again and again and again.

A good modern illustration of this is royal families in general and the British Royal Family in particular. (The genealogies among royals are very well documented compared to the anonymity the rest of us enjoy.) Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Phillip, are both great-great-great grandchildren of Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert. The Queen is related through her paternal line and Phillip through his maternal line, making them husband and wife as well as cousins to one another and to their own children. Victoria and Albert were also first cousins. Therefore, the Queen and Phillip not only share branches of the same family tree, their direct ancestors are one and the same.

Crenson goes on to note that although most of us have relatives who history does not record, it is almost one hundred percent certain that if you are of European descent, you are related to royalty (legitimate or otherwise). My life-long claims that I am a Bohemian Princess have turned out to be surprisingly accurate…can a castle and a few serfs be far behind?

Among early small populations or ethnic groups everyone was closely related through ties of property and kinship. (Grow up in a small town anywhere and you know this is true.) But when migration, exploration, colonization, trade, travel or war occurred, there was an enormous mingling of bloodlines resulting in all sorts of unpredictable co-mingling. In this way, the family tree widens out so that Mayans and Mongolians end up sharing common grandparents.

For example, the Crusaders spent a lot of years trying to recapture Jerusalem, and there must have been a massive tangling of ancestry on that adventure alone with Europeans linking back up with the Arabic world and the children of Abraham. There is a community in modern China whose DNA matches with present-day Austrians. How that DNA traveled, no one has a clue. (You must excuse me for my Euro centrism…if your roots lay elsewhere, the principle holds true for your ancestors as well,) In fact, there is some serious speculation that the actress, Brooke Shields, is a direct descendant of Mohammed. Even if this turns out to be false, it is certainly true that there are living relatives of Mohammed (he had recognized offspring) and they include modern Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hollywood movie stars (probably) and a sampling of everyone else.

What I’ve come to understand is that Dan Brown’s story has an element of truth. Jesus may not have direct descendants, but it is well within the realm of possibility that He has kin wandering around on the planet today. Paternity aside, Mary was the daughter of a tribe still in existence in modern times and we have reason to believe that she had other children. And, we are all connected by a few common ancestors.

However we try to trim the limbs, our mutual family tree is made of twining branches and shared relations that have been combining and recombining since antiquity. Perhaps the Great Secret is that we are all closely related. All of us. Everywhere.

May your holidays find you in the arms of your extended family.

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Ingrid divides her life between the San Juan Islands (where her heart lives) and Austin, Texas (where her paycheck is generated). While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra ..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane."

Ingrid is an old-school Libra and believes that the Revolution should be a catered event.

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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