FOR MORE THAN FIFTEEN CENTURIES, Christian authorities had equated sex—and, in turn, women—with sin. For centuries, preachers and theologians taught believers to feel shame and revulsion at the most human of yearnings. If evidence existed that Jesus married and chose his wife as a disciple—or even just that some early Christians believed he did—it would bring unprecedented scrutiny to how and why this vilification of sex prevailed. The celibacy of clergy and the exclusion of women from the priesthood were predicated, in no small part, on the presumption of Jesus’s bachelorhood and on his
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