The Book of Longings(130)

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? ? ?

“WHEN I AM DUST, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.” I chant the last line of the prayer in my bowl, and together, Diodora, Tabitha, and I lower the jars onto their sides and place the codices inside, fifteen in each one.

Reaching into my pouch, I remove the mummy portrait I commissioned all those years ago as a gift for Jesus, meant to preserve my memory. The three of us stare at it a moment—my face painted on a piece of limewood board. I carried it all the way to Galilee to give him, but I was too late. I will always regret that lateness.

I fold the last remnant of Jesus’s cloak around the portrait and slip it into the jar, thinking with wonder how his memory is being preserved three decades after his death. The past few years, Lavi has brought bits of news to me from Alexandria about Jesus’s followers, who didn’t disappear when Jesus died, but grew in number. Lavi says small groups of them have even sprung up here in Egypt, meeting in homes, telling stories about Jesus, and imparting his parables and sayings. How I would like to hear the stories they tell.

“They speak of Jesus as having had no wife,” Lavi told me. That was a conundrum I puzzled over for months. Was it because I was absent when he traveled about Galilee during his ministry? Was it because women were so often invisible? Did they believe making him celibate rendered him more spiritual? I found no answers, only the sting of being erased.

We seal the lids with beeswax, and with a grand effort, lower the jars into the earth. On our knees, we rake the pebbly soil into the holes with our hands, filling them. The codices are buried, Aunt. I’ve kept my promise.

We stand, brushing away the dust, catching our breath. And it comes to me that the echoes of my own life will likely die away in that way thunder does. But this life, what a shining thing—it is enough.

The sun slips from the sky and the dark gold light rises up. I gaze into the far distance and sing, “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth. I am a voice.”





Author’s Note


It was an October morning in 2014 when the idea struck me to write a novel about the fictional wife of Jesus. Fifteen years earlier, I’d thought of writing such a novel, but it hadn’t seemed the right time, and honestly, I couldn’t muster quite enough audacity then to take it on. But that day in October, a decade and a half later, the idea resurfaced with a great deal of insistence. I made a weak effort to talk myself out of it. Centuries of tradition insisted Jesus was unmarried, and that position had long been codified into Christian belief and embedded in the collective mind. Why tamper with that? But it was really too late to dissuade myself. My imagination had been captured. I’d already begun to picture her. Within minutes she had a name—Ana.

I have a habit of propping signs on my desk. This one remained there throughout the four and a half years I researched and wrote the novel:


Everything is the proper stuff of fiction.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF



The aim of the novelist is not only to hold up a mirror to the world, but to imagine what’s possible. The Book of Longings reimagines the story that Jesus was a single, celibate bachelor and imagines the possibility that at some point he had a wife. Of course, Christian New Testament Scripture does not say he was married, but neither does it say he was single. The Bible is silent on the matter. “If Jesus had a wife, it would be recorded in the Bible,” someone explained to me. But would it? The invisibility and silencing of women were real things. Compared to men in Jewish and Christian Scriptures, women rarely have speaking parts, and they are not mentioned nearly as often. If they are referenced, they’re often unnamed.

It could also be argued that in the first-century Jewish world of Galilee, marriage was so utterly normative, it more or less went without saying. Marriage was a man’s civic, family, and sacred duty. Typically undertaken at twenty (though sometimes up to age thirty), marriage was how he became an adult male and established himself within his community. His family expected him to marry and would have been shocked, perhaps even shamed, if he didn’t. His religion dictated that he “not abstain from having a wife.” Of course, it’s possible Jesus defied these imperatives. There is evidence that ascetic ideals were beginning to encroach into first-century Judaism. And, too, he could be something of a nonconformist at times. But I saw more reason to think that at the age of twenty, a decade before his ministry began, Jesus did not reject the religious and cultural ethic of his time and place.

Claims that Jesus was not married first began in the second century. They arose as Christianity absorbed ideas of asceticism and Greek dualism, which devalued the body and the physicality of the world in favor of the spirit. Closely identified with the body, women were also devalued, silenced, and marginalized, losing roles of leadership they’d possessed within first-century Christianity. Celibacy became a path to holiness. Virginity became one of Christianity’s higher virtues. Certain that the end-time would come soon, believers in the second century hotly debated if Christians should marry. Considering the accretion of such views into the religion, it struck me as not particularly acceptable for Jesus to have been married.

Perceptions like these allowed me to move outside of traditional ecclesiastical boxes and begin to imagine the character of a married Jesus.

Of course, I don’t know whether Jesus was married or not. There are reasons, just as compelling, to support the belief he remained single. Unless some genuine ancient manuscript is discovered buried in a jar somewhere and it reveals that Jesus had a wife, we simply cannot know. Even then the matter would likely be irresolvable.