The Bloodline of Christ

A Jesus bloodline is a hypothetical sequence of lineal descendants of the historical Jesus and Mary Magdalene, or some other woman, usually portrayed as his wife or a hierodule. Differing and contradictory versions of a Jesus bloodline hypothesis have been proposed in numerous books by authors such as Louis Martin (1886), Donovan Joyce (1973), Andreas Faber-Kaiser (1977), Barbara Thiering (1992), Margaret Starbird (1993), and various websites. Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code used the premise for its plot line. The 2007 documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus proposed that evidence existed to show that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that their son was named Judah, based upon inscriptions found on ossuaries discovered in Jerusalem in 1980. Biblical scholar and author James Tabor has recently affirmed his belief in a married Jesus, while Karen King announced the discovery of text in a Coptic papyrus fragment, alleged to be a translation of a lost 2nd century Gospel, in which Jesus is made to refer to "my wife".

According to the vast majority of professional historians and scholars from related fields, there is no historical, biblical, apocryphal, archaeological, genealogical, or genetic evidence which supports this hypothesis. Hypothetical Jesus bloodlines should not be confused with the biblical genealogy of Jesus or the historical relatives of Jesus and their descendants, who are known as the Desposyni.