The Jesus Dynasty, not so much

In a recent review of James Tabor's assertions about Jesus being married and fathering children, scholar Gary Greenberg concludes,

In the wake of The da Vinci code and claims about a Jesus family tomb including a reference to the son of Jesus, some people actually think there is some merit to the idea that Jesus was married and had a child. That there is not a shred of tradition or evidence in any ancient Christian writings for the existence of a wife and child seems to be beside the point....

In a further invest- igation of Jesus' surviving family members, apparently the most Eusebius could come up with, for all practical purposes, was that Jesus had a brother named Jude (attested in the Gospels) and this Jude had some grandchildren, and towards the end of the first century, under the Emperor Domitian, they were questioned as possible descendants of David and, therefore, potential enemies of Rome. Domitian decided they represented no threat and let them go. On their release, they became leaders of the Church. (EH 3.20.)

So, all our earliest traditions can come up with are a couple of nephews and a cousin, with what strikes me as an overwhelming circumstantial case that Jesus had no son.

The full text of his post is online here: What Son of Jesus?. Those who want to build a case for Jesus having a son seem to write a lot and quote one another, which builds the appearance of scholarly consensus emerging, but all without winning over the folks at the Society for Biblical Literature and others who do the hard work of biblical scholarship. It sells books, but makes for poor scholarship. My earlier post related post is online here: Jesus' tomb.