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Originally Posted by elchivito
At what point did Jesus' celibacy become central to faith? For most lay christians today is it just sort of an inconsequential fact, and not that important?
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I'd say St Paul's general attitude towards sex and marriage started the move towards repressive views of sexuality in the early Church. Not sure exactly when Christians began to explicitly believe that Jesus was celibate and turn it into an article of faith. The importance of the fragment is not that it proves that Jesus actually had a wife. The person who found it and wrote about it does not think it actually indicates anything about whether Jesus was actually married or not. If it's authentic, it's just a fragment which shows that the ascetic majority in early Christianity wasn't the only one. I think it's important because certainly most modern Christians have no sympathy whatsoever with the view that Christians need to be celibate in order to be a Christian.