A gullible subset of the world's population has embraced Dan Brown's fictional work, The DaVinci Code, and the underlying conspiracy theory most notably expounded in the pseudo-historical work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The idea is that there are secret descendants of jesus living among us, and that the Catholic Church has been hiding this from the followers of Christ for centuries. It is all a load of bullcrap, of course, but thre exist enough fools to believe such tripe.

Well, here is another flaw with the hypothesis -- there would not be some small group of descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene hidden away. Instead, most of us would have the Son of God popping up on our family tree. Not because we are particularly special, but because of the geometric progression that goes along with geneaology.

This absurd-sounding statement is an inevitable consequence of the workings of ancestry. People may have just a few descendants in the two or three generations after they lived, but, after that, the number of descendants explodes. For a population to remain the same size, every adult has to have an average of two children who grow to adulthood and have children. So the number of descendants for the average person grows exponentially — two children, four grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and so on. In just 10 generations — roughly 250 years — an average person can have more than 1,000 descendants.

Of course, no one is average. Some people have lots of children; some have none. But over time the fecund and the barren balance each other out. Also, a person's descendants eventually start having children with each other. That slows the rate of growth of a person's descendants, but usually not much, at least in the short term.

It's virtually impossible to "manage" a genealogical lineage so that a person has a limited number of descendants. The lineage would quickly go extinct in the occasional generation in which all of a person's descendants do not have children (or their children die). And a managed lineage inevitably would "leak" — someone would begin having children at a normal pace, and the usual process of growth would commence.

In real genealogies, a person's descendants either peter out within a few generations or begin to grow exponentially. That's why people who came to America on the Mayflower now have thousands of descendants. People who lived just a few centuries earlier have many millions of descendants.

So what about the possibility that Jesus and mary Magdalene had kids, as per Dan Brown?

The same observations would apply to Jesus, although we'll never know if he really had children.

But let's assume that he did, and that he also had a lower than average number of descendants — say 500 in the year AD 250. Where would they have lived?

Those centuries were a time of great ferment in the Roman Empire. Although most of Jesus' descendants probably would have lived in the Middle East, at least a few would have moved as far away as modern-day Italy and central Asia (whether as soldiers, traders or slaves).

Many of these individuals also would have had 500 to 1,000 descendants 250 years later. And these tens of thousands of descendants of Jesus likely would have been scattered along trade routes from western Europe to southern Africa to eastern Asia. After another 250 years, Jesus would have had millions of descendants. Repeat that cycle five more times and the whole world begins to fill up with descendants of Jesus.

Essentially, whether you have descendants is an all-or-nothing proposition in the long run, as two co-authors and I showed in an article in the scientific journal Nature a couple of years ago. If a person has four or five grandchildren, that person will almost certainly be an ancestor of the entire world population two or three millenniums from now. And if a person lived longer than two or three millenniums ago, that person is either an ancestor of everyone living today or of no one living today.

The idea that we all could be descended from Jesus takes some getting used to. After all, if we're all descended from Jesus, and Jesus is the son of God, that's a pretty illustrious bloodline.

But don't let it go to your head. You're also descended from Pontius Pilate and Judas, as long as they produced the requisite four or five grandchildren.

Every time we elect a new president, we learn that he is the descendant of some British monarch's bastard child. The genes of Ghengis Khan are said to have been passed on to much of today's population through his multitude of offspring (to paraphrase Mel Brooks, "It's good to be the khan."). So if you aren't descended from Christ, and I'm not descended from Christ, nobody is descended from Christ.

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Posted by: Greg at 05:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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