Descended From Jesus? Do The Math

[rodeodance]

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/op_ed/hc-jesus0521.artmay21,0,321047.story?coll=hc-headlines-oped


Descended From Jesus? Do The Math



Steve Olson

May 21 2006

Does Jesus have a secret line of descendants who are living today? It's an oddly appealing idea. We tend to think of ancestry in terms of bloodlines, in which some individuals are descended from famous ancestors and others are not. And the idea echoes deeper religious themes of individuals and groups favored by God.

But this is one idea in "The Da Vinci Code" that just won't wash. Jesus couldn't have just a few descendants living today. If anyone alive today is descended from Jesus, then so are most of the people on the planet.

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........


Steve Olson is the author of "Mapping Human History: Genes, Race and Our Common Origins." He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

Copyright 2006, Hartford Courant

[existentialist]

1. This does nothing to prove that Jesus didn't leave descendants

but only that if he did, then by now this would most likely include most of us.


Still, I very much liked the concluding line by a reviewer who was reviewing both "The Da Vinci Code" and "The Gospel of Judas":


"Verily, there is one born every minute."

[JustFiveMoreMinutes]

2. I thought that too... but....

... in the book/movie, wasn't there a statement that after Constantine, there was a directed action to KILL all living descendants? Altho even after the 300 years until Constantine, the records and numbers would have been too obscure to find them all. So it would be 'known' descendants instead of all descendants.

Anyway, sheesh, why ruin a good conspiracy theory with arbitrary logic and 'facts'! <smile>

[mainegreen]

3. Crap logic assuming that your ancestors wandered around like

some sort of sex crazed adventurers, as opposed to the more likely reality that the furthest they ever traveled was the neighboring valley and back again.