Apparently there’s a woman who claims to be a descendent of the union between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. It seems kind of silly, though since, mathematically speaking, most of us would also be a descendent of the same union (assuming it happened at all).
Jesus lived some 2,000 years ago, right? That’s about 65 generations (assuming a generation is 30 years). So how many ancestors did I have 65 generations ago? You just have think mathematically for a bit. 1 generation ago I have two ancestors (my mum and dad), 2 generations ago I had 4 (their mums and dads, my grandparents), 3 generations ago it was 8. So you keep doubling until you get to 65 generations. How many ancestors is that?
265 ≈ 37,000,000,000,000,000,000
Obviously, there weren’t that many people around at the time (there aren’t that many around now, either), so to get an accurate result you need to take into account people who get counted more than once (because they appear in different places in your family tree). But that’s still a staggering number.
In fact, if I were to build a time machine and travel back 2,000 years (even 1,000 years) the first person I happen to bump into is very likely going to be one of my ancestors. The only time this is not going to be the case would be if that person’s line died out (usually if they didn’t have any children themselves).
So the logical conclusion is that if Jesus had a child, and that child’s line has survived into today, then most of us are descended from Jesus Christ.
It would be theoretically possible for there to only be one or two people alive today who can make the claim, but that would require that, for 2,000 years, every descendent had only 1 child. Seems rather unlikely. I’m sure this Ms McGowan has cousins and second cousins – they would all be descendents of Jesus as well, since they all have the same progenitor (Ms McGowan’s great-grandparents).
I don’t know... it just seems like good timing, the way this story was released just in time for her book to come out.