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