If they were inventing stuff, they'd have simply deleted one of the inventions to keep the story straight. It is real history that doesn't make sense.
If you do that sort of redaction to the four gospels you are creating a new one. These are four different books with four different messages. Such a redaction never took place because the four books were well established before they were put together.
Fabricating family trees is an very old and well established tradition and it is not the only place were the gospel writers made something up to fulfill their interpretation of the Old Testament prophesies. If Jesus himself or his family were the source of that tree we only would have had one.
Mary Magdalen doesn't get the 'woman of loose morals' shtick until the Middle Ages, so no.
And we are making this up after the Middle Ages and a lot of work is already done in holy blood holy grail so we can use that.
And there is a huge difference between harlot and spouse.
Jesus' 4 brothers, and unknown number of sisters (minimum 2) are a serious option though.
Grandsons of Jesus' brother Judas were taken to Rome by the Emperor Domitian, and then sent home.
Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History records family members (referred to as Desposyni) as still being around when he was writing in the 4thC AD. Given how breeding works, we're probably all descended from them by now.
Yes but for a royal line you are never interested in all descendants but only in those with a reasonable claim to the inheritance according to the inheritance laws of the culture of the king in question.
