In the Old Testament, marriage is quite clearly defined as a relationship between a man and a woman, a man and several women, a man and his fertile slave girl, and a man and his rape victim. But assuming that Kern is referring to Jesus and the New Testament, the evidence for holy matrimony is a little thin on the ground.
While Jesus is adamantly opposed to divorce, he never once speaks in favor of marriage. He never celebrates a wedding (from a historian’s perspective, facilitating drunkenness at the Wedding at Cana is less evidence of Jesus’s support of marriage than of his desire to keep the party going) and describes heaven as a place where marriage no longer exists. It’s called heaven for a reason. In Mark 10:29-30, and with no mention of child support, Jesus promises the disciples that anyone who leaves “brother or sister or father or mother or children” for his sake would be rewarded in the age to come. And he’s not just a home wrecker in theory; tradition maintains that some of Jesus’s disciples were married, but their wives are not mentioned in the Gospels. Apparently the apostles left their families to go on a three-year fishing trip.
The Apostle Paul is equally ambivalent about the desirability of marriage. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul is clear that he would prefer that followers remain unmarried and celibate like him. If you really can’t handle celibacy and find yourself on fire with lust, then you should marry.
