Mary Magdalene

The February 13, 2006 issue of the New Yorker has an article about Mary Magdalene: The Saintly Sinner, by Joan Acocella.

I imagine we will see more and more of this type of article as the hype builds for the film version of The DaVinci Code. I plan to take off early the afternoon of the opening and see the earliest showing in Georgetown. I won't try to treat all the themes of TDC in this post; I just want to make a couple of comments about Acocella's article.

Acocella does a good job of summarizing recent Mary Magdalene (MM) scholarship and tying it somewhat to the broader field of gnostic studies. She also outlines briefly the connection of all this to the highly questionable Priory of Sion and the centuries' long mystery known as the quest for the Holy Grail, and what all this has to do with the movie some of us are dying to see.

I've read a good bit of this literature, and the arguments break down for me along a couple of lines. First of all, the writers all seem really sure that the Church would collapse if it could be proven that Jesus was married to MM, or that they were lovers. By "the Church" they mean the instiution of the Catholic Church. I can't speak for the Catholic Church. As an evangelical/pentecostal protestant, however, I can tell you that my faith would not be harmed if Jesus had been married. Marriage is a good, God-invented thing; sex is a very-good, God-invented thing if enjoyed inside marriage. The only real problem I have with the idea of Jesus being married is that it doesn't seem like it would be fair to the woman.

There is a scene in The American President where Michael Douglas is talking to Annette Bening about why he thinks she's nervous about sleeping with him for the first time. He tells her that almost all of the other presidents were already married when they became president, so their wives were already used to them. In their case, she was dating the President of the United States, so it made it intimidating for her to sleep with him. It turns out that Annette Bening's character was rather NOT intimidated by this circumstance, but that is a different essay. What I'm saying here is that it doesn't seem fair to any woman for her husband to be the Creator of the Universe and the Savior of Mankind.

Most writers I've read on the topic of this supposed marriage between MM and Jesus imply that the fact that MM is thought to be a prostitute makes the idea of marriage between them completely scandalous for the church. Well, maybe for some in the church, but have these writers read the Bible at all? Have they missed the entire book of Hosea? In that book, God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute as an allegory of God's relationship with Israel. I think if the Son of God were going to be united in marriage with a human woman, a prostitute is very likely exactly who He would choose. This is exactly the moral state all of us find ourselves in, and God rescues us when He brings us to Christ. Some of us are unfaithful and leave Him, some of us struggle with other loyalties, even with idols-- yet He remains faithful. Besides, there isn't really any scholarly basis for identifying MM as a prostitute. It appears to be mostly legend.

Another reason I doubt that Jesus was married is that in 1 Corinthians 9:5, the Apostle Paul asks the rhetorical question "Don't we have a right to take along a believing wife, as do the other apostles and Cephas (Peter) and the Lord's brothers?" I really think that if Jesus had been married, Paul would have used Him as the example here, not the other apostles.

As the article goes on to describe, the gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi fueled the speculation about MM and Jesus, particularly in the Gospel of Mary. There are descriptions of conflict between Peter and MM, as well as accusations from the other apostles that Jesus liked MM best, or that he was always kissing her on the mouth. Hmmm. If they were married, or unmarried lovers, then why on earth would it be remarkable that Jesus liked her best or kissed her? Even with cultural differences accounted for, it doesn't seem like something worth writing about.

There's a lot more in this article, but since it's online, I'll let you read it for yourself if you are interested. The only remaining thing I want to comment on is a paragraph about miracles, on page 8 if you print the article out. Here Acocella refers to a new (Nov. 2005) biography of MM by Bruce Chilton, an Episcopal priest who doesn't believe in miracles. She quotes a couple of other scholars who believe the question of miracles, particularly the resurrection, is irrelevant, but says that Chilton purports that the belief in miracles is actually harmful, and that he can put forth a more modern, acceptable form of Christianity without that belief.

Acocella goes on to admit that most of the world's Christians do believe in miracles. When was the last time you saw one?