An Issue of Marriage

What appeared to be a relatively minor news item caught my eye this week. Westminster Abbey authorities have refused to allow key scenes from the proposed film of The Da Vinci Code to be shot within the Abbey. They said this was because the book is ‘fictitious’. They also announced that they are investing in a DVD and training the Abbey’s marshals and wardens to explain to visitors why author Dan Brown is so mistaken. The Abbey is following hot on the coat tails of Rome, which has condemned the book as lies and appointed a senior cardinal to counter the myths it expounds. But Lincoln Cathedral has no such qualms. Its authorities this week signed a deal with the film company to turn its nave into a replica of Westminster Abbey for £100,000.

Personally I don’t consider The Da Vinci Code any more fictitious than parts of the Bible, particularly the early books of the Old Testament which are a collection of myths, fables and legends which depict the way one group of people wrestled with those ultimate questions of how the world began, and the nature of human destiny. I’m one of those who found Dan Brown’s book a good read and consider it a ‘must’ for anyone interested in theology, but I certainly didn’t read it as if it were literally true. It’s a work of fiction and like most good fiction it fashions links with events and experiences which might possibly be true and challenges its readers to ponder ideas that are potentially credible. Dan Brown is a novelist and not a theologian, a fact well demonstrated by the fact that he has sold 25 million copies of his book in a year, earned £140 million from it, and currently has four works among the twenty best sellers in the UK ranked this week at 1, 3, 8 and 11. No contemporary theologian could market his product this well!

The Roman Catholic Church’s image is dented in this book through the author’s suggestion that it harbours a secret society charged with protecting the Holy Grail at all costs. Many readers have drawn parallels with Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic organisation dear to the late Pope’s heart, and by all accounts equally close to the new Pontiff. So the Church is embarking upon damage limitation through a PR initiative to prove that nothing of the kind could possibly exist. But such is humanity’s penchant for secret societies, and the Church’s predilection throughout its history for secret politics, the recent Papal Concave being just one example, that it is little wonder that Dan Brown’s secret society strikes a chord with his readers.

But at the heart of the book lies not so much a political as a theological issue, and this is the contention that the Holy Grail of legend is not the chalice from Christ’s Last Supper, but the womb of his wife Mary Magdalene, and that their descendants live on to the present day. On scriptural evidence alone, the fact that Jesus had a special relationship with Mary Magdalene is beyond doubt. And that relationship is also alluded to in the Gnostic extra-canonical Gospel of Mary Magdalene which has Peter saying to Mary, ‘Sister, we know that the Saviour loved you more than any other woman. Tell us the words of the Saviour that you know, but which we haven’t heard’. Such was the special status accorded to Mary Magdalene in the early Church that she was known as the Apostle to the Apostles. Most Biblical scholars today seem agreed that Mary was marginalized by the writers of the four canonical Gospels most probably because she was a woman.

The theory that Jesus married Mary Magdalene is an assertion of an altogether different kind for which there is no direct biblical evidence. But it is nevertheless an idea which keeps cropping up in Christian and literary discourse. It was alluded to in Martin Scorsese’s film version of the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis’s work The Last Temptation of Christ. This much misunderstood film portrayed Jesus on the Cross being tempted to come down, forget his crusade and go off, get married and live a quiet life. A similar theme appeared in Kazantzakis’s novel about the life of St Francis where Francis seeks spiritual advice from a hermit. ‘Throw yourself into the abyss’, was the reply, and when Francis said he couldn’t do that, the sage told him to forget his troubles and go home, get married and have children. It is this struggle between spirit and flesh that Kazantzakis turned into the last temptation of Christ. At the end of both the novel and the film, we learn that this was indeed the final temptation that Christ endured, and that he resisted it. In the end Kazantzakis came down on the side of orthodoxy.

The idea that Jesus may have been a married man is anathema not only to the Chapter of Westminster Abbey, but to the majority of Christians who prefer a sanitised and sexless Jesus who was the embodiment of love but not that kind of love. But this is not the last word on the matter. Theology from the second century scholar Irenaeus onwards has affirmed that Christ entered every stage of human existence to sanctify and redeem it. Given that sexuality and family life are central to human life, how could Christ achieve this without being married? Hippolytus and Origen – two other early Church theologians - insisted that the Old Testament Song of Solomon was a prophecy of the marriage, albeit spiritual and non-sexual, between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Jewish tradition of Jesus’s time required rabbis to be married, and marriages were normally arranged for boys at the age of sixteen. Would Jesus’s parents not have arranged a marriage for him at that age? This argument shifts the burden of proof and makes it incumbent upon us to explain why Jesus’s parents did not fulfil their proper duties in this respect. All four Gospels relate the story of Mary anointing the feet of Jesus. Some scholars claim that this ceremony was common amongst royal houses in the ancient world, sealing the marriage between a king and his spouse. So the idea of a married Jesus, while contrary to Christian orthodoxy, is a perfectly legitimate subject for theological enquiry.

The Precentor of Lincoln Cathedral, in justifying to the media that Cathedral’s involvement with the film project argued that ‘it requires far more suspension of belief to accept the line of The Da Vinci Code than it does the Gospels’. Really? It might also be argued that belief in a married Jesus demands less of a leap of faith than belief in the resurrection.

Living by the Rules

One of the greatest teachers I encountered while doing postgraduate studies in the United States during the heady 1960’s was Saul Alinsky the pioneer of community organisation and the author of Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals. I attended some of his lectures, probably better described as virtuoso performances, at Brendeis University. In Rules for Radicals, Rule Four is ‘Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules’ for as Alinsky comments, ‘they can no more obey their own rules than the church can live up to Christianity’. He was fond of pointing out that those who ‘publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other)’ should be constantly ‘pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations’. He saw this as an effective tactic in situations where power is being abused.

This week has seen the Bush administration challenged once more to demonstrate that it lives up to its own book of rules. At the beginning of the week we were treated to George Galloway, one of the UK’s most flamboyant and outspoken Members of Parliament, lambasting the Senate committee investigating the oil-for-food scandal. Those of us used to his aggressive style and unwavering opposition to the war in Iraq knew what to expect and had eagerly looked forward to the encounter. Members of the committee appeared somewhat nonplussed by the barrage that George unleashed in response to allegations that he had personally benefited to the extent of two million barrels of Saddam’s oil. First George called into question the ‘kangaroo court’ travesty of American justice; ‘I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever having written to me or telephoned me, without any contact with me whatsoever, and you call that justice’. Then he wanted to know what evidence there was against him, and when this turned out to be his name on a piece of paper given in evidence by two Iraqi officials who are currently prisoners of the US forces, George launched into an attack on the illegality of the war in Iraq in particular, and the immorality of the occupying US forces in general.

There were some classic moments in his testimony, none more so than when he was asked how often he had met Saddam Hussein. ‘I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him’, George said. ‘The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try to bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war.’ At one level this was a wonderful piece of televised theatre in which a man who has consistently opposed the war argued forcefully that what the committee was involved in was not a judicial enquiry but rather, having got practically everything about the Iraq situation wrong, yet another attempt by the administration to justify its actions. But at a far deeper level, it was one lone person taking on the US government and challenging it to live by its own book or rules in terms of the pursuit of justice and truth.

The situation had not improved for the US by the end of the week when a British tabloid published photos which to the Arab and Muslim world were degrading, of Saddam Hussein in his underwear. In general, comment in the British media characterised the photographs as a breach of human rights and contrary to the Geneva Convention. The newspaper publishing the photographs said they had been leaked by a military source as a way of indicating to insurgent groups in Iraq that Saddam was a broken man, thus somehow undermining insurgent resolve. This is a fundamental misreading of the Iraqi mind and situation typical of the American regime. Many UK commentators focussed however, on something else – the way that the US administration cried foul when the Arab satellite TV station al-Jazeera (about which I wrote last week) paraded American prisoners of the Iraq war before the world, complaining that the provisions of the Geneva Convention were not being observed. If they were not being observed then, they were also not being observed this week. That the administration was well aware that it was not in this instance living by its own book of rules, became clear when the President backed an ‘aggressive’ investigation into the leaking of the pictures.

But the situation was compounded this morning when it was revealed that the President of Afghanistan has called for an enquiry into the way that prisoners of war were being treated by US forces in that country. This was prompted by the leaking of a military investigation into the killing of two detainees. Coming in the wake of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and the testimony of British Muslims formerly held in Guantanamo Bay about the degradation, abuse and torture they were forced to undergo, this Bagram Base incident in which two young Afghans were tortured, chained to the roof of their cells and left to die, appears to break all the rules of humanity and decency. It is easy to place the blame on the military psyche which is trained to treat the enemy as someone less than human, who can be abused and tortured in order to gain significant information which will assist the cause. I think there is some truth in this but there is also the question of the way all humanity is compromised when those in power cynically abandon the rules which they insist lie at the heart of concepts like freedom, justice and democracy.

For Saul Alinsky it is the superior strength of the powerful which becomes their undoing when they are pushed to live by their own book of rules. I’m grateful to George Galloway for reminding me once again that the arrogance of power can so easily be hoist by its own petard.

Begging Letters

Amongst yesterday’s mail was an airmail letter from Uganda. The handwriting and my mis-spelt name on the envelope looked familiar. It was a letter from a pupil at St Agnes Senior Secondary School in Kampala, the third such letter that I have received, though each purports to have been from a different student. This student’s story mirrors that relayed by her two predecessors. She is an orphan having lost her dear father to the ravages of HIV/AIDS and her mother in a tragic motor accident in which a taxi in which the woman was a passenger ploughed into a petrol tanker with everyone dying in the consequent conflagration. This tragedy was shortly followed by the loss of her two siblings who had been supporting the student by paying her school fees. Her sisters had been kidnapped, raped and then finally killed by members of a rebel group. She is now utterly alone in the world and begs me to meet her school fees of $390. ‘I am here on bended knees’, she writes, ‘crying for your parental care and love towards my suffering’. It is difficult not to be moved by such a catalogue of disasters.

Unlike its two predecessors this letter has an appendix, a copy of the student’s ‘O Level Terminal Report’ which indicates how well she is doing in the seventeen subjects she is studying. The report bears the official school stamp and is signed by the headmaster. I note that all the marks, comments and teacher’s signatures are written by the same hand. Sending me the report is a clever ploy, because in a postscript to her letter, the student requests that I return the report to her as the headmaster wants it back again at the beginning of next term. Whereas I could easily dismiss the first two letters from my mind, this time a response is demanded.

It was clear to me from the initial letter I received that the School, assuming it exists (it has an E-mail address but I have not been able to locate any information about it via the Web), possesses a copy of Crockford’s Clerical Directory which lists the names, addresses and clerical biographies of all Anglican clergy in the UK. It looks as if students are encouraged to select a promising donor and write off to him or her. The question I face is whether these are cases of genuine individual need, whether the school is exploiting the stories of children to raise funds, or whether this is yet another African scam.

Am I being too cynical about the situation? The trouble is that in addition to these letters purportedly from students in Africa, I am in receipt of others from Africa. There are those which are certainly a scam: individual letters, mainly E-mails, from Christians in Nigeria whose beloved father has passed on leaving behind a fortune in properties, diamonds, or oil revenues. For political reasons the son or daughter has to get these funds out to Europe, and if I allow millions of dollars to be sent to my account for safe-keeping, I will be rewarded both by God and by my Christian brother to the tune of some 5 million dollars. All I have to do is send my bank account details . . . The rest of course would be history with not a cent arriving from Nigeria, but any money that happens to be in my account being withdrawn by my Nigerian Christian brother. Apparently even though these scams are so obvious, people do fall for them. What angers me is the way in which both the gospel and Christian discipleship and solidarity are being cynically manipulated and abused.

The other kind of begging letter I receive from Africa is genuine enough, and comes from students on the programme I teach there, who are struggling with very meagre resources to establish small educational or economic generating projects amongst persons living with AIDS. But even in these instances where the need is great and obvious, my sympathy erodes when either the project is unnecessarily grandiose and seems fired by personal ambition and benefit, or where there lies revealed an underlying culture of dependency which regards Christians in the West, prompted by guilt over their colonial past, as the primary fount of resources. This demeanour becomes even more complicated for me when African Anglicans are happy to declare that they are no longer in communion with me because of what they perceive as my liberal and unbiblical views, but happy to solicit funds from me. I experience at a personal level something of the dilemma the Episcopal church faced when the Church in Uganda declared itself to be no longer in communion with the American Church because of its election and consecration of a gay bishop, yet continued to solicit major Episcopal funding.

I have been facing a similar dilemma over my ‘Lenten box’, into which ever since Sunday School I have been encouraged to make contributions towards overseas missions. These days I want to be sure that my gifts are going to worthwhile projects which benefit communities rather than individuals, like those which contribute to developing an infrastructure which will reduce endemic poverty and the suffering which accompanies it, or which promote educational projects for HIV/AIDS. I don’t want to see a single penny go towards the salaries of corrupt bishops or the expenses of local churches, least of all those which insist that their partial appreciation of the Gospel is the norm for Christian orthodoxy. Instead my Lenten self-denial gift goes these days to Christian Aid along with a letter requesting that the donation be directed towards the kind of project to which I am committed.

Christians have special duties of compassion towards the suffering and of expressing solidarity with the world’s poor. But as Jesus suggested, we also need to be as wise as serpents to ensure both that we are not being exploited by those who are abusing Christianity, and that our gifts have the potential of making a real difference.

Mediating Truth

Well, the British elections are over with the Blair government returned with a much smaller majority and the distinction of winning the election with the smallest percentage of the popular vote (around 37%) since records have been kept. This has again raised the issue of the ‘tyranny of the minority’ with a great deal of speculation about what the political landscape could have looked like had we some form of proportional representation, with seats in parliament distributed on the basis of the percentage of the vote won. In my own electorate of Brecon the Liberal Democrat candidate’s majority increased from a mere 800 to over 6000, ample excuse for drawing the cork from a hearty bottle of New Zealand Pinot Gris. Overall it was a night for quiet satisfaction as Blair was punished for his lies about Iraq, the Liberals, the anti-war party, increased their representation at the expense of Labour, and I, having vowed after surviving the Thatcher years never again to voluntarily live under a Conservative regime, do not have to pack my bags and leave.

The role of the media appears to have been more influential than in the past, particularly as political commentators and TV hosts kept the Iraq war issues centre stage, and would not allow Blair’s campaign to marginalize it in favour of discussions about the economy to succeed. One of the most dramatic moments captured on TV was the post-result speech by one of the candidates in Blair’s own constituency, the father of a young soldier killed in Iraq who had campaigned as an Independent on an anti-war ticket. With the Prime Minister amongst the other candidates looking the most discomforted I have ever seen him, the father said that he hoped that one day the Prime Minister would apologise for the deaths he had caused, and that one day he would visit the British soldiers lying injured in hospital. It was a powerful moment.

Today’s Sunday newspapers, and political analysis TV programmes are all focussing on the way that Blair has become a liability to his party. There is a great deal of murmuring about the need for a change of leadership and the return of some kind of integrity to politics, with disaffected Labour parliamentarians, generally nameless, suggesting the possibility of some kind of coup, and Blairite loyalists proclaiming that this is all media hype with absolutely no substance. This raises the question of the ability of the media to shape the political arena and process, a theme coincidentally illustrated in last evening’s episode of Dr Who. The space travelling Time Lord of the 60’s and 70’s is back on our screens again in a new series of wonderfully crafted adventures. Last night his Tardis spaceship ended up on Satellite 5, the galactic orbiting centre of all news and information, which was actually being used by an alien life form to control the entire human race some 100,000 years hence. The new Dr Who is very much into issues of globalisation and provides a popular forum for issues of global power and control.

From an academic perspective, Noam Chomsky, anarchist fellow-traveller and one of the writers I most appreciate, has been pursuing this theme for decades. Manufacturing Consent, the book he co-authored in 1988 and later made into an award winning film, exposed how in the USA, rather than relentlessly pursuing truth, the media structures all facets of the news, selecting topics and framing issues, in order to create a consensus around American economic and foreign policy. Concepts such as ‘the free press’ and ‘free elections’ are manipulated in order to mask aggressive American domination. In one of his more recent works, Hegemony or Survival (2003) Chomsky presses his thesis further arguing that contemporary American global politics of unilateralism, the dismantling of international agreements, state terror, and the militarisation of space – in all of which the media is employed to manufacture consent – threatens to turn our planet into a wasteland. According to Chomsky, what we need to do is to develop a radical and critical way of ‘reading’ the media, in order to free ourselves from its power.

There is always of course what we refer to as the ‘alternative’ media which although it cannot be entirely free from ideological influence, does try to tell things the way they are. Who can forget the dramatic news footage from the war in Iraq shown by the Arab-owned news service al Jazeera, based in Qatar? Much to the embarrassment and increasing frustration of the American commanders, al Jazeera beamed around the world dramatic evidence which belied the sanitised version of civilian casualties which the war machine wanted people to believe. It was not surprising that after the fall of Iraq, so-called ‘Iraqi authorities’ banned al Jazeera from that country, putting an end to any challenge to the ‘victors’ version of events.

But the quest for manufacturing our consent can be far more subtle than banning alternative sources of news and comment. Buried within the news this week – after all, THE most important thing had to be the British election! - was a brief article announcing that Qatar was drawing up plans to privatise al Jazeera. For in addition to offending the US, this news service which attracts 35-40 million viewers, and has changed the face of middle-East media by offering critical coverage, has also offended most of its Arab neighbours. Unable to attract sufficient advertising revenue, it relies heavily on a state subsidy to keep afloat. The fear is that if al-Jazeera is privatised, Saudi investors and advertisers, heavily into the business of manufacturing consent, will impose censorship with the channel becoming just another medium for propaganda.

Elections, with their accompanying hype and spin, provide an opportunity for us to pause and consider just how ‘free’ our media are.