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.
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.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 2:54 AM
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