Deciphering The DaVinci Code

I’d like to thank Dan Brown for writing The DaVinci Code and thus finally bringing the issue of Mary Magdalene’s true identity into the consciousness of mainstream America. How many of us here have read all or part of The Da Vinci Code? For those of you who haven’t this is my quick summary—and for those of you still reading, stick your fingers in your ears if you don’t want to know the ending—and I’ll signal you when the sermon is over!

So, according to The Da Vinci Code, there is a great secret, hidden for millenia to protect itself, protected by a secret society made of up great leaders and artists with famous names like Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo and Sandro Botticelli. And the secret is plenty: the true location of the tomb of Mary Magdalene, and the fact that she and Jesus were married, and the fact that they had children, and the fact that the children had children and in fact there are descendents living right down to this present day. Boom. That’s a lotta secrets. It takes the whole book, some nifty devices, a certain amount of decryption, angst, death, international flight and revelatory moments, along with soul searching and reconciliation, for the two protagonists to find this all out, and one of them turns out to be one of those descendents herself. So, that’s the big deal, a big deal that the Catholic church is very hot to keep secret or downright eradicate in order to protect historic ways. And there’s enough detail, truth and research salted into the book to give grounds for a lot of speculation into just how true the final truths of the novel really are. A number of you have asked me to consider this book as a topic, and frankly, I hesitated, because I thought having a novel that is right up my alley might make me a smidge too judgemental. But… you persisted, and I read it and am now all fired up. What follows may be more information than you want to know… but it’s not my fault we’re going over all this ground this morning, it’s yours and Dan Brown’s.

For millenia, Mary of Magdala has been the prostitute who followed Jesus with devotion. Though most of the gospels name her as the first of his followers to recognize Jesus after his resurrection, even this important event quickly began to disappear from Christian consciousness. She is never mentioned in the Pauline epistles, written within 30 years of Jesus’ death, not even in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 where Paul lists those to whom Jesus made post-resurrection appearances. (Jane Schaberg “How Mary Magdalene Became a Whore” in Bible Review, v.8, no 5, October, 1992).

She is called Magdelene because she hailed from Magdala or Migdal, a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. She appears first in Jesus’ life in the account of Luke, where she is one of several women healed of evil spirits and infirmities. Mary of Magdala is healed of 7 demons. According to the understandings of New Testament times, demon possession was in no way associated with inherent evil in a person. It was an ailment, like any other, and treatable, like other ailments such as blindness or lameness, by miraculous healing. After being healed by Jesus, Mary of Magdala becomes one of the most important figures in the New Testament’s accounts of Jesus’ ministry: she, along with some other women, is specifically named as one who travels with him and the disciples (Matt, Mark, Luke and John). She witnesses his death (Mark 15:40, Mt 27:56) and burial (Mark 15:47, Mt 27:61, Luke 23:55), who brings spices to his tomb with which to anoint him (Mark 16:1, Mt 28:1), and to whom most of the gospels give the honor of being the first to see and recognize him resurrected (Mt 28:1-10, Mark 16:9, John 20:14-18).

This anointing, in fact, becomes a path for those concerned to diminish and stigmatize her role among Jesus’ followers. As the one who goes to anoint him after his death, she became conflated with other unnamed women who anointed: a woman who anoints Jesus head for his burial and another woman who is defined only as a sinner and who anoints Jesus’ feet in Luke 7:36-50, of whom Jesus famously said:” Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.” One version of this encounter gives the woman the name Mary but she is another Mary, Mary of Bethany. In Luke this woman is a public sinner, a “woman of the city”and in turn becomes conflated with another loose woman, the Samaritan woman with five husbands and a live-in lover (John 4:8-29), and a woman caught committing adultery (John 7:53-8:11).

This conflation of Mary with these other women, most of them not followers of Jesus but merely women he encountered in his ministry, is in line with an underlying element of misogyny in Christianity, that equates femininity with earthly concerns, a kind of sexual evil that undermines the soul. Thus Mary became a symbol of rehabilitation, of penitence for a life wrongly lived, a testimony to the saving power of Christ even for a fallen woman. (Schaberg, BR.)

This is perhaps one of the most successful and extended smear campaigns in history. Because this drastic recharacterization of the Magdalene was not only consistent with the inclinations of Christianity according to many of the Church Fathers, it seems to have been explicit and intentional. As late as 1517, Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples published a critique of the traditional view of Mary Magdalene as a repentent whore. His writings spawned a major controversy, he was censured by the Sorbonne and his works were placed on the Vatican’s list of prohibited books. (Schaberg, BR) And though modern Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrines all agree in distinguishing between Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany and the unnamed sinner of Luke 7, still Boston’s now-deposed Cardinal Law preached a few years ago an Easter sermon, reprinted in the Boston Globe, holding Mary Magdalene up as a model of repentance and renewal for all people.

This treatment of Mary Magdalene has been decried in many ways and especially in recent years. It is a disservice of course to the historical woman who lived a visionary life of radical commitment and sacrifice, only to be condemned and diminished after her death. But it is also a blow, one of many, against the right of women to be recognized and honored a religiously legitimate figures, even leaders. The vision of women as low and sinful, candidates for only for salvation, and Mary Magdalene as an ultimate symbol of low, limited role, has been a foundation time out of mind for the religious disenfranchisement of women. The New Testament, as typically interpreted over time, tells us women can be whores or virgins, and that’s about it. Mary Magdalene is a follower, but not a disciple, one whose insight into Jesus’ importance is evident in her very casting of her lot with his, let alone in her recognition of him after his resurrection—a recognition not shared by his apostles in their first post-resurrection encounter with their leader—is ignored almost from the first. Some scholars have even likened this campaign to other forms of abuse towards women, citing both its character as an hostile excercise of power over her, and its intentionally controlling and debilitating effect on her life and its autonomy.

So when Dan Brown writes of Mary being terribly misunderstood by most people, and that because of her intentional misrepresentation by the church, he’s exactly right. The only problem is, the identity of Mary Magdalene that he presents as the real thing is… complicated. Some of it reflects speculation by modern Bible scholars, a very little of it is grounded in the highly different version of Mary Magdalene found in the Gnostic Gospels, some of it is his own creation. Certainly his final conclusions are very far from incontravertible truth. Her identity has been so misunderstood for so long, and is therefore so vulnerable now that scholarship and public understandings are just beginning to reflect what seems to be a more respectful and accurate sense of Mary’s true role in early Christianity. So it troubles me that Brown’s own work, while decrying those earlier misunderstandings and abuses, introduces and perpetuates other misrepresentations that are likely to endure in the minds of his readers. The abuse of her character and history by the church is perhaps only echoed by his own work, even as it bashes the Catholic church for that very thing.

Because The Da Vinci Code does reduces Mary Magdalene still. It lifts her from her status as a prostitute, only to relegate her to the usual role of wife and mother. Though the story tells us that she sits at the table with the other apostles in The Last Supper, at Jesus’ right hand no less, she is not there as their equal, much less as Jesus’ lieutenant, who comes even before Peter in the leadership of his movement…no, she is there as his wife, the mother of his children, as, of all things, a chalice, a vessel… merely… the worthy receptacle of his dangerous seed, just another foremother in the tradition of Sarah and Hagar and the Virgin Mary. “Behold,” Teabing proclaimed, “the greatest cover-up in human history. Not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father. My dear, Mary Magdalene was the Holy Vessel. She was the chalice that bore the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ. She was the womb that bore the lineage, and the vine from which the sacred fruit sprang forth!” TDVC, p. 249)

I say this not to deride or even disrespect motherhood—is a powerful and essential and even a sacred office, as is pointed out in one of my favorite books, the cleverly named: The Oldest Vocation, an exploration of motherhood in Christian tradition. But in the context of the story of The DaVinci Code, motherhood is hardly a revelation for any women, even the Magdalene. In the scheme of religious history, motherhood is timeless, blameless and uncontroversial. Even in the time of the Reformation, when Luther was attacking the ways and means of the Catholic church, when he beseiged and destroyed the cloisters of monks and nuns, where did he send the nuns, those few women able to study and practice religion, to lead others to read and write and pray and gather in service of their faith? ‘Back to the world!’ he told them. And what was that world? The ‘real’ world, of simple piety and pure faith, the world where women were illiterate and unempowered, where women were wives and mothers and served their families and only thus lived their faith.

So really, the revelation that Mary Magdalene was a chalice, even the ultimate chalice, even to we who hold the lit chalice as a symbol of our faith… it’s actually a little disappointing. It may be radical by the standards of the Catholic church’s doctrine, but it’s not at all radical to those of us living by very different religious standards. And it disregards the some of the truths lifted up in the very gospels Brown cites in his novels, the Gnostic Gospels of Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Dialogue of the Savior. They really do exist, they really were found in 1945, in Egypt, as he says, but they say a lot more about Mary Magdalene’s role in the Jesus movement than Brown presents, or perhaps just more than he’s interested in.

Those three texts, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene) and the Dialogue of the Savior, were found among 47 gnostic texts. Not all of the texts are Christian, not all of the texts represent New Testament characters. But some of them are and some of them do, and the picture they present of Jesus and his early movement is different enough from that in the biblical texts to explain why they were not accepted into the canon. These 3 are among 9 texts which explicitly or implicitly present Mary Magdalene as a disciple of Jesus, in fact as a pre-eminent disciple, with a special relationship to Jesus which the texts explicitly explain as being founded on her gnosis, her advanced understanding of gnostic truths, her enlightenment. While the Gospel of Philip does say that Jesus’s companion was Mary Magdalene and that he “loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss often on her” (G of P, 63: 31-35), this is then explained by Jesus in the text itself as being in some way tied to her sharing a mystical communion with Jesus—perhaps one with a physical dimension, but not one that was primarily worldly in orientation as her being his wife and mother of his children would have been.

The gnostic text The Gospel of Thomas shows the religious nature of Jesus’ commitment to Mary, and indeed to gender equity in his movement: “Simon Peter said to them ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’” And in the Gospel of Philip again: “The rest of the disciples… said to him “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The savior answered and said to them “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.” Though he goes on from here to talk of marriage, Jesus is using marriage as a symbol of completeness that inures people from lustful and inherently lowering distractions that come with sexual frustration. Thus marriage is important not in itself but for freeing its participants to focus on attaining gnosis, spiritual wisdom. And Mary, married or not, is one who has access to spiritual wisdom the others haven’t attained yet.

This is in line with a larger, gnostic concept of gender and spiritual insight. In so far as Da Vinci’s painting represents her as Jesus’ right hand man, that’s actually ironically accurate. The gnostics had a phrase: ‘putting on the perfect man’ which meant freeing onself from worldly concerns, ie even those of family, children, parenthood—in order to realize and maintain spiritual insights. In the Dialogue of the Savior, the ‘works of womanhood’ are named as something that will be dissolved when the times comes for the final gnostic enlightment. Though such phrases carry an inherent gender bias—in that being ‘male’ is a metaphor for operating on a higher plane—anyone, male or female, could put on the perfect man.

Thus, in the Dialogue of the Savior, Mary Magdalene repeatedly speaks with authority concerning spiritual insights, being, as the text itself says “a woman who understood completely.” And in the Gospel of Mary, Levi, one of the disciples says “Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect man and acquire him or ourselves as he commanded us and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said.” This, as well as earlier paragraphs in the same gospel implies that Mary is more of a perfect man than the other disciples… and that means her status and significance are not about her being a wife and mother and thus Jesus’ companion in life, she is rather, in some ways the first apostle: it’s not Peter who often attacks her in the gnostic texts, and certainly not Paul who ignored her in his iteration of witnesses to the resurrection, who is leading the way in Jesus’ wake, according to the gnostics it’s Mary, Jesus’ companion in spirit, and that is really revolutionary.

This is by far my greatest concern with The Da Vinci Code: that while it raises the issue of the falseness of Mary Magdalene’s historical identity, it offers another for which there is little support, and ignores the more likely truth, for which there is not only explicit support, but which is also by far a more radical and religiously significant role. What if Jesus did have issue, a line of people extending into the modern day? That would be cool, but that’s about it. He was not the king of the Jews, and messiahood is not genetic… or presumably someone else in his long line of descendents would have made their mark on the world.

There are other small things in the book that made me wish I hadn’t spent quite so much time on precisely these issues: Mary Magdalene, the Gnostic Gospels, Early Christianity and Hellenistic History… because sometimes knowing too much gets in the way of a good story. For example, some people in Jesus’ day might have cared if he’d had children, they would have been the same people who believed and cared that Jesus himself was descended of royal lineage. You may know or remember that the Gospel of Matthew, the first gospel in the canon, begins right off the bat with Jesus’ genealogy, tracing him back through Joseph, of all people, to the line of King David. Matthew does this because Jesus’ being of royal lineage justifies him as a true prophet/messiah according to the standards laid out in earlier, prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible which stated that the true messiah would come from the line of David.

So this is complicated, but essentially Jesus’ offspring would only have mattered to the Romans and certain Jews who both believed in Jesus as the messiah and who were looking to reinstate a Jewish Messianic king of David’s line. And that would have been close to impossible at the time, because the Hasmoneans, otherwise known as the Maccabees, had come into power a couple of centuries before, (as we will discuss next week for our Hannukay service,) and set them selves up as priest-kings—and married into the line of David to legitimate themselves, and they still had descendents. Moreover, Rome had total dominion over Judea as the later uprisings proved, and their puppet-king, Herod, had likewise married into the line of David.

Finally, while The Da Vinci Code claims that Mary Magdalene “posed a threat to the men of the early Church that was potentially ruinous,” (TDVC, p. 254) it was not because in bearing a child she would have borne evidence that Jesus was mortal. Because Jesus’ Biblical identity was dual, mortal and immortal both, suffering the true dreadful pangs of a mortal death on the cross and the mortal challenges of a dangerous ministry that almost overwhelmed him in the Garden of Gethsemane, but also able die a death that ransomed back humanity, and to rise to live again eternally, because of his divinity. As The DaVinci Code tells it, the church that was so concerned to banish all evidence of Mary and her offspring, was the church of Constantine, almost three centuries after Jesus and Mary Magdalene lived and died, by which time the rebellious, counter-culture, Jewish sect known as the Jesus movement had evolved into the Holy Roman Empire. Therefore church leaders invented the idea of her as a prostitute, conflating her with another woman mentioned in gospel accounts who was indeed a prostitute [Rev. Lerner will be providing the citiation to the Webmaster soon.] and thus changing her role. And indeed, as I’ve mentioned earlier, that conflation really did occur and was perpetuated by the church. But that was the church once it had begun to be established. The earliest church was that of the Jesus and his apostles and followers, and the conflicts after his death were between different ideas of how his movement should understand itself in what they believed would be Jesus’ short-term absence.

Paul’s writings illustrate one of those conflicts—should the movement understand itself as Jewish or open to all regardless of faith background? And another issue that the Gnostic Gospels point to is a conflict as to the nature of the movement regarding gender: is the movement one where, as in Judaism, men are the leaders and women are limited and defined by their sex to be, in fact, only wives and mothers? Or is gender in some way spiritual or transcendable - such that all can share in the rights and understandings of the truly enlightened, anyone, male or female can lead, all can be “perfect men.” And what the canonical works of the New Testament show is that Paul won the conflict about religious heritage—anyone, male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free, could be a Christian. And that Peter and his view prevailed in establishing roles for church leadership—anyone could be a Christian, but only men could lead. And the established church of the Holy Roman Empire followed that path, and much (though not all) of Christianity has continued on it ever since.

The nature of this topic is such that this sermon has been a lot about facts, and not much about feeling or souls. But it leaves us with perhaps our perennial question; okay, so now that we know this, what does it mean for us UUs? We generally don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, we are not even Christian in that we hold other world religions of equal importance with Christianity— and we’re skeptical as heck about most things just on general principles. What do we do with this book, this history? Well, I never dare to give an answer meant to speak for all of us. But one thing that occurs to me not infrequently about this line of study is that it is easy to dismiss old-time religion, and the Bible with it, as outdated, a tool of patriarchy, and so forth. Indeed, in many tangible, inescapable ways the Bible is just that, outdated and a tool of patriarchy.

But there are two things we miss by such dismissal. One is that the Bible is also loaded with beauty and truth and inspiration. Every book, every chapter, is different and lush with history and import and sometimes personal and direct expressions of faith, of pain, of hope… that can and should stir us despite what else is packed in. And the other is that only in exploring the Bible and its counterparts such as the Gnostic Gospels can we hope to arrive at a place of understanding more fully, perhaps more broadly, perhaps more deeply, the world of the Bible, the world of Abraham or the later, different world of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, and their movements that were so rich as to move so many hearts, as to change the world and history. Perhaps our hearts will also be changed in such encounters. Perhaps that would be a good thing. It’s a different kind of multiculturalism - which we say we care so much about and believe in - to encounter the ways of people in the Bible and learn from our differences and also from our sameness. As it says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said “If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.” It could have been Freud or Simone de Beauvoir, but it was a gnostic, quoting Jesus. Imagine.

Amen.