For Da Vinci Code Readers
There has always been a mystique about Mary Magdalene, whether she was understood as an apostle of high moral character or as a reformed prostitute. There’s always been a fascination with her relationship to Jesus, her preaching and teaching, and after the sixth century, her penitence. In the Middle Ages there was an outburst of mysterious attraction and veneration that in its intensity rivaled any saint. Through the centuries, there seems to have been an insatiable desire to fill in the gaps and lost details of the life of the woman whose seven demons Jesus had cast out and who remained at the cross and went the burial place and received first blessing from Jesus after his entombment. Today we continue this fascination: Mary Magdalene has re-emerged into public consciousness. Renewed interest in her is in large part due to the subliminal chord that Dan Brown has sounded. In The Da Vinci Code Brown tells a lost story of Mary Magdalene as the bride of Jesus and the bearer of his child. For Brown, what was lost and misconstrued in the Christian story was the significance of the Holy Grail and the sacred feminine.
Brown quotes liberally from Leonardo Da Vinci, (“Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O Wretched mortals, open your eyes!”) and we are set us up to solve the mystery of the Grail, not where it is, but who it is. Two opposing characters Sir Leigh Teabing and Steven Langdon give Sophie, the young ingénue, some lessons in the Christian history. And the lessons are not those we learned in Sunday school. They are lessons how Genesis and the doctrine of original sin demonized the sacred feminine and began the subjugation of women, how the history of the Christian Church was an all too human political process. Jesus’ supposed plan to leave the future of the church in the hands of Mary Magdalene was submerged and went underground.
Whatever the historical merits of The Da Vinci Code—or lack thereof—the book brings Mary Magdalene into prominence as a symbol of womanhood and conjugal intimacy and piques our curiosity about new manuscript discoveries, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Coptic Scrolls discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. Sophie, like most of us, has never heard of the Gospel of Mary, which was discovered in 1896 in a Cairo marketplace.
Most historians call this fictionalization. Yet the reality is that Brown’s book has called Mary Magdalene into prominence. And there has been a flurry of cover stories for news magazines and special television programs.
Magdalene.org is a popular website with book suggestions, a gallery of images, articles by scholars such as Karen King and Margaret Starbird and devotional materials from “conservative Christian” to “pagan magical.” The public seems to have a limitless appetite for anything to do with Mary Magdalene, and it’s changing our beliefs in subtle–and not-so-subtle—ways.
In the flurry of thought that Jesus was married, subtle changes are taking place within us, especially about the humannes of Jesus and about the sacredness of sexuality and fertility. If the imaginative scenario is true, the Holy One of the Christian traition is then married and no longer a model for the celibate life.
While all this is felt to be a positive sign in some corners of the Christian imagination, there are many more corners that resist. All these corners are of interest to The Magdalene Mystique, but the one that holds speicial interst is the one repesenting the work of historians of early Christiantiy who say that as the wife of Jesus, Mary Magdalen is still not a figure in her own right.
The Magdalene Mystique and The Da Vinci Code explore some of the same themes and undercurrents. The Da Vinci Code is adventure fiction about the suppression of the story of Mary Magdalene, and The Magdalene Mystique traces the suppression of the Magdalene as an apostle and spiritual leader in the early Christian communities. But The Magdalene Mystique is not a work of fiction. It sorts through the legends and scholarship to find the historical Magdalene and asks what is the mystique that calls us to notice her and her story today. The Magdalene Mystique retells the Magdalene story for our time so that her message may inspire a new way of thinking about ourselves and all others. The “true humanness” espoused by the Magdalene’s gospel is an offer of peace that has great resonance in the world today.
