Reading: from the novel The Da Vinci Code (pages 243-244, 245-246)
The heroes of the story, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, are on a quest... to find the truth about a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris... the murder of Sophie's grandfather who was also a curator of the museum. In the middle of the night, they visit the religious historian Sir Leigh Teabing at his country estate, The Chateau Villette. Sir Teabing explains to them the legend of the Holy Grail. According to popular legend, the Holy Grail is the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. And according to legend, it has been hidden for centuries.
Teabing is showing them the famous painting of The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci and points out to the astonished heroes that one of the apostles, the one to Jesus' right is clearly female. Let's pick up the story there.
"Sophie moved closer to the image. The woman to Jesus' right was young and
pious-looking, with a demure face, beautiful red hair, and hands folded quietly. This is the woman who singlehandedly could crumble the Church? [Sophie thinks to herself].
"Who is she?" Sophie asked.
That, my dear," Teabing Replied "is Mary Magdalene."
Sophie turned, "The prostitute?"
Teabing drew a short breath, as if the word had injured him personally. "Magdalene was no such thing. That unfortunate misconception is the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church. The Church needed to defame Mary Magdalene in order to cover up their dangerous secret-her role as the Holy Grail."
"Her role?"
"As I mentioned," Teabing clarified, "the early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus' life had to be omitted from the Bible. Unfortunately for the early editors, one particularly troubling earthly theme kept recurring in the gospels. Mary Magdalene." He paused. "More specifically, her marriage to Jesus Christ."
"I beg your pardon?" Sophie's eyes moved to Langdon and then back to Teabing.
"It's a matter of historical record," Teabing said, "and Da Vinci was certainly aware of that fact. The Last Supper practically shouts at the viewer that Jesus and Magdalene were a pair."
A couple of pages further in the novel, while arguing his case, Sir Teabing opened a huge, leather-bound book, The Gnostic Gospels. This book contains translations of the ancient Nag Hammadi Scrolls found in Upper Egypt in the 1940's... which, according to Dan Brown, contain the earliest Christian records.
Teabing continues: "Troublingly, they do not match up with the gospels in the Bible." Flipping toward the middle of the book, Teabing pointed to a passage. "The Gospel of Philips is always a good place to start."
Sophie read the passage:
And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?"
The words surprised Sophie, and yet they hardly seemed conclusive. "It says nothing of marriage."
"Au contraire," Teabing smiled, pointing to the first line. "As any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion, in those days, literally meant spouse."
Langdon concurred with a nod.
Sophie read the first line again. And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene.
A little further on in the story, Teabing claimed that both Jesus and Mary Magdalene came from royal bloodlines, Jesus from the House of David and Mary from the House of Benjamin. Furthermore, he claimed that they had a child. Thus Mary herself was the Holy Grail. As Teabing stated, "When Grail legend speaks of 'the chalice that held the blood of Christ'-it speaks, in fact, of Mary Magdalene-the female womb that carried Jesus' royal blood line."
I'll say from the start that I read the novel The Da Vinci Code some months ago and saw the movie last week with my husband. I liked both... although maybe the book more than the movie because of the greater detail and twists and turns of the plot. But both the movie and the book were good entertainment. Dan Brown is a good story teller and made it seem pretty real. He claimed that the story, although clearly a fiction, was based on historical fact. I can understand how some people would be convinced that this was a true story, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had a child. And that the Church had been hiding the truth all these centuries. And I can certainly understand how orthodox Christians, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, would be upset by the novel. It is a direct attack on long held doctrine of the divinity of Jesus.
I'm not here to defend Dan Brown, the author... or to criticize him. In fact, I think it's pretty clear now that the premise of the story is based on a hoax, one created by Pierre Plantard in the 1950's. In 1993, Plantard confessed to having created false documents which he planted in the French National Library and that the entire Priory of Scion hoax. You may have heard on the news last week that Dan Brown backed down on his claim that the novel was based on historical fact. It's just a novel, he said. It's meant to entertainment and not to be taken so seriously. But the confession came too late to calm the waters of controversy he's stirred up.
But about the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. When it comes right down to it, we can't really say one way or another whether Jesus and Mary were married or whether they had child. There is no historical evidence to prove it conclusively or to disprove it. There is not enough evidence to say it was or wasn't so. There are only hints, like the word companion and its Aramaic meaning mentioned in Brown's novel. We just don't know, so we are left to choose what we want to believe.
For Unitarian Universalists, it doesn't really matter at all to our faith. We have no creed that relies on Jesus' divinity. I know of no Unitarian Universalists, even those who call themselves UU Christians, who are upset. They are only somewhat bemused at all the fuss. In fact, I think many of us are pleased that Jesus' humanity (over his divinity) is being discussed by so many people now. Jesus' humanity is something we've believed for over 200 years, back when the Trinity was declared "non-scriptural" by William Ellery Channing. No big deal, really. In fact, Jesus has long been viewed by us as one among many great religious prophets. Maybe other people will begin to see him as we do.
But more important than the facts of the story of Jesus and Mary's marriage may be the power of the myth behind the story. Religious liberals don't take the bible literally anyway. It isn't God's Word, but the stories of two ancient religious peoples, the Jews and the Christians, one growing out of the other. We don't believe in the miracles of the Bible and are at least are skeptical about the more historical accounts...or what may appear to be historical accounts. You know the old saying about history being written by the winners. The discovery in the last hundred years of hidden scrolls which give other versions of early Christianity have called the official accounts into even greater question.
In the opinion of religious liberals (including me), these ancient scriptures are valued less for their historical accuracy and more their abstract or symbolic meanings. The philosopher Joseph Campbell spoke a lot about the power of myth. From early childhood, we form our world view based on the myths of our families, of our religious communities, of our society and our culture.
If we believe that Mary Magdalene, a woman, was Jesus' first and most beloved disciple, if we believe that he imparted special knowledge to her and that she was the one to whom he appeared first after the Resurrection, then the status of women as a whole is elevated in Christianity. If it is revealed that women played a large part in the first two centuries of the Christian movement, in teaching, preaching and supporting the church financially, many of us today are empowered to do so in our own faiths. If it is shown that an apostle like Peter was very jealous of Mary and thought she didn't deserve, as a woman, to be among them, we can understand the divisions in the early Christian movement and the struggle for power.
Elaine Pagels, a famous scholar of the Gnostic Gospels, highlights this passage in the Gospel of Thomas:
"Simon Peter said to the (the disciples): "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."
You and I may be put off by that language. Why should women have to deny their femininity and become male? But for those times, it was affirming of women's role in the church. Remember that this was a big step forward in a patriarchal society where women had little worth and little chance assuming leadership positions outside the home.
If it is proven that the early Church Fathers, like Tertullian, did everything they could to blot out this troubled early history, then feminists, whether Christian or not, feel justified in renouncing the sexism of the church.
Is it any wonder why the male-dominated power structure of the Roman Catholic Church feels so threatened? It's bad enough that Brown's novel paints the church and the ultra-conservative organization Opus Dei in such a negative light. But what's worse is that some people might actually start reading biblical and religious scholars like Elaine Pagels, who's well respected, even I think by conservative scholars. People might actually find out the truth, that women and sex and reproduction and the female body in general have been denigrated for centuries because honoring the feminine was a threat to all-male power structures.
I remember when Cakes for the Queen of Heaven came out as an adult education curriculum in the early 1980's. It was very popular among Unitarian Universalist women and was the beginning of feminist groups within several UU churches. I took the course in Brockton, where I was then a member. In one of the classes we discussed how the worship of powerful Greek, Roman and Egyptian goddesses was suppressed by the patriarchal religions of Judaism and Christianity. Instead, the power of the goddess was taken away and given to male gods. In Christianity the passive Virgin Mary replaced the image of the once powerful goddess, like Hera the wife of Zeus. The Virgin was just the goddess demoted or dethroned to a kind of second class divinity. She was now merely Christ's mother, nearly silent in the gospels after the holy birth. She had lost much of the feminine powers of Wisdom and Creation of the earlier goddesses and could only be the humble servant and the passive receptacle of God's power. In the Cakes course, we began as women to reclaim earlier myths of powerful goddesses. In many pagan religions I learned that there was an essential balance of male and female powers or principles. Without that, the world would be out of balance and would not work properly.
Some years after I took the Cakes course, I was the coordinator of Womensphere, the district women's group of the UUA. I attended worship services organized by some other women who were more into this thing called feminist spirituality as a religious practice. We gathered in a circle, symbolizing our equality. We invoked the spirits of the four directions symbolizing the four elements of Nature -- air, fire, water and earth. (We also did this as a church last week at the Boyden Wildlife Refuge.) And we chanted to the Ancient Mother, a powerful symbol in many pagan or earth-centered religions. Despite my initial resistance to such harmless but "primitive" practices, I found myself deeply moved by the ritual. For the first time, I could picture ... and even experience a sense of the Feminine Divine.
It was only later when studying the Hebrew Scriptures at Andover Newton Theological School that I learned there were images of a feminine divine in the scriptures. It was not something I had grown up knowing, despite my Jewish background. I didn't know that the Hebrew word for the holy spirit was ruah, which is a feminine word. The Greek word for spirit commonly used in the New Testament is pneuma. It has no gender; it's neutral. If we simply substituted the Hebrew word ruah for the Greek word pneuma in the Christian Trinity, we would have both a Divine Father and a Divine Mother. We are back to the concept that had existed in pagan religions for thousands of years, the essential and fundamental balance of male and female characteristics.
You have probably heard of the Gnostics Christians, the group which was denounced as heretics by the Early Church Fathers, the ones who ultimately gained the power of Rome. These early Gnostic Christians believed differently and followed a very different path than these Church Fathers. Although in the culture of the times equality of the sexes was never assured, in the Gnostic society men and women were more equal for decades longer than in the orthodox churches. Here women here filled the roles of teachers and preachers, evangelists and sponsors. They were, in general, powerful and influential.
In the Gospel of Philip, one of the Gnostic mentioned in my reading before the sermon, Pagels points us to the following passage: "Whoever becomes a Christian gains both father and mother, for the Spirit or ruah is 'Mother to many.'" The gospel writer didn't mean that these new converts would gain a second set of physical parents, but spiritual parents, a Divine Mother and Father. Some Gnostics also give the Divine Mother a special power long associated with the Goddess, Sophia or Wisdom.
It seems that Dan Brown was influenced by Gnostic writings and scholarship about such writings in his novel. Why else would he name one of his main characters, a supposed descendent of Jesus, Sophie? I pretty sure he meant to refer to Sophia, the Wisdom of the Feminine Divine. And why else would he have as central to his story the near equal partnership of Jesus and Mary Magdalene? His scholarship in the book may have been sloppy, but he knew enough to be inspired by the Gnostics, the ones who chose the different path, the ones who clung to the ancient wisdom.
It is not too much of a stretch to say that Unitarian Universalists are descended spiritually from these Gnostic Christians, these heretics. Heretic simply means one who chooses. Each of us is a heretic in a way in the sense that we are free to choose our own beliefs... within the bounds of experience, reason and conscience. We are descended spiritually from those who emphasized knowledge, self-understanding and compassion, not simply blind faith. We are related to those who value the strengths of the female characteristics as well as the male characteristics and the need for balance in society as well as in ourselves.
I end with this prayer--
May all of us, men and women, rediscover and reclaim the Divine Mother.
May we cultivate within ourselves her virtues of creativity, love and compassion.
May a new balance of female and male traits create a world of greater peace and harmony.
Amen and blessed be.
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
James L. Garlow, with Timothy Paul Jones and April Williams, The Da Vinci CodeBreaker. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2006.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.