What do we know about the historical people in this book? We’ve probably read a lot of books between us, so what can we confirm or not? Which inconsistencies are most intriguing? What does this story tell us about faith (humanity and divinity), God (inner or outer?) and how beliefs manifest across religious practices?Our thoughts…
• There were many intimate and touching moments in this book (the Garden with Jesus and Mary; the death of Jesus while he is with Mary; Jude's "betrayal" of Jesus)
• The different perspective/twist made sense even though they were totally different than what some of us learned about the Bible.
• Should we be saying “The Virgin Jesus” or “The Celibate One” just like we say “Virgin Mary”?
• We had a person in the group who was raised Protestant and one was raised Catholic, and another who was raised neither but have read a lot about Jesus. It was really interesting. One thing that the not C/P person learned was that Magdelene was seen as a scholar and often depicted that way in art and paintings (with a book). A Pope changed that part of history (some think he did it accidentally), confusing her with another "Mary" in the Bible who was in fact a prostitute. The C and P book groupers had only learned she was a prostitute and never heard this story.
Ideas from the book…
• It is not that there is one God, but that God is one
• God is in you and you are in God and this is all meshed (just like Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love). The Secret is that the energy you put out is the energy you attract.
• “Gnosis” means seeking knowledge (of God)
• Pythagoras taught that Dionysus was Osiris (who was cut up into pieces, yet still impregnated Isis to conceive Horus) who is Christ (for the Jews). There seemed to be an idea that the Jews needed a “savior” like the other religions of the time.
• There was the “plot” at the end to create a Messiah, but then the plan didn’t work, but the essence of Christianity still came out in the decision by Jesus that he needed to die afterall.
In this story, it looks like…
• Jesus a twin
• Mary, the mother of Jesus was a substitute wife for Joseph
• Mary, the mother of Jesus was already pregnant
• Joseph, the father of Jesus, was already married
• Salome and Mary debated whether John the Baptizer or Jesus was the “chosen one”? In the story, Jesus didn’t think John really “got it” because he didn’t have the “God is within” ideology.
• Mary Mag. disguised herself as “John” and this enabled her to get an education (and so did her father)
• a different image of Mag. as scholar, rather than the “prostitute.”
• The “death” and “rising” at Passover was planned.
• Jude and Mary Mag. just played the role that Jesus asked of them.
What did other books have to say?
The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity by James D. Tabor. Tabor argues Jesus was a member of an important Jesus family (descendant from the royal lineage of King David) and along with John the Baptist (descendant from the priestly lineage), a Messiah for the Jewish people.
- "The English word 'messiah' comes from the Hebrew word moshiach, which simply means 'an anointed one.' The equivalent Greek word, christos, also means 'anointed' and from that we have derived our more familiar term 'Christ,' meaning Messiah.... Most people are surprised to learn that the very first Messiah in the Bible was Aaron. He was 'annointed' as a priest by his brother Moses and is referred to in the Hebrew text as a 'mosiach' or 'messiah' (Exodus 40:12-15)." (p. 58)
- "Christians and Jews subsequently have come to focus on the Messiah—a single figure of David's line who was to rule as King in the last days. And yet, in the Dead Sea Scrolls we encounter a devoutly religious community, usually identified with the Essenes, who expected the coming of three figures—a prophet like Moses and the messiahs of Aaron and of Israel." (p. 57)
- "...[W]hat we can know, with some certainty, is that the royal family of Jesus, including the children and grandchildren of his brothers and sisters, were honored by the early Christians well into the 2nd century A.D., while at the same time they were watched and hunted down by the highest levels of the Roman government in Palestine." (p. 290)
- Jesus was actually a disciple of John the Baptist from whom he learned a great deal.
- "Jesus near his thirtieth birthday joined the crowds that were streaming out to hear John. He traveled from Nazareth down to the Jordan, along this very route, to be baptized by John in the Jordan River (Mark 1:9). By such a response he was publicly joining and endorsing the revival movement John had sparked…. [F]rom the time of Jesus' baptism he was ready to take his destined place alongside John as a full partner in the baptizing movement." (p. 127)
- "The great embarrassment that the Christians faced was that it was well known that John had baptized Jesus—not the other way around! Jesus had come to John and joined his movement—which in the context of ancient Judaism meant that Jesus was a disciple of John and John was the rabbi or teacher of Jesus." (p. 133)
- "There [in a Hebrew version of the gospel of Matthew untouched by the Greek copyists] Jesus' astounding testimony to John' s greatness stands unedited and unqualified: 'Among those born of women there is none greater than John.' " (p. 134)
- "When he told them, 'Let' s leave the nets and go fish for people,' they did not blindly drop everything in some mesmerized state of devotion to his irresistible bidding as is so often portrayed. These disciples had worked with him and lived with him for months the previous year in Judea when they were baptizing huge crowds of people." (p. 158)
- "This is perhaps the best-kept secret in the entire New Testament. Jesus' own brothers were among the so-called 'Twelve Apostles.' This means they were the muted participants in all those many references to the 'Twelve.' They were with Jesus at the 'last Supper' and when he died he turned his movement over to his brother James, the eldest, and put his mother into James' s care. James is none other than the mysterious 'beloved disciple' of the gospel of John." (p. 163)
Mary is no virgin, having sex with not one but three men. Jesus’ father was actually a Roman soldier names Pantera, thus reviving an anti-Jesus polemic advocated by Celsus in the patristic era. "The assumption of the historian is that all human beings have both a biological mother and father, and that Jesus is no exception. That leaves two possibilities—either Joseph or some other unnamed man was the father of Jesus." (p. 59)
- "The later Christian dogma that Mary was a perpetual virgin, that she never had children other than Jesus and never had sexual relations with any man lies at the heart of the issue. No one in the early church even imagined such an idea, since the family of Jesus played such a visible and pivotal role in his life and that of his early followers. It all has to do with Mary being totally removed from her 1st-century Jewish culture and context in the interest of an emerging view of the time that human sexuality was degraded and unholy at worst, and a necessary evil to somehow be struggled against at best." (p. 74)
- "There is good reason to suppose that Joseph died early, whether because he was substantially older than Mary or for some other unknown cause…. According to the Torah, or Law of Moses, the oldest surviving unmarried brother was obligated to marry his deceased brother' s widow and bear a child in his name so that his dead brother' s 'name' or lineage would not perish. This is called a 'Levirate marriage' or yibbum in Hebrew, and it is required in the Torah (Deuteronomy 25:5-10)." (p. 76)
- "Given this information, a rather different but historically consistent picture begins to emerge. Jesus was born of an unknown father, but was not the son of Joseph. Joseph died without children, so according to Jewish law 'Clophas' or 'Alphaeus' became his 'replacer,' and married his widow, Mary, mother of Jesus." (p. 80)
The "lost" childhood of Jesus: "We have extraordinarily good historical records from the reign of Herod the Great. It is inconceivable that such a 'slaughter of the infants' would go unrecorded by the Jewish historian Josephus or other contemporary Roman historians. Matthew' s account is clearly theological, written to justify later views of Jesus' exalted status." (p. 88). "A good trivia question would be 'What was Jesus' vocation?' Everyone knows he was a carpenter, or at least the son of a carpenter…. The Greek word tekton is a more generic term referring to a 'builder.' It can include one who works with wood, but in its 1st-century Galilean context it more likely refers to a stoneworker." (p. 89)
"Jesus was a Galilean Jew, not a Christian…. To understand Jesus in his own time and place we have to understand his deep commitment to the ancestral faith of his fathers." (p. 108). "…[Jesus] is not 'liberal' with regard to Jewish observances in any modern sense of the term. What he did not accept were certain oral traditions and interpretations that some rabbinic teachers had added to the biblical commandments." (p. 115). "As we shall see, Jesus held Herod Antipas and all he stood for in utter contempt…. It was Herod who had brutally murdered his kinsman and teacher John the Baptizer, and Jesus had witnessed firsthand how Herod' s aspirations for wealth and power had unjustly oppressed the lives of his countrymen." (p. 106)
The final week in Jerusalem—the Temple and the Last Supper, Jesus' trial, death by crucifixion
- "Scholars are agreed that little in the accounts of Jesus' trial before Pilate is historically credible. They have been completely shaped by a later Christian theological tradition that sought to put the blame for Jesus' death wholly upon the Jewish people while exonerating the Romans as sympathetic to Jesus, with Pilate doing all he possibly could to save Jesus' life." (p. 213)
- "At every Jewish meal, bread is broken, wine is shared, and blessings are said over each—but the idea of eating human flesh and drinking blood, even symbolically, is completely alien to Judaism…. This general sensitivity to the very idea of 'drinking blood' precludes the likelihood that Jesus would have used such symbols." (p. 200-201)
- "Later Christian tradition put Jesus' last meal with his disciples on Thursday evening and his crucifixion on Friday. We now know that its one day off. Jesus' last meal was Wednesday night, and he was crucified on Thursday, the 14th day of the Hebrew month Nisan. The Passover meal itself was eaten Thursday night, at sundown, as the 15th of Nisan began. Jesus never ate that Passover meal. He had died at 3 p.m. on Thursday." (p. 197)
- "As shocking as it may sound, the original manuscripts of the gospel of Mark report no appearances of the resurrected Jesus at all!" (p. 228)
- "If Jesus did come to anticipate his suffering at the hands of his enemies, I am convinced that he expected that he would be saved from death, delivered from the 'mouth of the lion' as the Psalmist had predicted (Psalm 22:21)." (p. 179)
- "Paul seems to be willing to use the term 'resurrection' to refer to something akin to an apparition or vision. And when he does mention Jesus' body he says it was a 'spiritual' body. But a 'spiritual body' and an 'embodied spirit' could be seen as very much the same phenomenon." (p. 230)
- "Although the followers of Jesus reshaped themselves under the new leadership of James, and eventually returned to Jerusalem, there might well have been a period in which they retreated to Galilee in order to sort things out, and that is just what these gospel traditions appear to reflect. If that was the case then the more idealized account of the Jesus movement in the early chapters of the book of Acts is Luke' s attempt to recast things in a more triumphant way." (p. 238)
- "There are two completely separate and distinct 'Christianities' embedded in the New Testament. One is quite familiar and became the version of the Christian faith known to billions over the past two millennia. Its main proponent was the apostle Paul. The other has been largely forgotten and by the turn of the 1st century A.D. had been effectively marginalized and suppressed by the other." (p. 259)
• Tabor puts undue importance on the hypothetical gospel document known as Q(Quelle), calling it “our most authentic early Christian document.” In this he aligns himself with a key affirmation of the infamous “Jesus Seminar.”
• Tabor’s method, though at points rooted in solid historical facts, is highly speculative and inconsistently selective. He will read one text as literally true, but reject the next as unreliable.
• Tabor is to be respected as a capable and hardworking archaeologist.
• A resurrected Jesus needs no successor to carry on His dynasty. He is the dynasty, the King, eternal who reigns forever!
• The conclusions of James Howell, pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC, are surely on target, “Though Tabor has much hard evidence, he builds on facts with a hypothesis, then a guess, a few more facts, then another two hypotheses, an artifact that admits of multiple interpretations, another fact, then a guess- then he connects all these dots in one of dozens of possible ways. The feel in this marvelously well-written volume is that he is building a structure of facts toward his conclusion, and the reader may easily forget that a hypothesis is merely a hypothesis, and a string of them become guesswork.”
The Da Vinci Code: A Novel by Dan Brown• Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had children whose decedents are protected by a secret society.
• “The Da Vinci Code is a novel and therefore a work of fiction. While the book's characters and their actions are obviously not real, the artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals depicted in this novel all exist (for example, Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings, the Gnostic Gospels, Hieros Gamos, etc.). These real elements are interpreted and debated by fictional characters. While it is my belief that some of the theories discussed by these characters may have merit, each individual reader must explore these characters' viewpoints and come to his or her own interpretations. My hope in writing this novel was that the story would serve as a catalyst and a springboard for people to discuss the important topics of faith, religion, and history.” ~Dan Brown
• True facts from the novel
• “The dialogue is wonderful. These authors and I obviously disagree, but the debate that is being generated is a positive powerful force. The more vigorously we debate these topics, the better our understanding of our own spirituality. Controversy and dialogue are healthy for religion as a whole. Religion has only one true enemy--apathy--and passionate debate is a superb antidote.” ~Dan Brown
Breaking the Da Vinci Code by Darrell L. Bock• “Gnostic” means knowledge. Do the unbiblical "Gnostic Gospels" really reveal truths about Jesus that the church and New Testament have hidden from us? No
• Was Jesus really married to Mary Magdalene, and did he have children by her? Has their bloodline really been traced by "scores of historians"? No
• Would being single really make Jesus "un-Jewish"? No, it was accepted among very religious/spiritual Jews.
• Did the Catholic Church really suppress the fact that Christ's "family" fled to France as a way to protect his claims to divinity? There were no children.
• Did the Bible really emerge as a "power play" document in the early fourth century under the emperor Constantine, after Christianity finally won its battle with paganism? “Because Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status four centuries after Jesus’ death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling [Jesus’] life as a mortal man. To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke. From this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history.” (Emphasis in The Da Vinci Code, p. 234.) Constantine “commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.” The claim continues that Nag Hammadi and the gospels found there show that a more diverse Christianity existed than people think in the early period. No, it was pretty much the four gospels early on.
• Did Leonardo da Vinci really stumble on a Vatican plot to conceal the truth about Jesus, and then expose it in his famous painting of the Last Supper? No.
• “Christ as Messiah was critical to the functioning of church and state. Many scholars claim that the early church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power.” It was by a “relatively close vote” at that council that Jesus was made Son of God.”
• Was the role of women suppressed in the early centuries of the Christian faith? No, if it were really suppressed, then they wouldn’t have had women find the tomb empty, witness the resurrection, and receive the “good news” of afterlife.
THREE CORRECT CLAIMS in the Da Vinci Code
1. Constantine was a key figure whose rule was a turning point in Christian history.
2. The Nicene Creed was an important affirmation in the history of the faith and was, in part, an effort to control what was to be believed. The creed was an attempt to affirm the core of what Christians regarded as essential for all Christians to believe, a significant exercise for a movement experiencing the diversity that Christianity faced in AD 325.
3. Mary was important because she saw the empty tomb and testifies to a Jesus that lives so we might have life.
Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know About Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine by Bart D. Ehrman (I highly recommend this book, if you are interested in this topic)Ten Historical Problems – factual errors with The Divinci Code
1. Jesus’s life was not recorded by 1000’s of followers (he didn’t have 1000’s, let alone literate ones).
2. It’s not true that 80 gospels were considered for the New Testament (there was no “contest,” only the four we know have been a “standard” since before Constantine)
3. It’s not true that Jesus wasn’t considered divine until the Council of Nicaea, and that he was considered “a mortal prophet before that. (Human, Super Human, or Divine?)
4. Constantine did not commission a new Bible which omitted references to Jesus’s human traits (he didn’t commission a new Bible and there are many references to Jesus’s humanity)
5. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not found in the 1950’s (they were found in 1947) and the Nag Hammadi documents do not tell the Grail story or emphasize Jesus’s human traits (quite the contrary, they underemphasize them)
6. Jewish decorum in no way forbade a Jewish man to be married. Most of the community behind the Dead Sea scrolls were Jewish, unmarried, celibate men.
7. The Dead Sea scrolls were not the earliest Christian records (they are Jewish with no Christianity in them at all).
8. We have no idea about Mary Magdelene’s lineage. We don’t know if she was from the house of Benjamin. Even if she were, that wouldn’t make her a descendant of David.
9. Mary Magdelene was not pregnant at the time of the crucifixion.
10. Q is a hypothetical document (there was nothing secretive, it was not written by Jesus, it was probably list of quotes from him).
What historians and theologians agree upon, has to be based on certain premises:
A story is either made up (lie) or has a “source”
The earlier the better (Mark and Q)
Stories are more reliable when two or more sources say the same thing independent of each other (that means that the two sources didn’t rely or look upon each other as a source), therefore the story must have been from an ealier source available to them all
Cutting against the grain of perspectives (or wishes or desires) means it is probably true
- Jesus had brothers
- Jesus knew John the Baptiste
- Jesus publicly associated with women.
Infancy Thomas told about Jesus being a superhuman child who couldn’t control his powers (and was not included in the gospels). In addition to showing Jesus as more super-human, the gospels that weren’t included were more anti Jewish.
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Men in the Ministry of Jesus
The first thing to be said is that it appears that most of Jesus' followers, and certainly his closest followers, were men. The vast majority of the stories about Jesus -- both those that can be established as historically authentic and those about which we might have some doubts -- concern his interaction with men. This is not to be unexpected: women in the first century were typically under the authority of the men in their lives -- their fathers and/or husbands -- and would not have been allowed, for the most part, to be traipsing about the countryside after an itinerant teacher when there was so much work to be done in the home: preparing food, making and mending clothes, taking care of children. These were women's activities; men had more of a public profile outside the home. For a woman to be active outside the home usually meant either that she was not under a man's authority (father or husband) because she was, say, an older single adult or that she was an upper-class woman of means who had others, such as slaves, to take care of her household duties. And even though a select few of Jesus' followers may well have been from the upper classes -- and probably were, as we will see -- the vast majority of them were peasants. And peasant women in areas such as rural Galilee would necessarily have spent most of their time at home working; there was not a lot of time (if any) for leisure activities such as going out midweek to hear a good sermon.
Women in the Ministry of Jesus
This does not mean that women were absent from Jesus' ministry. Quite the contrary, even though women are not prominently featured in the stories of Jesus in comparison with men, they do appear there on a regular basis, far more than one might anticipate given the patriarchal society that restricted women's public activities in the first century. More than other teachers, including other Jewish teachers, Jesus appears to have been publicly involved with women in his ministry. This is born out by a careful examination of our surviving sources, utilizing the various historical criteria that I spelled out in the previous chapter.
To provide a brief synopsis of the material, I can summarize as follows. It is attested independently in two of our early sources, Mark and L (Luke's special source) that Jesus was accompanied by women in his travels (Mark 15:40-41; Luke 8:1-3). This tradition is corroborated, independently again, by the Gospel of Thomas (e.g., Gosp. Thom. 114) and by other passages where Jesus interacts with women (e.g., Luke 10:38-42; Matt. 15-21- 29). Mark and L also indicate that women provided Jesus with financial support during his ministry, evidently serving as his patrons (Mark 15:40-41; Luke 8:1-3). That is to say, since Jesus during his ministry had no source of income, these women (one of them is named as Mary Magdalene) provided him with the funds that he and his disciples needed in order to live. These obviously would have been wealthier women who would not have been forced to remain at home to do the work necessary to keep a household together. It may be that some of these women, including Mary Magdalene, were single, but not all of them were. One of them is named as "Joanna, the wife of [King] Herod's steward Chuza" (Luke 8:2). Another is called Susanna, but, as with Mary, we are not sure of her marital status. Luke tells us that there were "many others who provided for him [Jesus] out of their own resources." The others named by Mark include one named Salome and another Mary, who is identified as "the mother of James the younger and of Joses." It is possible that this is none other than the mother of Jesus, who is earlier said in Mark 6:3 to have two other sons named James and Joses. In any event, it is clear that Jesus was accompanied in his travels not only by the twelve men disciples but also by women, some of whom provided for him out of their means.
Not only was Jesus accompanied by women, he also was actively in contact with them during his public ministry. In both Mark and John, Jesus is said to have engaged in public dialogue and debate with women who were not among his immediate followers (John 4:1-42; Mark 7:24-30). Both Gospels also record, independently of one another, the tradition that Jesus had physical contact with a woman who anointed him with oil in public (Mark 14:3-9; John 12:1-8). In Mark's account this is an un- named woman in the house of a leper named Simon (this same account is found in a different form in Luke as well, who appears to have gotten it from Mark but changed it in some key ways; see Luke 7:36-50); in John's account it is Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, in her own home. And Jesus is said to have helped women in need on several occasions (e.g., Matt. 15:21-29).
In all four of the canonical Gospels, the women who accompanied Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem during the last week of his life are said to have been present at his crucifixion (Matt. 27:55; Mark 15:40-41; Luke 23:49; John 19:25). The earliest traditions in Mark suggest that they alone remained faithful to the end -- all of his male disciples had fled. In addition, it is clear from all four of the canonical Gospels, along with the noncanonical Gospel of Peter, that women followers were the first to believe that Jesus' body was no longer in the tomb (Matt. 28:1-10; Mark i6:i-8; Luke 23:55-24: 1 0; John 2 0:1-2; GOSP. Pet- 50-57). These accounts all differ in significant ways concerning how many women there were at the empty tomb: was it Mary Magdalene alone, as in John? Or Mary Magdalene and other women, as in the other Gospels? And if it was with other women, which other women? It depends on which account you read. In any event, it was these women who were the first to proclaim that Jesus had been raised from the dead. As some feminist historians have pointed out, it is hard to underestimate the importance of this tradition about the women at the tomb: without these women, there may well have been no proclamation of the resurrection -- and thus no Christianity.
There are other interesting traditions about Jesus' contact with women that are found in only one or the other of our Gospels and so do not meet our criterion that multiply attested stories are more likely to be authentic. These would include the memorable moment found only in Luke's Gospel when Jesus encourages his friend Mary of Bethany in her decision to attend to his teaching rather than busy herself with "womanly" household duties (Luke 10:38-42).
What can we say about the contextual credibility of these traditions, in light of our criterion that any tradition about Jesus must plausibly be situated in a first-century Palestinian context to be accepted as historical? It is true that women were generally viewed as inferior to men in the ancient world. But there were exceptions. Greek philosophical schools such as the Epicureans and the Cynics, for example, advocated equality for women. Of course, there were not many Epicureans or Cynics in Jesus' immediate environment of Palestine, and our limited sources may suggest that women, as a rule, were generally even more restricted in that rural part of the empire with respect to their abilities to engage in social activities outside the home and away from the authority of their fathers or husbands. Is it credible, then, that a Jewish teacher would have encouraged and promoted such activities?
We have no solid evidence to suggest that other Jewish teachers had women followers during Jesus' day. But we do know that the Pharisees were supported and protected by powerful women in the court of King Herod the Great. Unfortunately, the few sources that we have say little about women among the lower classes, who did not have the wealth or standing to make them independent of their fathers or husbands.
There is one other consideration, however, that makes it easy to believe that Jesus may have had women publicly following him during his ministry. This involves the particular character of his proclamation of the coming kingdom of God. If you'll recall, Jesus maintained that God was going to intervene in history and bring about a reversal of fortunes. The first would be last, and the last would be first. Those who were rich would be impoverished, and the poor would be rich. Those who were exalted now would be humbled, and the humble would be exalted. As a corollary of his message, Jesus associated with the outcasts and down-trodden of society, evidently as an enactment of his proclamation that the kingdom would belong to such as these. If women were generally looked down upon as inferior by the men who made the rules and ran the society, it does not seem at all implausible that Jesus would have associated freely with them and that they would have been particularly intrigued by his proclamation of the coming kingdom.
Some recent scholars have proposed that Jesus in fact did much more than this, that he preached a "radically egalitarian society" -- that is, he set about to reform society by inventing a new set of rules to govern social relations, creating a community in which men and women were to be treated as absolute equals. This, however, may be taking the evidence too far and possibly in the wrong direction, for there is little to suggest that Jesus was concerned with pushing social reform in any fundamental way in this evil age. In his view, present-day society and all its conventions were soon to come to a screeching halt, when the Son of Man arrived from heaven in judgment on the earth. Far from transforming society from within, Jesus was preparing people for the destruction of society. Only when C-@-od's kingdom arrived would an entirely new order appear, in which peace, equality, and justice would reign supreme. This kingdom, though, would not arrive through the implementation of new social reform programs. It would arrive with a cosmic judge, the Son of Man, who would overthrow the evil and oppressive forces of this world.
To this extent (and I would stress, only to this extent), even though Jesus did not urge a social revolution in his time, his message did have radically revolutionary implications. He may have urged his followers to implement these implications in the present (hence his association with women). And in any event, it should be clear that some persons would find his message more attractive than others -- especially those who considered themselves downtrodden and oppressed in the present age, who would be rewarded in the age to come. If there were women who felt this way, given the patriarchal structures of their society, small wonder they would have been attracted to the apocalyptic message of Jesus and the hope it held out for life in the kingdom that was coming.
Was Jesus Married?
We can now turn to the thorny question of whether Jesus him- self was married. In The Da Vinci Code there is no question about the matter, as both Robert Langdon and Leigh Teabing speak of Jesus' marital status.
As Teabing says at one point to Sophie Neveu:
"Jesus as a married man makes infinitely more sense than our standard biblical view of Jesus as a bachelor."
"Why?" Sophie asked.
"Because Jesus was a Jew," Langdon said . . . According to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned, and the obligation for a Jewish father was to find a suitable wife for his son. If Jesus were not married, at least one of the Bible's gospels would have mentioned it and offered some explanation for His unnatural state of bachelorhood." (p. 245)
Once again, however, we appear to be in the realm of sensationalized fictional claims instead of the realm of historical reality. I will be dealing in a moment with the general question of whether Jewish men were always married and whether celibacy was "condemned." But first, what have historians said about Jesus' marital status?
It is true that there have occasionally been historical scholars (as opposed to novelists or "independent researchers") who have claimed that it is likely that Jesus was married.6 But the vast majority of scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity have reached just the opposite conclusion. This is for a variety of compelling reasons.
Most significant is a fact that cannot be overlooked or underestimated: in none of our early Christian sources is there any reference to Jesus' marriage or to his wife. This is true not only of the canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John but of all our other Gospels and all of our other early Christian writings put together. There is no allusion to Jesus as married in the writings of Paul, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of the Nazarenes, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Gospel of the Ebionites -- and on and on. List every ancient source we have for the historical Jesus, and in none of them is there mention of Jesus being married.
And just think of all the occasions each of the authors of these books would have had to mention Jesus' marriage or his wife, had he been married. Jesus' mother is mentioned in these books, as are his "father" (Joseph), brothers, and sisters. Why would his wife never be mentioned? His disciples are mentioned; his other followers (including other women) are mentioned. Why would his wife never be? Moreover, the spouses of his followers are occasionally alluded to. And in one passage there is a reference to the wives of the apostles and to the wives of Jesus' earthly brothers (i Cor. 9:5)- Why not to the wife of Jesus? (That this is not just an argument from silence will become clear in a moment.)
More specifically with reference to Mary Magdalene, if Jesus were actually married to her, why would there be no reference to it? Why is she not singled out as special anywhere in the canonical Gospels? Why in fact, apart from Luke 8:1-3, where she is mentioned by name along with two other named women (Joanna and Susanna) and several others, is she not mentioned during his ministry at all, let alone as one who stood in a special relationship with Jesus? Why does she figure in none of the stories about Jesus in these Gospels? And even in Gospels where she is thought of as someone special, such as the Gospel of Mary, why is it as someone to whom Jesus delivered an important revelation, rather than as someone to whom he was married?
More telling still, why is she identified as she is, as Mary Magdalene? Scholars are widely agreed that she is called Magdalene to differentiate her from the other Marys named in the New Testament, including Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Magdalene indicates her Place of origin -- the town of Magdala, a fishing village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. If one wanted to differentiate this Mary from other Marys, why not indicate that this is the one to whom Jesus was married, rather than to say where she was from? Moreover, if they were married, how is it that Jesus is never portrayed as leaving his hometown until his public ministry, but this woman actually comes from a different town (Magdala, rather than Nazareth)?
These are imponderable difficulties for most scholars considering the question of whether Jesus was married, let alone married to Mary Magdalene. She simply doesn't figure prominently in any of our earliest traditions of Jesus, except at the very end, when she along with other women come to anoint his body for burial. And as I pointed out, not even the later Gospels, such as the Gospel of Philip, indicate that they were married (more on these Gospels in the next chapter).
But if in fact Jesus was not married, how can we explain that he was not? Is Robert Langdon right to say that Jewish men were expected to be married and that celibacy was "condemned"?
Unfortunately, this again is simply part of the narrative fiction of The Da Vinci Code; it has no basis in historical reality (or, perhaps, is based on a tendentious reading of much later Jewish sources). For we do know of Jewish men from the time and place of Jesus who were single, and it is quite clear that they were not "condemned" for it. And what is striking is that this tradition of remaining single and celibate can be found in precisely the same ideological circles as Jesus himself, among Jewish apocalypticists of the first century who expected that the world they lived in soon was to come to a crashing halt when God intervened in history in order to overthrow the forces of evil and bring in his good kingdom.
We know about one group of Jewish apocalypticists in particular from this time and place, as we have already seen. This is the group of Essenes who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. As it turns out, according to ancient records of these Essenes, they were predominantly single, celibate men. This is the testimony of Jewish sources from the time, such as the first-century philosopher Philo, who indicates that "no Essene takes a wife," and the historian Josephus, who indicates that the Essenes shunned marriage; on the other hand, this view is affirmed even by non-Jewish sources, such as the writings of the Roman polymath Pliny the elder, who indicates that the Essenes renounced sex and lived "without any woman."
*Endnotes have been omitted.
Copyright © 2004 Oxford University Press, Inc.
