  urlLink This NYT article is on ABC's editorial process for their special, Jesus, Mary, and da Vinci , which aired last night. My mom read the book that started all this, I should say, that brought all this to the surface of American pop-culture, The da Vinci Code . She told me the plot, and I'm getting ready to talk about it, so if you want to read the book, don't click on any links or read the rest of this blog. The plot weaves in a lot of theories about Christianity's origin, namely two, though. One that says Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers, got married, had a baby.
Pretty standard urlLink Last Temptation stuff. The other says that the figure in the painting The Last Supper commonly thought of as an effeminate looking John is actually Mary Magdalene and, correspondingly, da Vinci and the Knights Templar held the secret that the Gospel of John's mention of the disciple Jesus loved is actually Mary. The weaving depends on the reader believing the Catholic Church purposefully and forcefully held the secret to protect the proper image of asexual religious leaders.
Not a hard sell for some, especially in light of the church's recent problems. I have to say, the ideas the book puts forth would make it easier for me to believe. The church--the body of Christianity at large, Catholic and Protestant--is clearly not what Jesus meant it to be. I can believe in Jesus, but everything after gets fuzzy. A gigantic part of that stems from the books written by Paul that so malign women, and the actions churches take today that claim Paul as their justification.
Last night I watched The Thornbirds and there was a line where Meggie asked the priest how God could condemn a man for loving a woman. This jives with my idea that God, who presumably created man and woman and love, would never want to set the ideal as a person that denies himself this. If Jesus and Mary were lovers, it makes sense that Mary was the first to go to him. As his spouse, it would have been her duty to prepare his body, and as the person most intimate to Jesus, he would have shown himself resurrected to her first.
Most of all, I like the idea that Jesus loved . I don't mean love in the typical Greek three kinds of love way, either. I mean love , like the end of a hard day, share a look, eat, pay the bills, then find enough strength deep, deep down to still make love love . The Greek language of Jesus' day recognized friend love, passionate love, and selfless love. Spouse love is all three and then some, and if the language weren't a following of misogynist culture, there would have been a forth love word that recognized that.
The bible covers all the other three, but it was written by, edited by men in an age that did not celebrate marital love. I can totally believe they left anything that could be construed as marital love out. I think all this da Vinci Code stuff is too trendy to even consider as true. I wish it were true though. 
