The ABC special Jesus, Mary, and Da Vinci was a fair program about a silly idea, but it illustrates a key distinction Christians need to be mindful of in our efforts to engage this culture.

The recent special walked through the ludicrous idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that he had children that were shepherded off to the south of France, and that the church suppressed this information because it would undercut Jesus’ deity. Furthermore, Mary’s reputation as a prostitute was fabricated by church leaders to undercut her influence, and that of women in general, in the early church. The real story was kept by a secret society called “The Priory of Sion,” to which many famous Europeans, such as Leonardo da Vinci, belonged. The entire theory is strung out in a novel known as The Da Vinci Code. What caused the stir, at least in part, was the author’s claim that the backdrop to his fictitious story is based on the truth.

Anyone familiar with the Bible knows that three facts are clear. First, Mary indeed was not a prostitute. The effort to connect her to the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet in Luke 7:36–50 or to Mary of Bethany in John 12 is fraught with difficulty. Second, Mary is introduced to us in Luke 8:1–3 as the beneficiary of an exorcism by Jesus. Third, her only other biblical role is that of witness to the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

The Apostle Mary
When some in the early church called Mary an “apostle to the apostles,” the point was not to promote women’s ordination (and thus pose a threat to early bishops). The title only meant that she was divinely chosen and sent to the Apostles as bearer of the good news that Jesus was raised. In an era when women were not counted as legal witnesses, this exalted Mary as a significant role model for women in the early church.

Regarding this business of her supposed marriage to Jesus: When Paul was defending his right to have a wife (as in 1 Cor. 9:5), a right he did not exercise, he mentioned that Cephas (Peter) and Barnabas had wives. Had Jesus been married, Paul would have certainly mentioned such an important detail; it would have clinched his argument. I mentioned this in my interview on the ABC special, and the program noted that most biblical scholars agreed with the point. This inclusion leads me to the next point.

Constructive engagement
Many Christians have become so worked up in the cultural war metaphor that they risk losing the ability to engage the culture at all. In this case, many believers have mocked not only The Da Vinci Code but also the TV special that discussed it. For reasons that will help us engage the culture in ways that help them understand us better, I believe this is a mistake.

ABC ran this special because over 4 million people had read the book and had been exposed to this revisionist view of Jesus. The special sought to investigate these claims journalistically. To do so, the producers had to walk through the theory in detail to give context for its assessment. The mass media are not an arm of the church, nor should Christians expect them to be. Their job is to report all sides of an issue, employing a variety of perspectives, the true and the false, not to mention the plausible and the fringe, especially when such ideas are making a cultural impact. That is what this special tried to do.

In watching such programs, we need to distinguish between those who advocate revisionist theories, who also get prime-time exposure, and the reporting that takes place, especially if there is a good-faith effort to present both sides. In this instance, I counted several times when a point made from the book was followed by scholars who said there was no evidence for the idea.

I have my quibbles with the special, and with the hype the network used to advertise it. But the popularity of both the book and the special points to our culture’s continuing fascination with Jesus. And even when that curiosity borders on the perverse, we need to be engaged in the conversation—if not on TV specials, certainly in our neighborhoods, schools, and offices, wherever the topic of conversation comes up—talking about the real Jesus in a constructive way.

Darrell Bock is research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and author of Jesus According to Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels (Baker, 2002).

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Dan Brown is right about one thing (and not much more). In the course of Christian history, few events loom larger than the Council of Nicea in 325. When the newly converted Roman Emperor Constantine called bishops from around the world to present-day Turkey, the church had reached a theological crossroads.

Led by an Alexandrian theologian named Arius, one school of thought argued that Jesus had undoubtedly been a remarkable leader, but he was not God in flesh. Arius proved an expert logician and master of extracting biblical proof texts that seemingly illustrated differences between Jesus and God, such as John 14:28: “the Father is greater than I.” In essence, Arius argued that Jesus of Nazareth could not possibly share God the Father’s unique divinity.

In The Da Vinci Code, Brown apparently adopts Arius as his representative for all pre-Nicene Christianity. Referring to the Council of Nicea, Brown claims that “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.”

In reality, early Christians overwhelmingly worshipped Jesus Christ as their risen Savior and Lord. Before the church adopted comprehensive doctrinal creeds, early Christian leaders developed a set of instructional summaries of belief, termed the “Rule” or “Canon” of Faith, which affirmed this truth. To take one example, the canon of prominent second-century bishop Irenaeus took its cue from 1 Corinthians 8:6: “Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ.”

The term used here—Lord, Kyrios—deserves a bit more attention. Kyrios was used by the Greeks to denote divinity (though sometimes also, it is true, as a simple honorific). In the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint, pre-dating Christ), this term became the preferred substitution for “Jahweh,” the holy name of God. The Romans also used it to denote the divinity of their emperor, and the first-century Jewish writer Josephus tells us that the Jews refused to use it of the emperor for precisely this reason: only God himself was kyrios.

The Christians took over this usage of kyrios and applied it to Jesus, from the earliest days of the church. They did so not only in Scripture itself (which Brown argues was doctored after Nicea), but in the earliest extra-canonical Christian book, the Didache, which scholars agree was written no later than the late100s. In this book, the earliest Aramaic-speaking Christians refer to Jesus as Lord.

In addition, pre-Nicene Christians acknowledged Jesus’s divinity by petitioning God the Father in Christ’s name. Church leaders, including Justin Martyr, a second-century luminary and the first great church apologist, baptized in the name of the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—thereby acknowledging the equality of the one Lord’s three distinct persons.

The Council of Nicea did not entirely end the controversy over Arius’s teachings, nor did the gathering impose a foreign doctrine of Christ’s divinity on the church. The participating bishops merely affirmed the historic and standard Christian beliefs, erecting a united front against future efforts to dilute Christ’s gift of salvation.

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In Christian mythology, the Holy Grail was the dish, plate, cup or vessel used by Jesus at the Last Supper, said to possess miraculous powers. The connection of Joseph of Arimathea with the Grail legend dates from Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie (late twelfth century) in which Joseph receives the Grail from an apparition of Jesus and sends it with his followers to Great Britain; building upon this theme, later writers recounted how Joseph used the Grail to catch Christ’s blood while interring him and that in Britain he founded a line of guardians to keep it safe. The quest for the Holy Grail makes up an important segment of the Arthurian cycle, appearing first in works by Chrétien de Troyes (Loomis 1961). The legend may combine Christian lore with a Celtic myth of a cauldron endowed with special powers.

The development of the Grail legend has been traced in detail by cultural historians: It is a gothic legend, which first came together in the form of written romances, deriving perhaps from some pre-Christian folklore hints, in the later 12th and early 13th centuries. The early Grail romances centered on Percival and were woven into the more general Arthurian fabric. The Grail romances started in France and were translated into other European vernaculars; only a handful of non-French romances added any essential new elements.

There are two schools of thought concerning the Grail’s origin. The first, championed by Roger Sherman Loomis, Alfred Nutt, and Jessie Weston, holds that it derived from early Celtic myth and folklore. Loomis traced a number of parallels between Medieval Welsh literature and Irish material and the Grail romances, including similarities between the Mabinogion’s Bran the Blessed and the Arthurian Fisher King, and between Bran’s life-restoring cauldron and the Grail. Other legends featured magical platters or dishes that symbolize otherworldly power or test the hero’s worth. Sometimes the items generate a never-ending supply of food, sometimes they can raise the dead. Sometimes they decide who the next king should be, as only the true sovereign could hold them.

On the other hand, some scholars believe the Grail began as a purely Christian symbol. For example, Joseph Goering of the University of Toronto (Goering 2005) has identified sources for Grail imagery in 12th-century wall paintings from churches in the Catalan Pyrenees (now mostly removed to the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona), which present unique iconic images of the Virgin Mary holding a bowl that radiates tongues of fire, images that predate the first literary account by Chrétien de Troyes. Goering argues that they were the original inspiration for the Grail legend.[1]

Another recent theory holds that the earliest stories that cast the Grail in a Christian light were meant to promote the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Holy Communion. Although the practice of Holy Communion was first alluded to in the Christian Bible and defined by theologians in the first centuries A.D., it was around the time of the appearance of the first Christianized Grail literature that the Roman church was beginning to add more ceremony and mysticism around this particular sacrament. Thus, the first Grail stories may have been celebrations of a renewal in this traditional sacrament (Barber, 2004).[2] This theory has some backing by the fact that Grail legends are almost entirely a phenomenon of the Western church (see below).

Most scholars today accept that both Christian and Celtic traditions contributed to the legend’s development, though many of the early Celtic-based arguments are largely discredited (Loomis himself came to reject much of Weston and Nutt’s work). The general view is that the central theme of the Grail is Christian, even when not explicitly religious, but that much of the setting and imagery of the early romances is drawn from Celtic material.

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Between 1961 and 1984 Plantard contrived a mythical pedigree of the Priory of Sion claiming that it was the offshoot of the “Order of Sion” (its correct historical title being the Abbey de Notre Dame du Mont Sion) which had been founded in the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the First Crusade.

Another book on the Priory of Sion, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail [claims] the Priory of Sion has a long history starting with the creation of the Knights Templar as its military and financial front; it is sworn to returning the Merovingian dynasty, that ruled the Frankish kingdom from 447 to 751 C.E., to the thrones of Europe and Jerusalem; the order protects these royal claimants because they think they are the literal descendants of Jesus and his alleged wife Mary Magdalene or, at the very least, of king David and high priest Aaron; and the Roman Catholic Church tried to kill off all remnants of this dynasty and their guardians, the Cathars and the Templars, during the Inquisition, in order to maintain power through the apostolic succession of Peter instead of the hereditary succession of Mary Magdalene.

Recently, due to Dan Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, there has been a new level of public interest in the Priory of Sion. In a short preface, Brown lists a series of “facts” underlying the fiction of the novel. He declares that “the Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci.”
If this is not a mere marketing trick, it would seem that Dan Brown takes the fantastic claims of the Secret Dossiers more or less at face value, like the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail did before him. In the body of the novel itself (chapter 48), it is said that “the Dossiers Secrets had been authenticated by many specialists and incontrovertibly confirmed” that the famous people listed were indeed former Priory leaders - something “historians had suspected for a long time.” It should be understood that this fictionalized treatment completely reverses the judgment of real-world researchers, who (with the exception of dedicated conspiracy theorists) have rather dismissed the Dossiers as obvious forgeries. Nor had any “historians” ever suspected that Newton, Botticelli etc. were members of any “Priory of Sion”; this claim first appeared in the Dossiers themselves
…
In the novel, the Priory is portrayed as more of a Goddess mystery religion, something that is hardly true to the character of Plantard’s original Priory (he had no particular interest in goddesses). On the other hand, the organizational structure of Brown’s version of the Priory is as described in the Dossiers (it has a Nautonnier or Grand Master who has three Sénéchaux below him; as part of the plot, all four are murdered).

In February of 2006, Baigent and Leigh filed suit against Brown’s publishers, Random House, alleging that significant portions of The Da Vinci Code were taken from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and are copyright violations. It is in any case obvious that most of what Dan Brown “knows” about the Priory is based on that book, which in turn is inspired by the Secret Dossiers that Plantard and his companions salted into the French National Archive.

Brown also worked into his plot Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh’s theories regarding the ultimate “secret” of the Priory: Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, their descendants intermarried with the Merovingians, and the sacred bloodline survives into modern times. In the universe of the novel, unlike our own, this scenario seems to be widely accepted among historians and academics while the general public remains ignorant because of the influence of the Bible and the Church. In short, The Da Vinci Code describes a world where Pierre Plantard’s hoax was the truth, where the Secret Dossiers were genuine and not forgeries, and where people who support such ideas are reputable historians rather than conspiracy theorists and fringe researchers.

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Mary Magdalene is mentioned in precisely three of the Nag Hammadi scrolls. The “Gospel of Mary” is the report of a vision which sets the material world against the nonmaterial, seeing Mind as the intermediary of Soul and Spirit. This is fairly standard Platonic idealism; it is hard to see what it’s got to do with the sacred feminine, but it’s easy to see that it has nothing to do with a first-century Jewish prophetic movement such as that of Jesus.

The “Gospel of Philip” is the one where Jesus kisses Mary— but the idea that a kiss was a key gesture of romantic attachment won’t survive two minutes when we move away from Hollywood and into the real world of late antiquity. There is not the slightest sign of Jesus being married to Mary and having a child by her. The “Gospel of Thomas” has one saying about Mary (51:19), in which “Jesus” states that “Mary will be saved if she makes herself male, because every female who makes herself male will become fit for the kingdom of God.”

That is hardly a ringing endorsement for the sacred feminine. If it’s sacred femininity you want, you must look elsewhere, to various forms of paganism ancient and modern. These have become enormously popular in some strands of New Age and postmodern thinking. They have found their way into some revisionist versions of western Christianity. But they have nothing to do with Nag Hammadi and nothing whatever to do with early Christianity.

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Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily “true” of “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous-that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.
 
The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy’s [God’s] own ground. He can argue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below [Satan]. By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real”.

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