The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (31 page)

MAGDALENE MYTH

Even the canonical gospels tell us enough about Mary Magdalene for us to recognize her true nature and role. First, we know that she accompanied Jesus on his journeys (Luke 8:3; Mark 15:41). Second, she witnessed his death (Mark 15:40, “There were also women looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the Lesser and of Joses, and Salome”). Third, she and her sisters witnessed the interment: “Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid” (Mark 15:47). Fourth, they came to find and anoint the body: “And when the Sabbath was done, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go and anoint him.” As for the searching element, see John 20:13-15, “They said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ She said to them, ‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ Saying this, she turned around and saw Jesus, though she did not recognize that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?’ Assuming he was the gardener, she said to him, ‘Sir, if you are the one who carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will take him away.’”

Thus far we have a pretty complete parallel to the pattern of the myths of the resurrected gods: The women mourn for the slain divinity and seek for his body, aiming to anoint it. Meanwhile they mourn his death. Mary Magdalene, Mary of James, and Salome are obvious analogues to Isis and Nephthys, though scarcely less to Cybele, Aphrodite, Anath, and Ishtar. In one Osiris mourning chant, Isis exclaims, “Evil men have killed my lord, and I know not where they have laid him!” The similarity to the Magdalene’s words in John 20:13 is striking and obvious.

Conservative apologists like to observe how women were not allowed to give legal witness on most matters according to Jewish law. Thus, they claim, early Christians would never have made up the empty tomb stories, with their female witnesses. Surely, if they were freely fabricating, they would have had men on the scene instead. But then, we must ask, why offer the empty tomb stories at all? Doesn’t the initial claim, that women weren’t worthwhile witnesses, imply that the empty tomb stories/traditions
do not mean to offer them as witnesses
? The stories have an entirely different origin and function: They are scripts for the annual mourning rituals of Jesus and Anastasis /Magdalene, whose women worshipers took the role of the holy women/goddesses of the myth, just as women cultists did in the Isis and Osiris faith.

RESHUFFLED RESURRECTION

As we now read the gospels, Mary and her sisters arrive at the tomb to anoint the body but do not get the opportunity, since the tomb is open and empty. To complete the parallel with the mythic prototype, we should expect to find a Jesus version of the scene in which the Isis analogue anoints Jesus to raise him from the dead. It might be disguised, rewritten, or even omitted, in which case we would be out of luck. But we are in luck, as it happens, for the scene has found a new home earlier in the sequence. It is, of course, the famous anointing scene at Bethany. The original story here has been refracted as well as redacted through many rewritings and retellings both prior to the gospels and since. The important core element is the notion that
the woman has saved the ointment for the day of Jesus’s burial.
This is most faithfully preserved in John’s version: “Let her alone! Let her keep it for the day of my burial” (John 12:7). Mark and Matthew’s version, no longer in touch with the original context of meaning, has reinterpreted the words, though not quite thoroughly, since they still manage to sound a bit odd in the context. “She has done what she could: she has anointed my body beforehand for burying” (Mark 14:8). “In pouring this ointment on my body, she has done it to prepare me for burial” (Matt. 26:12).

John’s wording is still close enough to our hypothetical original in which
the anointing scene would have been part of the Easter morning narrative.
Mary and her female companions approach the tomb carrying the anointing materials. Apparently male disciples, too, are on the scene. It is their carping voices we hear, jeering at the waste of an expensive commodity that might better have been cashed in for the poor. This element has survived elsewhere as the story of Judas being paid off for betraying Jesus, with the silver finally going to charity (Matt. 27:7). More importantly, it is also of a piece with the disciples’ skepticism about Jesus’s resurrection typical of the gospels’ Easter narratives. When the woman anoints the corpse of the Lord Jesus, Judas (or whoever) complains: Since he’s dead anyway, why not use the ointment to some constructive purpose, like poor relief? So little does any hint of what is to come cross his mind. But once she anoints the body, it returns to life, and Jesus himself answers the petty objection. “She has saved it for my burial.”

But was it Mary Magdalene who did the anointing? No gospel says so. But what do they say, and why? There is something mighty strange about the wording of Mark and Matthew:

“Amen: I say to you, wherever this gospel is proclaimed throughout the world, what she has done will be told in memory of her” (Matt. 26:13; Mark 14:9). And yet no name is given? The whole idea of memorializing the woman demands that her name be included. Thus originally it must have been. But it has subsequently been removed as part of the redactional effort to displace and disguise the original point. For the same reason, we might suspect, the anointing has been credited instead to Mary of Bethany in John 12:1-3 and to an unnamed “sinner” in Luke’s wholly rewritten version (7:36- 38). Her original identity may be hinted soon after, in the beginning of the very next chapter, when Mary Magdalene is introduced in Luke 8:2. John has simply switched Marys. But it must have been Mary Magdalene, whom we are told brought ointment to the tomb to do precisely what we are saying she did on that occasion: anoint the body—and, like Isis, bring it back to life.

One more point: The concluding notice that the anointing story shall always be told as an adjunct to Christian preaching is formulaic, implying it originated as part of a ritual recital. This links it to the character of the empty tomb story as a script for the mourning ritual leading up to the retelling or even reenactment of the anointing.

Just to be clear: I am far from saying this is the way the evangelists want us to read their narratives. No, my point is that they have inherited a version (a novelized version, as per my discussion in chapter 3, “Beyond the Cross”) of the story in which the older, mythic character of it has been largely effaced. But that earlier version can still be plausibly discovered and reconstructed. And when we do, we discover Mary Magdalene as the Christian goddess of the resurrection, the Anastasis.

MAGDALENE DILEMMA

I hope to have shown, not out of any preference or any desire to advocate theological revision, that a very good case can be mounted to the effect that Mary Magdalene is a historicized version of an underlying mythic redemptrix like the Egyptian Isis. But as I hinted in the discussion of Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s
The Templar Revelation
, we cannot very well balance this theory off against the other option for glorifying Mary Magdalene, the one considered in chapter 8, “Mary Magdalene: Female Apostle?” That is,
either
we have a historical Mary who was said to be present at the tomb of Jesus and had unique, powerful visions of the Risen Christ and, on the basis of them, built an apostolic ministry,
or
we can make her a historicized goddess and cut loose the gospel story as any kind of history at all. Dan Brown, Lee Teabing, and some of our other related authors seem to think one can have both simultaneously, but one cannot. If we decide to use, for propaganda’s sake, two arguments that are logically incompatible with one another, we are being as underhanded and opportunistic as the “winners” who we say rewrote Christian history to begin with.

NOTE

1
Paul Veyne,
Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 88.

Conclusion

THE VITRUVIAN SON OF MAN

N
ew Testament scholarship is a challenging and fascinating field. And if
The Da Vinci Code
has awakened your interest in these matters, then you have no option but to undertake a thorough study of them yourself. In years to come, you will look back at your old, dog-eared copy of Brown’s novel with fondness, recalling that it first prompted you to take a path that is immensely satisfying.

But there is one kind of satisfaction that critical New Testament research will
not
provide. It makes it pretty much impossible for the honest student to rest content with any conventional slate of beliefs. Once one approaches the questions of the historical Jesus and Christian origins, one is sentenced forever to carry the cross of tentativeness, of indecision. Dostoyevsky’s Jesus (in
The Brothers Karamazov
) came to set upon us the burden of freedom, free thought, and free choice. And it is a cross. One cannot slough off one’s responsibility to weigh all theories and to favor none beyond the strength of its evidence. Faithfulness to the truth entails a stubborn unwillingness to decide prematurely that you have it. This is the problem with conservative Christian apologists who use the tools of historical criticism cynically in order to vindicate dogmatic beliefs they hold on other, prior, grounds. They have sacrificed the sincere search for truth, ironically, in the name of Christ.

Martin Kähler, Wilhelm Herrmann, Paul Tillich, and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century theologians saw things more clearly. They knew from experience what resulted if one based one’s faith squarely on ostensibly historical events. You can’t afford to admit even the possibility that it might turn out to be false! Since historical judgments are based on ever-new discoveries and reevaluations of the evidence, opinions about the past must always remain tentative and provisional. But faith, the commitment that guides one’s life, cannot be so tentative. Thus one is faced with two alternatives. First, like our apologists, one may secretly sacrifice the honest conscience of the impartial historian and become a mere propagandist. Second, one may keep an open mind on all historical questions and base faith elsewhere. And for this, may I recommend a striking symbol: the Vitruvian Son of Man, a crucifix displaying Leonardo’s famous spread-eagled human figure that is so important in Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
. I like the way the figure simultaneously displays all the possible postures of the limbs. It speaks of the intellectual posture of the serious student of Christian origins: one must remain open to all possibilities, arms stretched wide to catch any new idea, feet nimble to cover new territory as it appears. Not a dogma, but a stance.

As Tillich said, faith will no longer be an arbitrary assent to a set of assertions held in place by sheer willpower (“I believe Jesus did this. I believe Jesus said that. What a good Christian am I!”). It becomes instead an existential risk, the risk of choosing a worthy path to follow. One sees the Jesus figure of the gospels (and it may differ in the eyes of different beholders, as in the Preaching of John!). One weighs the sayings ascribed to Jesus. Who knows how much the portrait of Jesus one sees is historical fact? Who knows who first said these words? It hardly matters. One remains faced with the call to discipleship as surely as the characters in those old stories were. We don’t know for sure who or what Jesus was, but we can get a pretty good idea of what discipleship would mean just by reading the gospels. And then it is ours to decide whether that path is for us. For my part, one aspect of that discipleship would be the unflinching courage to follow historical evidence wherever it leads. It would mean carrying that cross of chafing uncertainties when I would rather settle down with the security blanket of pleasant beliefs.