Keeping the Faith, Without Da Vinci
How the blockbuster gets it both wrong and right about women in Christianity.
By Bryan Collinsworth
Thursday May 25, 2006
Denouncing surprisingly trivial things—beach reading, summer action flicks, Tom Hanks’ hair—as mortal threats to faith seems to be an essential attribute of any self-respecting religious establishment.
 Still, one can see why the high-ranking Vatican officials who recently called for a boycott of the book and film phenomenon collectively known as The Da Vinci Code might be concerned. After all, some 60 million people have read Dan Brown’s novel, and the film version just opened to the second-highest first-weekend box office of all time after last year’s Star Wars: Episode III.
And there’s no doubt that the appeal of Da Vinci has something to do with the grandiose, faith-challenging conspiracy theory that lies at its cheesy, pulpy heart. (Spoiler alert for the two of you out there who still haven’t read the book or seen the movie.) What could be more enticing than the contention—laid out in between a series of car chases, gun battles, and code-cracking challenges, no less—that the last 1800-some odd years of Christianity have been a massive scheme to suppress the truth that Jesus was just a man, and more than that, was the coequal marriage partner of one of the most famous biblical women, Mary Magdalene?
The earliest followers of Jesus accepted and documented all of this as basic fact, posits The Da Vinci Code; but the Christian clergy hierarchy that arose by the third century could only maintain its power by claiming a divine Jesus as the one true way to salvation while simultaneously suppressing the most popular alternative in that era: namely, women, the “sacred feminine,” with their mysterious powers to create and sustain new life in a world fraught with decay. And so the real, egalitarian Jesus was buried beneath a masculine deity, and the women who had found equality and even honor in his initial community were subjected to millennia of marginalization and oppression by the church.
In other words, Brown’s story suggests not just a centuries-old cover-up but a potentially utopian resolution: If the hidden truth about Mary and women in the early church can only be revealed, the theological and institutional support for almost two thousand years of Western misogyny will be cast aside. Or, as Sir Ian McKellan’s character grandly declares in the film, sexism and even other human divisions may cease to exist.
It’s all a wonderfully radical notion, but do the assertions behind it hold water (or communion wine, as the case may be)?
Admittedly, the details of Brown’s story leave something to be desired. The Da Vinci Code devotes much time to ancient texts that allegedly reveal the truth about Jesus and Mary’s relationship, but which, it says, were purposely excluded from the “official” Bible. It focuses particularly on several excerpts from what are called the “Gnostic gospels” or “Nag Hammadi Library,” long-lost papyrus writings about Jesus rediscovered within the last 150 years.
These texts do indeed exist, and they do offer portrayals of Christ, Mary Magdalene, and Christian faith that differ from the well-known Biblical accounts in striking ways (though they’re far from the straightforward counter-story Brown suggests).
The Code’s contention that these were more accurate portrayals of Jesus’ life than the accounts that made it into the Bible, however, is nearly impossible to support. The main problem is that while the non-biblical texts Brown cites are old, the New Testament texts are even older. The best biblical historians date the Gnostic gospels mentioned in the Da Vinci Code to the second century—about 100 years after Jesus’ death. The gospel of Mark, meanwhile (the oldest of the four biblical accounts of Jesus’ life), is dated to 40 to 60 years after his death.
There are telltale signs in these “Da Vinci gospels” that make some surpassing authenticity unlikely—particularly the tendency of the Jesus portrayed therein to speak in long, polemical discourses, rather than the concise, pithy phrases typical of the style of Jewish teachers of his time. (These are how he speaks in the biblical books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.)
And while the names of the specific texts Brown quotes from may sound impressively legitimate—there’s even the Gospel of Mary Magdalene herself!—more in-depth biblical scholarship has long established that claims to authorship in the era of early Christianity were a complex and tenuous affair. The text attributed to Mary (her last name isn’t actually specified) was almost certainly written by later authors seeking to legitimize their version of the Christ story by connecting it with a famous name.
But here’s the kicker: While Brown’s dramatic story of Mary, wife of Jesus may be a stretch, his broader assertion that Christ and the first Christians were a remarkably egalitarian and female-friendly bunch later suppressed into a patriarchal church has a heck of a lot going for it.
It doesn’t take any secret archaeological finds to figure that one out, though; the evidence is in the Bible itself. Take just one famous story from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is teaching his male disciples while they stay in the home of two women, Mary and Martha. As Martha rushes about trying to fulfill her expected duties as a hostess, Mary does something deeply frowned upon if not totally unheard of in the culture of her day: She forsakes her womanly duties to sit down alongside the men and learn from Jesus as their equal. Martha is shocked at her sister’s audacious behavior, but Jesus tells her that “Mary has chosen what is better.”
This striking pattern continues throughout the rest of the New Testament stories. While the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ life diverge at many points, all four tell us that it was his female companions who remained with him until he breathed his last on the cross, long after his male disciples had fled. All four hold that it was a group of women, Mary Magdalene among them, who first discovered his empty tomb and experienced the revelation of the resurrection.
And in the writings of the early church that make up the rest of the New Testament, we read again and again of women holding high status—often equal to or even greater than that of men—in the first Christian communities. In a bold departure from contemporary Jewish and Roman practices in which women were often entirely separated from men at best and relegated to second-class status at worst, we find the story of Priscilla and Aquila, a missionary couple who seemed to work only as equals; or references to Phoebe, “a deacon [minister] of the church at Cenchraea”; or countless other leading women. For a brief time at its inception, Christianity was a genuine force for progressive equality of the sexes, offering liberation to a group that could find it almost nowhere in the surrounding culture.
So what happened next? Did Dan Brown’s massive cover-up actually take place after all?
To paraphrase another (slightly more time-tested) world-renowned writer, the end of women’s high place in the early church came not with a bang so much as a long, painful whimper. As we progress through the New Testament, further and further from the birth of the movement, we watch the misogyny that so thoroughly dominated almost every other aspect of contemporary life in the Roman Empire creep back into these faith communities, as well.
Stories of precocious women are gradually replaced by admonitions to silence; the Phoebes and Priscillas leading worship services fade into anonymous figures seated at the back of the church, forbidden from teaching, to “be saved through childbearing.” At some points, it even appears that later writers brazenly inserted anti-female passages into the scriptures of earlier, revered Christian leaders like the Apostle Paul, in an effort to set the more egalitarian record crooked. (Try reading through the 14th chapter of I Corinthians and see if you catch any suspiciously drastic shifts in subject matter.)
Unfortunately, we all know how the history unfolds from there. In an important way, the true suppression of Christianity’s early gender egalitarianism is even worse than The Da Vinci Code’s great cover-up: There will be no sudden, all-correcting revelation to rescue us from the millennia of discrimination that have ensued.
On the other hand, the reality also relieves us of the need for any breathless, death-defying romps across Europe in search of secret codes and hidden treasures, Dan Brown-style. The cultural counter-tradition to Western patriarchy may have been suppressed, but it was never fully concealed; it hides in plain sight not only in the early Christian stories but a thousand other cultural cues and experiences in Western history. From Ruth and Esther in the Hebrew scriptures down through the women’s suffrage movement to modern-day feminism, women seeking progress have seized on this alternative vision of empowerment and equality, forced it into the light of day, and found in it the strength to achieve genuine change.
While the literal truth of The Da Vinci Code’s story about Jesus and Mary Magdalene is tenuous at best, it can still be deeply resonant as a metaphor. Despite the dark history of women’s treatment in the West, far more progressive possibilities have indeed arisen and persisted again and again. At times, as in early Christianity, these visions have even flourished, and we find ourselves struggling toward their fulfillment again today.
Dan Brown and Tom Hanks aren’t going to be the ones to complete this quest for us, though. We’re going to have to take it from here.
Illustration: Matt Bors
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Comments
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I believe that the male dominated Catholic church is not the church that Jesus intended. Which is also why he broke away from the Jewish church. Like everything else on earth, there has to be a balance or there will be chaos. How can there be balance when some people refuse to see it.
— Mary Lou Czupek - May 25, 08:40 PM - #I don’t believe God or His Son intended there to be any one single religon. I believe They just want us to have faith that they exsist….male or female we are all God’s children…not any one better than another….
— Bridget Cassidy - May 25, 10:49 PM - #Clearly, if Jesus actually lived and the gospels are anywhere near accurate as to his life, he and his life long companion, Mary, were married or he was gay. I can live with either. The Vatican’s reaction to the movie strengthens my suspicion that there’s more askew than Dan Brown’s story.
— Ned Glassman - May 25, 11:18 PM - #The Catholic Church needs to allow women to become priests. They talk about a priest shortage when there are hundreds of willing and qualified women ready to lead the Church in the right direction—away from cover-ups, scandals, and greed.
— Caroline Hallman - May 26, 12:37 AM - #From the Greeks to the Romans to Machiavelli to present day American cowboy politics, it is the male who really believes that he is in control. It’s the reverse. It’s the female who will awaken one day and understand it is her nurturing power that will bring peace to the planet.
— William A. Spriggs - May 26, 06:16 AM - #Jesus was likely a Nazrite
— Frank Lornitzo - May 26, 09:54 AM - #(Nazrites first mentioned
in Leviticus), going out into desert for periods of
“dining on locusts and honey” . But not sanctioned as a permanent way of life. Non-marriage may have been circumstances incidental to the perceived mission rather
then as the role model. Undoubtedly the “Acts”, the earliest text shows his
spiritual affinity for women as well as men.
It’s a work of fiction .... a story .... it’s NOT a documentary!
— Atkins - May 27, 04:15 PM - #Cheeze!
I think a great deal of the appeal of the Da Vinci Code stems from the hope that liberalism and a moral desire for equal rights for all of humanity can be reconciled with Christianity, and not just reconciled logically, but historically as well to give it more legitimacy. Ironically this longing for liberal morality in religion indicates that many people who seek a more liberal religion are capable of having a strong moral code and using ethical reasoning completely independently of religion, if they weren’t, they would be content with more conservative existing churches and interpretations of faith. That they are not content with conservatism indicates that Christianity, or more broadly religion are not prerequisites for having morality, but rather each individual person is capable of acting ethically even regardless of their religious preferences.
Thus the quest to free ourselves from a more conservative mindset need not be to try to reinterpret the history of various faiths to accomodate our ethics, but to let our inherent capacity for moral reasoning and values guide our decisions without needing any religious interference at all. We don’t need Dan Brown or any historical documents to justify our morality in a religious framework, rather that morality is justified on its own.
— Alex - Jun 6, 12:13 AM - #Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, they did have a daughter, and the second coming of Christ is going to be in the female form of his soul. People’s faith will be tested in this. I predict that God and Christ will be coming to earth in the year 2007. People have been surpressed from the real gospel of Christ from the beginning. Why wouldn’t God and Christ want women to be included in preaching the good word? It is not only limited to men to love and worship and teach of the Lord. All will be held accountable. I pray for you all.
— Kaye - Aug 22, 02:33 PM - #Want another shocker? When Jesus ascended into heaven on the third day, it was only for a brief moment to get instruction from God. God then sent Christ back to earth – over and over and over again. Christ has lived in the human form for the last 2000 years. Christ would pass away in one bodily form, and be born right into another human shell. Until the day in the future, when God and Christ meet up again on earth, can Christ ascend back into heaven at which point they will come back to earth together, united, in full power, to finally conquer evil once and for all. Have you not noticed that evil is fighting the good fight right now? Evil knows that this event: God and Christ reuniting, is happening very soon and is doing everything it can to destroy human life. THis is why it is almost time for the second coming.
— Kaye - Aug 22, 02:39 PM - #From my theory earlier…until Christ ended up in the human body that he/she would realize that he/she was Christ, it was only until then that this human realizing they were Christ, that God was ready to take Christ back into heaven. Think about it: Why would Christ be in heaven from 2000 years ago? What purpose would it serve to have both God and Christ in heaven? Help was needed on earth, and God wanted Christ to witness first-hand, human suffering.
— Kaye - Aug 22, 02:41 PM - #And another thing people don’t realize: Christ is not marrying the CHURCH in Revelations. He is actually marrying a human being. Are people so blind that they don’t think that Christ deserves to have this kind of happiness too? How could so many people have overlooked this? “The bride is preparing herself for the Lamb.” Christ is coming back as a woman, Christ is marrying another female, which will be yet another test to all humankind of their faith. And all people who were judgemental about homosexuals will all be held accountable to God and Christ. What do you think right religious groups will think or say when they see Christ as a woman married to a woman? God said those entering into His kingdom would be in a SMALL multitude. People have been so brainwashed over all of these centuries, and have no idea what the real truth is. As to where I get my sources, I cannot divulge that information. Those who work for God do not do it for anything but His glory. I am here to open your minds and get you ready. I want to see all of your souls saved.
There are no terms in heaven like “homosexual” “gay” “lesbian” because in heaven, people are all free of this labeling. Love is love in its purest form in heaven. It is not a sin to love another human being. Males can love males in heaven, females can love females in heaven. There is no marriage in heaven either, but God has awarded this to His son Christ.
— Kaye - Aug 22, 02:52 PM - #kaye, you are a crazy fanatic.what are you gonna do if “god” and “christ” do not come down in 2007? commit suicide? perhaps that would be better
— jane - Aug 30, 04:20 AM - #