COMMENTARY: Me, Dan Brown and Mrs. Jesus Christ

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Even my mother wanted to know. “Was Jesus was really married to Mary Magdalene?” she asked after reading “The Da Vinci Code,” and “Did Mary and her kids really move to France?” Since the book’s publication in 2003, those questions have been asked of me by people of every […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Even my mother wanted to know. “Was Jesus was really married to Mary Magdalene?” she asked after reading “The Da Vinci Code,” and “Did Mary and her kids really move to France?”

Since the book’s publication in 2003, those questions have been asked of me by people of every religious stripe, from devout Christians to skeptical agnostics.


So I told my mother about the scholarly arguments behind the widely accepted position that Jesus was a lifelong bachelor. Being an unmarried male was an embarrassing anomaly in first-century Palestine, something that the Gospel writers would have been unlikely to invent _ especially if they wanted to paint Jesus in a positive light. The Gospels also speak at length about Jesus’ other family relations, so it would be odd not to mention something as important as his wife. Finally, were she married to Jesus, Mary Magdalene would have been called “Mary the wife of Jesus,” the convention for other married women in the New Testament.

Since Dan Brown’s book rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists in 2003, I’ve resigned myself to two things: First, I have to answer more questions about the mythical Priory of Sion than about Jesus’ message of forgiveness. Second, almost anything I say will be suspect _ since we Catholic priests are part of what the film’s Web site darkly calls “the con of man.”

This week’s (Friday, May 19) release of “The Da Vinci Code” movie means the questions will only get more numerous, and the suspicions more intense. And I pity the Catholic priest who doesn’t have ready answers to the following questions:

_ Does Opus Dei assassinate people?

_ What else is hidden in the Vatican’s “secret archives”?

_ And where in France did Jesus’ lovely wife and children settle?

(By the way, the respective answers are no, nothing and nowhere.)

More frustrating than the questions is the way the novel and the movie present their fiction as built on fact. (“Seek the truth,” said one of the movie posters.) Brown often adverts to the scholarly “research” upon which the novel is based. And there are a few bits of the book that are true: for example, the historic denigration of women’s contributions in the early church.

But most of the “facts” _ about Jesus of Nazareth, about Opus Dei and about the contemporary Roman Catholic Church _ are simply false.

To take one example, the chief villain of the book is the evil albino monk Silas, a member of the international Catholic organization Opus Dei, and a guy who has an unusual vocation _ killing people. While Opus is an international Catholic organization, it has no “monks” (it’s a lay group) and they don’t assassinate anyone (you’ll have to take my word for this).

Some argue that the movie may encourage people to read more about church history. But does anyone really believe that after leaving the theater, moviegoers will rush to the nearest bookstore to pick up, say, a copy of Henry Chadwick’s “The Early Church”? My bet would be on another Dan Brown novel _ the theological equivalent of junk food.


People are flocking to the movie for reasons that are both healthy and unhealthy. First, the film is based on a well-told (if not always well-written) thriller. Second, among Christians there is a natural desire to learn about Jesus and also about the early church, which remains clouded in mystery and is strongly identified with a supposedly “purer” form of Christianity.

Now for the unhealthy reasons. First, some people gravitate toward conspiracy theories _ it helps to make sense of things in a complicated and often frightening world. Second, the taste of anti-Catholicism in the story goes down easily in a culture that is still largely Protestant.

While the Catholic Church has done some reprehensible things and recently participated in its own sort of conspiracy during the clergy sexual abuse crisis, Brown would never have gotten away with attacking another real-life religious organization so viciously. One of the producers called the film “conservatively anti-Catholic,” which makes you wonder if a movie that was described by its makers as “conservatively anti-Semitic” or “conservatively anti-Muslim” would be featured on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.

Now that “The Da Vinci Code” film is upon us, I am bracing for another barrage of questions, which I will try to answer patiently.

But part of me wants to be somewhere else when the movie is released _ maybe France, where I could discuss all of this over some wine and cheese with the descendants of Mr. and Mrs. Jesus Christ.

(The Rev. James Martin is a Jesuit priest and author of “My Life With the Saints.” A version of this essay was featured on National Public Radio.)


KRE/PH END MARTIN

To find a photo of this columnist, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by last name.

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!