The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (29 page)

NOTES

1
It is customary to date this gospel to about 150 CE, still a very early date, but recently there have been attempts to show that Thomas may very well be a first-century CE document. See especially Stevan L. Davies,
The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom
(New York: Seabury, 1983).

2
D. A. Carson,
Exegetical Fallacies
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984), p. 53, explains the conclusions of Robert Joly,
Le vocabulaire chretien de l’amour est-il original? ΦιλEιν et Aγaπaν dans le grec antique
(Brussels: Presses Universitaires, 1968), who shows how the similarity between
kuneo
(to kiss) and
kuno
(to impregnate), especially in their identical aorist form
ekusa
, led to all sorts of sexual puns.

3
This passage is still so shocking to pious ears that M. R. James refused to translate it! “Epiphanius in
Her
xxvi. 8 quotes the Lesser Questions of Mary: but I must be excused from repeating the passage.” In
The Apocryphal New Testament
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 20. (Actually, it is the
Greater Questions
, not the
Lesser
, to which Epiphanius refers. James was nodding.)

4
Gilles Quispel, “The Birth of the Child: Some Gnostic and Jewish Aspects,” in
Eranos Lectures 3
(Dallas: Spring Publications, 1987), pp. 25-26. If one were to accept Morton Smith’s
Secret Gospel of Mark
as a genuine ancient document (I do not), it must be admitted it would be tempting to trace the sacrament of the Bridal Chamber back to the rites of homosexual initiation Smith claims (
The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel according to Mark
[New York: Harper & Row, 1973], p. 114) Jesus practiced, since it would certainly make sense of the fact that men accepted the female role in a hidden ceremony with Christ as the male! But this must be left as mere speculation unless and until more evidence comes to light.

5
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins
(New York: Crossroad, 1984), p. 276. Fiorenza is dependent on the work of R. Beor,
Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female
(Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1970).

6
For sheer interest’s sake, attention ought to be drawn to a striking parallel (?) in the Mahayana Buddhist scripture
Saddharma-Pundarika
(
Lotus of the True Law
). Sariputra says to the daughter of the Naga-king Sagora, who is seeking to become a Bodhisattva, “‘It may happen, sister, that a woman displays an unflagging energy, performs good works for many thousands of Aeons, and fulfills the six perfect virtues [
Paramitas
], but as yet there is no example of her having received Buddhaship.’” Contrary to expectation, however, she does receive this distinction: “At that same instant, before the sight of the whole world and of the senior priest Sariputra, the female sex of the daughter of Sagara, the Naga-king, disappeared; the male sex appeared and she manifested herself as a Bodhisattva” (Xl:51). H. Kern, trans.,
Saddharma-Pundarika, or Lotus of the True Law
(New York: Dover Publications, 1963), pp. 252-53.

7
Elaine Pagels,
The Gnostic Gospels
(New York: Random House, 1979), p. 64.

8
Pheme Perkins,
The Gnostic Dialogue
(New York: Paulist, 1980), p. 136.

9
Fiorenza,
In Memory of Her
, pp. 304, 306.

10
Karen L. King,
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle
(Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2003), p. 86.

11
E.g., Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty,
All We’re Meant to Be
(Waco, TX: Word, 1975), p. 59; Paul K. Jewett,
Man as Male and Female
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), p. 169; Virginia Ramey Mollenkott,
Women, Men & the Bible
(Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1977), p. 19.

12
King,
Gospel of Mary of Magdala
, p. 142.

13
Rudolf Bultmann,
Theology of the New Testament
, trans. Kendrik Grobel, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951), pp. 295-96, shows how 20:2-18 was at first a distinct story unto itself.

14
Raymond E. Brown,
The Community of the Beloved Disciple
(New York: Paulist, 1979), p. 154.

15
Charles H. Talbert,
What Is a Gospel? The Genre of the Canonical Gospels
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977).

16
Randel Helms,
Gospel Fictions
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), pp. 140-42.

17
Rudolf Bultmann,
The Gospel of John: A Commentary
, trans. G. R. Beasley-Murray, R. W. Hoare, and J. K. Riches (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), p. 682.

18
Helms,
Gospel Fictions
, pp. 146-47.

19
The pun occurs in the Babylonian Talmud,
Hagigah
, 4b. See Bernhard Pick,
Jesus in the Talmud
(Chicago: Open Court, 1913), pp. 15-16; F. F. Bruce,
Jesus and Christian Origins outside the New Testament
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 58. Jane Schaberg (
The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament
[New York: Continuum, 2002], p. 55) is fully aware of the suggestion (originally made by J. B. Lightfoot), which I am merely reiterating here, that “Mary Magdalene” originally denoted “Mary the Harlot,” but she just notes it to drop it. For her and her semi-mystical meditation on Mary as a Virginia Woolf analogue “Mary the Harlot” is a dead end.

20
Frank R. Zindler, “Where Jesus Never Walked,”
American Atheist
(Winter 1996-97): 41-42, dependent upon D. Paul Glaue, “Der älteste Text der geschichtlichen Bücher des Neuen Testaments,”
Zeitschrift für neutestamentlische Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche
45 (1954): 103.

21
Schaberg,
Resurrection of Mary Magdalene
, pp. 47-64; Richard Atwood,
Mary Magdalene in the New Testament Gospels and Early Tradition
, European University Studies Series XXIII, vol. 457 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 21-25; Marianne Sawicki, “Magdalenes and Tiberiennes: City Women in the Entourage of Jesus,” in
Transformative Encounters: Jesus and Women Re-viewed
, ed. Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2000).

22
Of course, I, too, am repairing to the Talmud, but in my case it is only a matter of lexical information. If, on the other hand, one is willing to siphon “historical” information about Jesus, Mary, or “Magdala” from these texts, one might as well go the whole way with Brown, Teabing, Biagent and the rest, taking one’s data from
The Golden Legend
. One is already on the same train, and one might as well hang on for the next station.

23
Schaberg,
Resurrection of Mary Magdalene
, p. 55.

24
Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds.,
Ante-Nicene Christian Library
, vol. 16:
Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, and Revelations
. Edinburgh, UK: T&T Clark, 1870), pp. 304-305.

Chapter 9

A CHRISTIAN GODDESS?

Mary Magdalene and the Sacred Feminine

GOD AND MAMMY

T
o a great degree,
The Da Vinci Code
tends to exploit the o a great degree, The Da Vinci Code tends to exploit the radical chic fringe of religion and religious studies. Is the book’s advocacy of Christian goddess worship another case of this? Is the very notion of “rediscovering” a Christian goddess just an opportunistic gimmick employed to bring liberal Christianity into fellowship with neo-paganism? There are many individuals, men and women, attracted to both Protestant Liberalism and neo-paganism at the same time, and they welcome such a rationale for healing their theological schizophrenia. If they do not finally have to choose between, shall we say, God and Mammy, all the better. But that is neither here nor there as far as the task of New Testament research is concerned. It shouldn’t matter whose interests or whims may be served by one’s possible conclusions. The question is, regardless where a theory comes from or whose bread it butters, is there any evidence for it? And in the present case, it seems that there is.

JESUS ADONIS

We must begin with an old and despised theory of Christian origins, already mentioned in this book more than once, namely, that the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is of a piece with the celebrated resurrections of other Near Eastern savior divinities, including Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz/Dumuzi, and Baal. The vigor with which conservative Christian apologists have attacked this theory is an index of its strength and of the wide-ranging character of its implications. Consider first the mythic parallels.

OSIRIS

Jealous of his brother Osiris’s sister-bride Isis, Set (god of the desert) contrived to assassinate Osiris (god of the grain harvest). This he accomplished by means of a clever subterfuge. At a feast, Set arranged for someone to haul in a mysterious and elaborate sarcophagus. No one admitted to having had it delivered. So Set suggested all present lie down in it to try it on for size. The first to fit it should receive it as a prize. Of course, it had been designed to fit Osiris’s dimensions, and Set’s minions were ready to act as soon as Osiris reclined in it. They rushed forward with hammers and pegs to nail the casket shut, then spirited it away before anyone understood what was happening. They cast the box into the Nile, which took it far away until it was found and used as a pillar in a building. Isis set out to find her husband’s body and did find it. But Set stole it away and this time cut it into pieces, distributing them all over the land. Isis (and her sister Nephthys, Set’s wife) went in search of the pieces and, in some versions, found all of it but the penis, which Isis magically reconstructed from clay. She anointed her husband’s corpse with unguent, and he returned from the dead.

She had intercourse with him to produce a son, Horus, the falcon of the sun, who would serve as Osiris’s reincarnation on earth while Osiris himself assumed office in the netherworld Amente, the heaven of Egyptian mythology, as lord of the living and the dead. Later, Horus would kill Set in battle. These beliefs are pre-Christian, attested many centuries earlier among the Pyramid Texts, where it says that the interred shall share Osiris’s resurrection even as they have shared his death. The myth was also still alive and circulating in early Christian times, as we can see both from the enormous popularity of Isis and Osiris initiation across the empire and from the summary of the story in Plutarch’s
Isis and Osiris
. It is notable that the worshipers of Osiris sealed their identity with him by means of a sacramental feast of bread and beer, which naturally symbolized his body and blood, seeing that he was the god of grain. Nor is Osiris any stranger to the biblical tradition, since the patriarch Joseph married into the family of the Osirian priesthood (Gen. 41:45, “On” = Osiris). In fact, the story of Joseph itself sounds like a reworked version of the Osiris myth.

DIONYSUS

According to the salvation myth of the Orphic religion (which began in the sixth century BCE), Dionysus Zagreus was the son of Zeus, born as a hunting deity. He was murdered and devoured by the Giants (monstrous offspring of Uranos, and consigned by him to nether darkness inside the earth till Zeus freed them). Athena alerted Zeus to the attack, but by the time the father of gods and men could intervene, all that was left was the beating heart, which Zeus promptly swallowed. He reduced the Giants to ash with his vengeful thunderbolts, and then he created the human race from this dust. On the one hand, this resulted in human beings possessing an inner spark of the divine (from Dionysus) and an outer body of crude flesh (from the Giants). Orphism proposed to help them awaken the divine spark within. Subsequently, on the other hand, Dionysus of Thebes, the more familiar version of the god, was reborn from Zeus’s thigh. “Dionysus” means “Young Zeus” and implies a still earlier version of the myth in which he represented the resurrection of Zeus himself, who was believed on Crete to have been gored to death by a wild boar, like Adonis.