The King of King's Code

Mr and Mrs Jesus

You know it all already, don’t you?  You know that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, having penetrated the code and read the gospel according to Da Brown, or at least seen the movie of the gospel of the code of the book.  Even so, it might interest to know that a far older code has been discovered proving the same point…or proving that Dan Brown is a lot older than he pretends!

I fragment of papyrus has been discovered, an ancient Da Vinci Code, which makes the ‘explosive suggestion’ (that’s Daily Mail, not Ana speak) that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were man and wife.  The report I read in the Mail pompously declares that the discovery “undermines centuries of Church dogma by suggesting that the Christian Messiah was not celibate.” 

Au contraire, monsieur le Mail; this undercurrent has been around for centuries, part of a Gnostic tradition, text that did not make it into the official text, Satanic Verses, if you like.  The Gospel of Philip promoted the marriage claim centuries before Dan Brown.  But the Gospel of Philip, along with that of Thomas and Mary Magdalene herself, is among the scriptural also rans.  In other words Christian dogma trumps the other dogma; the Nicene Creed trumps the Gnostic heresy!  

Anyway, this in the cryptic script, translated from ancient Coptic, the language of Biblical Egypt;

…not [to] me.  My mother gave me li[fe]…

The disciples said to Jesus,

deny.  Mary was worthy of it

Jesus said to them, My wife

she will be able to be my disciple

Let wicked people swell up

As for me, I dwell with her in order to

an image.

An image?  What image!  Hmm, yes, well, you can make of that what you wish. What Karen King, Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, wants to make of it is quite a lot.  She recently told the Smithsonian Magazine that the fragment casts doubt “on the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’ celibacy.”  Oh, really, more so than the far more complete Gospel of Philip?  In time to come we may have the Gospel of Karen to add to the unofficial canon, or a new cracking bestseller – The Da King Code.

Hey, let’s get our feet back on the ground and look at the picture a little more soberly. To begin with, Jesus was a practicing Jew, a rabbi.  There is nothing in Jewish tradition and law that would proscribe marriage for such a person.  More than that, an unmarried rabbi is likely to have been considered as a bit of an oddity. 

The other thing is that the Catholic Church itself did not always insist on priestly celibacy.  That came later, when the performance of sacred duties was felt to be incompatible with carnal marriage.  When the Church decided on the purity of the priesthood it was easy to fall back on the canonically accepted Jesus as the avatar of perfection. 

There was no problem in this.  Scripture is completely silent on Jesus’ marital status, pointing neither one way nor the other.  But the whole point of Christianity is its novelty – it took a rabbi and prophet and turned him into the Messiah and the Son of God.  The Son of God as a carnal being? – never in a month of sexless Sundays! 

I always find it amusing when an academic advances a bridge too far, when making a mark rather than scholarly probity and caution becomes the important thing.  It’s like the silly fuss over the ‘discovery’ of the remains of Richard III in the archaeological dig at Leicester, a conclusion trumpeted before the facts have been fully established.  Wait and see, always wait and see.  

Professor King does not wait.  She goes that much further.  Never mind dead bones; she has the living text!  There she is, a more fatal Martin Luther, ready to shake the Catholic Church to its foundations with an enigma that is no enigma, a revelation that is no revelation!  It’s such a pity that Philip and Dan got there first.  It makes her dramatic dénouement look just a tad derivative and oh so passé.  

Stop Press!

There have been developments.  This ‘explosive’ evidence has been systematically rubbished by other specialists since I wrote this story at breakfast time this morning.  Now the King herself, in the light of this, is backtracking, at least to a point. 

With the stable doors creaking and groaning in the wind she says: “We still have some work to do, testing the ink and so on and so forth, but what is exciting about this fragment is that it's the first case we have of Christians claiming that Jesus had a wife.”  To this she adds that the papyrus itself provides no evidence (what?!) that Jesus was married, merely that ‘some Christians’ believed he was two hundred years after his death. 

Yes, and would ‘some Christians’ go by the name of Philip; would some Christians be considered as Gnostics?  She has also revealed – what a surprise – that the unnamed owner wants to sell it. 

"There are all sorts of really dodgy things about this,' said David Gill, professor of archaeological heritage at University Campus Suffolk.  "This looks to me as if any sensible, responsible academic would keep their distance from it.”  Ouch!  Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first turn into the Hollis Professor of Divinity.