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. 

The word of man

I mentioned last November that this year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Authorised or King James Bible, one of the great landmarks of English literature. I’ve since discovered one or two additional interesting facts about the history of a book that was never, in fact, ‘authorised’ by James or anyone else.

As Derek Wilson writes in the January issue of History Today, James may have set the translation in motion but he neither paid anything towards its publication nor did he promote its use. Although the new translation got a royal nod of approval, it was only ‘appointed’ to be read in churches, not commanded. Other versions continued to be favoured according to taste, including the puritan Geneva Bible, translated by exiles during the reign of Mary Tudor.

The original publication, moreover, was beset with all sorts of problems, largely to do with inadequate proof reading. In one of the verses in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Judas’ was substituted for ‘Jesus’. In the account of the crucifixion given in Luke Jesus is said to have been executed with two ‘other’ malefactors. Fundamental errors and poor production meant that the new Bible was slow to catch on. Robert Barker, the book’s first publisher, was unable to recoup his outlays, with the result that he finally ended his life in a debtor’s prison.

Even twenty years after the original publication there were still proof reading and printing problems. A 1631 edition was so bad that it came to be known as the Wicked Bible, omitting the word ‘not’ from the commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ In another place God’s ‘greatness’ was misprinted as God’s ‘great asse.’ No, I’m not joking!

The Authorised Version only really started its steady advance after William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I, banned the Geneva Bible, far too puritan for his High Anglican taste. Even then, mirroring the politics of the day, there was a kind of civil war between the holy books, with the Authorised Version only gradually winning out over its Calvinist rival. Its final triumph came with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

The paradox here is that by this time the language used in the 1611 translation was already antiquated in the way that Shakespeare was antiquated. But this only added to its charm and authority, giving it a central role in the rediscovery of a more authentic religion and a more authentic England, uncorrupted by the traumas of the Civil Wars and all that followed.

It was now that the translation, always intended for recitation in church, became a central part of public worship, helped along by the fact that there was no alternative. It was, if you like, the only word of God. But it also took its place alongside the poems and plays of Shakespeare as the word in English, whose beauty and lustre is increased by the passage of time.

A song of songs

I love the English language; I love its beauty, its directness and its simplicity. There are wells of our language, sources where words and expressions were first drawn that people continue to use, often unconscious of their origin. The work of William Shakespeare is one of the most important; the other is the Authorised Version of the Bible, the King James Bible, the translation of which was completed in 1611, almost four hundred years ago.

So far as I am concerned the King James Bible is the Bible, though I have never known it used in worship: the Church of England has long favoured the modern translation. But I grew up in a literate household, one where I was introduced to a range of influences from an early age, including the translation of 1611, based on the earlier Bishop’s Bible of 1568 and William Tyndale’s New Testament of 1525.

There is a marvel to it, a sacred marvel, if you like, lost in modern translation, a marvel that was to have a huge impact on the subsequent course of English literature. I am tempted to say that in abandoning the King James Bible the Church of England abandoned sacred language altogether, the beginning of a process of secularisation, disengagement and decline.

I suppose the argument was that it was too difficult, too archaic, too remote from common understanding and contemporary concerns. If so, it’s rubbish. An editorial in the Times made reference to Politics and the English Language, my favourite essay by George Orwell, where he offers his own up to date translation of one of the most moving passages in Ecclesiastes, of good usage into the worst usage imaginable. Ecclesiastes proceeds as follows;

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The imagery, the cadence, the simple poetry of these words is intense. Now consider the version suggested by Orwell;

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

It’s awful; it’s meant to be awful. Orwell admits it’s a parody, though not, as he says, a gross one. This essay was written over sixty years ago. If anything the problem has got worse since then, as meaningful, direct words are increasingly obscured in fog of abstraction. I’m ever mindful that the abuse of language and the abuse of meaning was part of the political horror that overtook humanity in the course of the last hundred years. There is nothing at all obscure or difficult in Ecclesiastes, nothing that could not be easily grasped and understood

So, as we approach the four hundredth anniversary, it’s time to think again about the importance of the King James Bible, time to restore it in its full cultural significance. I leave you with my favourite passage from The Song of Solomon, my favourite book of the Old Testament, a sublime hymn to love and renewal.

My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;

The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.

My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.

Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

Herodias of the Witches

If Mary is the most significant of the good women in the New Testament Herodias, the granddaughter of Herod the great, and the wife of King Herod Antipas of Judea, surely has to be the most significant among the bad, second only to her daughter Salome. Salome was only an instrument; Herodias is the power. It was she who engineered the death of John the Baptist, using Salome in a particularly unscrupulous way to gain her ends. But for Herodias we would never have had the Dance of the Seven Veils! So there is no great surprise that she became the primary female villain for Christians. She was the Wicked Woman, by some accounts even reputed to be a demon.

The historical Herodias died sometime after 39AD, after she and her husband were banished to Gaul by the Emperor Caligula. But the Wicked Woman rose from the dead, taking shape as a new goddess in the pagan pantheon, possibly as a witch deity, though the links are far from clear. In any case a spirit bearing her name rose alongside Diana in Italy as one of the two figures most associated with witchcraft. The two are often paired together in leading the nocturnal Wild Hunt and in witch-trial transcripts.


Ratherius, Bishop of Verona until his death ion 974 AD, complained that many saw Herodias as a queen, even a goddess, as though this was her reward, he remarks, for killing John the Baptist. In 936 he outlawed a movement which claimed that Herodias ruled one third of the world and was thus worthy of devotion. This was a time when she was also identified with Hecate, one of the greatest of the witch goddesses. There would also seem to me to be strong associations with Lilith, the first wife of Adam according to the Jewish apocrypha, and the great demon queen.

There are many Medieval legends about Herodias, though she is often confused and conflated with Salome. In one she is condemned to ride with the Wild Hunt until Judgement Day, always carrying with her the head of the Baptist. In Romania she manifests as the spirit Irodeasa. Here masked dancers, riding hobby-horses and carrying clubs and swords, undertook nine day rituals in her honour. In Russia she is to be found as a troop of female fever demons called Herod's daughters, numbering anything from nine up to seventy-seven spirits, the youngest named as Salome. Again the associations with Lilith are striking.

The Crime of Adam

Poor old Eve has, on a point of interpretation, has largely been made to carry the burden for 'seducing' Adam into disobedience. But since they both knew that eating the forbidden fruit was contrary to the command of God, I suppose they must be equally guilty. It was merely a question of whom the serpent approached first. Indeed, perhaps Adam is the more guilty, since of the two he had a longer acquaintance with the law.:)

Great is Diana of the Ephesians!

I was in Ephesus in Turkey last summer, in the ruins of the old Greco-Roman city, once the centre of the cult of the many-breasted goddess Artemis or Diana. The making of votive statues of the goddess by the silversmiths was an important part of the local economy.

Then St Paul arrived. Because of his preaching the trade in these religious artefacts dropped off sharply. One of the silversmiths, a man called Demetrius, gathered his fellow craftsmen. The initial complaint was over the decline in business but they found a higher cause, blaming Paul’s preaching for a loss of respect for the goddess herself. Rumours spread through the city, until a great crowd gathered in the central amphitheatre. The story is detailed in the Book of Acts, chapter 19, verses 24 to 41:

24: For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen;
25: Whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth.
26: Moreover ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying that they be no gods, which are made with hands:
27: So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised, and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth.
28: And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.
29: And the whole city was filled with confusion: and having caught Gaius and Aristarchus, men of Macedonia, Paul's companions in travel, they rushed with one accord into the theatre.
30: And when Paul would have entered in unto the people, the disciples suffered him not.
31: And certain of the chief of Asia, which were his friends, sent unto him, desiring him that he would not adventure himself into the theatre.
32: Some therefore cried one thing, and some another: for the assembly was confused; and the more part knew not wherefore they were come together.
33: And they drew Alexander out of the multitude, the Jews putting him forward. And Alexander beckoned with the hand, and would have made his defence unto the people.
34: But when they knew that he was a Jew, all with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.
35: And when the townclerk had appeased the people, he said, Ye men of Ephesus, what man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great goddess Diana, and of the image which fell down from Jupiter?
36: Seeing then that these things cannot be spoken against, ye ought to be quiet, and to do nothing rashly.
37: For ye have brought hither these men, which are neither robbers of churches, nor yet blasphemers of your goddess.
38: Wherefore if Demetrius, and the craftsmen which are with him, have a matter against any man, the law is open, and there are deputies: let them implead one another.
39: But if ye inquire any thing concerning other matters, it shall be determined in a lawful assembly.
40: For we are in danger to be called in question for this day's uproar, there being no cause whereby we may give an account of this concourse.
41: And when he had thus spoken, he dismissed the assembly.

For an hour those people shouted out “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” Well, I stood in the ruins of that amphitheatre, some 2000 years later, and shouted those same words at the top of my voice, something I had longed to do, to the complete astonishment of the hordes of tourists and our Turkish guide. Great she is indeed. :-))