The Volatile Notion of a Married Jesus (George Stephanopoulos' Mom Objects)

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN ^ | November 3, 2003 | VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

[Destro]

The Volatile Notion of a Married Jesus

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Published: November 3, 2003

Half a dozen religious leaders joined David Westin, the president of ABC News, and others from the network and the press for lunch on the 22nd floor of ABC building on 66th Street in Manhattan late last week. Mr. Westin wore a sharp suit, as did some members of the clergy; others had dressed casually. Many were diffident. Some were quietly furious.

Part symposium and part focus group, the meeting had been convened to discuss "Jesus, Mary and da Vinci," tonight's ABC News special; the show is a woolly and underthought treatment of the religious sophistry in "The Da Vinci Code," the best-selling novel by Dan Brown. The producers, along with the show's on-camera reporter, Elizabeth Vargas, were troubleshooting. After the meeting on Thursday, they rushed to the editing room to make changes to the show.

Though set mostly in modern Europe, Mr. Brown's thriller centers on Leonardo da Vinci's role in maintaining a secret from biblical times. In pursuing what it calls the "claims" of Mr. Brown's fiction, the ABC special, which the group on the 22nd floor had seen before the meeting, bares Leonardo's so-called secret: Mary Magdalene, far from being a prostitute, was the rightful wife of Jesus; Mary and Jesus had a child and heirs; and finally, the heirs, whose existence threatened church dogma, were protected by a clandestine priory that counted Leonardo among its members.

Soon after the floor was opened for questions, Nikki Stephanopoulos, the communications director for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, whose son is the ABC News correspondent George Stephanopoulos, complained that the voluptuous, ravenous images of Mary Magdalene on display in the documentary bore little resemblance to Eastern representations of the Magdalene. (Sexy music by Me'shell Ndegeocello accompanies one sequence of semi-nude pictures on the show.)

As a member of the Greek Orthodox Church, Ms. Stephanopoulos also objected to the show's restrictive use of the word "orthodox." In an interview, Ms. Vargas uses the word to denote the repressive church hierarchy in the Middle Ages. Joseph De Feo, policy analyst for the Catholic League, then asked the show's producers why they hadn't solicited opinions from Roman Catholics other than the Rev. Richard McBrien, a priest and theology professor at the University of Notre Dame who, Mr. De Feo said, is known chiefly for his far-out views and his "shtick" about Mary Magdalene's primacy among Jesus's apostles.

Rudy Bednar, an executive producer at ABC, responded that the Catholic view had been expressed in the documentary by various evangelicals the producers had consulted. Mr. De Feo, perhaps bridling at the idea that arch-Protestants should represent the opinions of Catholics, shot Mr. Bednar a look of incredulity.

As several people mused about whether a married Jesus could still be divine — the consensus was that he could — the subject of the documentary almost seemed to stymie further discussion.

Its logic is of an especially enervating kind. Like a seatmate on a train who voices ardent ideas about Procter & Gamble's satanism, the ABC special is both amusingly audacious and profoundly irritating. If you're not freshly familiar with the invariably eclectic materials under discussion, you can express only general skepticism, which makes you a sucker. You're suddenly in the camp of the uptight "orthodox," those joyless suppressors of truth who enjoy none of the pleasures of heresy. The more attractive option may be to keep quiet.

On the other hand, many theories advanced in the ABC special are not ultimately endorsed by it. ("Not all the claims made in the book are true, and some have been made before, but there is some surprising truth," is how Ms. Vargas puts it.) Early in the show, too, Ms. Vargas asks a series of questions that begin with, "What if we told you," which suggests that the ideas that follow are being proposed so that viewers might entertain them as beliefs — and thus be entertained, while not informed. This is a curious approach for network news.

To establish and then half-dismantle its arguments, the show relies on interviews with Mr. Brown, whose novel is simply called a book in the voiceover and who is treated as a historian; Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician and novelist; Elaine Pagels, the Princeton professor of religion; Karen King, a professor at the Harvard Divinity School; Robin Griffith-Jones, an Anglican rector in London; Margaret Starbird, an independent scholar; and Daryl Bock and Jeff Bingham, two Evangelical scholars in Dallas.

These experts have divergent reputations. Ms. Pagels, for example, wrote "The Gnostic Gospels" in 1979; that book is still considered the gold-standard explication of the way the Gnostics illuminated the power struggles of the early church. By contrast, Henry Lincoln, a chief source for "The Da Vinci Code," is an author of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," a weird farrago about Jesus and the Knights Templar.

The juxtaposition of ivory-tower erudition and antic amateurism creates odd effects. Did Ms. Pagels know that her statements would be marshaled in the service of an argument that, at its outer reaches, contends that the pregnant Mary Magdalene was the holy grail, the lost vessel of Jesus's blood? And further, that the figure in Leonardo's "Last Supper," generally taken for the effeminate apostle John, is none other than Mary Magdalene, leaning away from Jesus in a telltale "V" that symbolizes her femininity?

More important, how did ABC manage to persuade this group to come together to use a popular thriller as a pretext for a serious discussion of religious history?

Individual motivations seem to surface in the show itself. Ms. King and Ms. Starbird are eager to make a case for the importance of Mary Magdalene in the early church and, more generally, to elucidate the ways that women have been denied access to power and had their reputations smeared for seeking it.

In contrast, Mr. McBrien and Mr. Griffith-Jones appear determined to advertise Jesus as a sexual man. And by arguing that Jesus was heterosexual and monogamous — married, even — they offer a new portrait of him that may be more palatable to some contemporary Christians who, following sex scandals in the Catholic Church, now find the idea of a celibate priesthood unnerving. In the view of the priests consulted for the ABC documentary, Jesus wasn't an asexual Jewish radical who consorted with a prostitute and a gang of guys, one of whom was an androgyne; instead, he was a normal family man.

"Jesus, Mary and da Vinci" has, however briefly, provided common cause for feminists and Catholics who are discouraged. Formally, it mixes fable with history in an absurdist way that, while indecent as documentary, can nonetheless activate the intellectual immune system in viewers, implicating them in the drama of historical debate. That's an exciting aim for network documentaries.

On this note, a sensible summation comes from Ms. King at the end of the hour: "Sometimes religion is presented as something that's fixed and stable. When you have to accept it and reject it. But the fact is that religious traditions, and certainly Christianity among them, are very diverse, very filled with possibilities. And we need to take responsibilities for the kind of religion that we make."

But others at the meeting missed the uplift of the day, and found the implications of ABC's show unnerving. As the meeting broke up and participants bussed their sodas and plastic plates, one minister grumbled that the last thing he wanted to offer to his congregants was a married Jesus. Conceived that way, Jesus's role as consoler of gay people, single people, widows and widowers, as well as the lonely, would be diminished, he said.

Jesus with a wife also implies favoritism, someone else said. Wasn't he supposed to love us all?

[TheCrusader]

"As several people mused about whether a married Jesus could still be divine"

Imagine a man being able to claim that the Son of God was his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather?

Of course you devout Christians out there understand that this blasphemous hypothesis of Jesus being married to Mary Magdelene is all about trying to make Jesus Christ less than Divine. It's quite similar to the Arian heresy, which claimed that Jesus was God's son, but that He was merely human and not divine. Satan never takes a rest, and neither should we in our fight to expose the bottom dwelling scumbag demon who attacks the divinity and sanctity of Our Lord.

[TheCrusader]

"If Da vinci was a homosexual, that woule explain something about the figure of "John"."

Da vinci was a homosexual.

[Petronski]

Note this was before the stone casket was found that said James brother of Jesus.

The fraud?

[RobbyS]

You have plenty of monks and this whole thing has to do with
a hostility toward monks that goes back to the Reformation.

[LiteKeeper]

INTREP

[pawdoggie]

ABC said it felt compelled to air this "special" because a four million people had read "The Da Vinci Code". There are millions of Muslims in this country, why no critical examination of Islam? There must be a million Buddhists in this country, why no critical examination of Buddhism? Hindus? Same-Same.

[RobbyS]

No one is going to say anything negative about Islam, including the fact that we know nothing about the life of Mohammed except through Muslim sources, or that the Koran was not compiled until two generations after his death. If the Koran seems to have a single voice, it is not necessarily that of Mohammed but of his editor.

[Destro]

The Mary Magdalene wife of Jesus myth is a reformation of West Central pagan mythology retold and reshaped over time: Ean Begg’s the Cult of the Black Virgin is mostly about the origins of the mysterious Black Virgins of Europe and their connections to esoteric saints, goddess traditions, the Cathars and other heretical sects, and Jungian depth psychology. However, Begg also discusses the Priory of Sion and notes that in most records, the full name of the organization is the Order of Our Lady of Sion. He hints that that Lady might not be the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, or even Isis, but instead the goddess Rosmerthe, associated with the Mount Sion found in Switzerland, and the female embodiment for the Celts of their ideal of sovereignty.

"Sion appears to have been at the nexus of two French anti-monarchical movements, the Compagnie du St.-Sacrament of the 17th century (acting on behalf on the Guise-Lorraine families) and the Fronde of the 18th, as well as an attempt to make the Hapsburgs emperors of all Europe in the 19th- the Hieron du Val d'Or."      - Steve Mizrach, "The Mysteries of Rennes-le-Château and the Prieure du Sion"

The final clue for study. Here is the key clue (and my own hypothesis-when I studied this the connection jumped out to me) - the French priest of this aristocratic cult, Berenger Sauniere who was patronized by European royalty (he was visited by the Archduke of Austria) in the 1890s got the money to build in the Catholic church several occultic themes that point to the origin of this myth back in time to the pagan days of old.

The grinning devil supports the Rennes Le Chateau's holy water vessel is, Asmodeus, also known as Ashmadia, most likely originated from the Persian Aeshma-deva ("demon of waith").

The apocryphal Book of Tobit describes an instance where Raguel's daughter, Sarah, was tormented by the demon. She was married seven times, each time the Asmodeus killed off the husband before they could have intercourse. Sarah, was about to hang herself in grief, but decided against it after thinking about the shame it would cause her father. She then prayed to God for death.

God answered her prayer by sending the angel, Raphael, to her aid. He instructed Tobiah to place fish liver and heart on the embers for incense. Asmodeus was repelled by the odor:

"The demon, repelled by the odor of the fish, fled into Upper Egypt; Raphael pursued him there and bound him hand and foot." - Tobit 8:3

The metaphor being that this demon (and the cult it represents) is repelled by the odor of the fish..the fish of course stands for Jesus.

[Destro]

One final point!

The said priest inscribed over the church's doorway:

"TERRIBILIS EST LOCUS ISTE"

This text, chiseled by the church's doorway dedicated to Mary Magdalene means: "THIS PLACE IS TERRIBLE"

And finally, Rennes-le-Château is situated in an area susceptible to earthbeams.

[MarMema]

Satan never takes a rest, and neither should we in our fight to expose the bottom dwelling scumbag demon who attacks the divinity and sanctity of Our Lord.

You are so very correct here. Recently the evil one seems to be more active than ever, though. I feel like it is coming in droves at us, and from all sides.

[MarMema]

Wow.

[MarMema]

There are millions of Muslims in this country, why no critical examination of Islam?

Well I think you know why.

[Destro]

PS: The above Devil has a golden belt, a sign of royalty and is holding up the holy water font in the shape of a giant oyster shell. The French word for oysetr is "huitre". The colloquial meaning of huitre is "fool". The demon is also sculpted in such a way as to make it seem he is sitting on an invisible chair. Satan's invisible throne?

[Destro]

It could be chilling, eh? No wacky Orthodox to build holy water holding demons, thank God.

[harbingr]

Go to Harbingr and read my links about the Fallen Angels and the Three Days of Darkness

[stands2reason]

I'd trust Eco on it. I enjoyed his work proving the fraud of the "Protocols of the Elders..."

[not-an-ostrich]

Was Da Vinci presented as a homosexual in The Da Vinci Code?

[TheCrusader]

"You are so very correct here. Recently the evil one seems to be more active than ever, though. I feel like it is coming in droves at us, and from all sides."

You are right about that, in a mere 40 years he has stood the world on its ear and turned everything inside out. Good is bad, bad is good, and few today can figure out what happened.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Destro. Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
11/03/2003