What Can Unitarians Learn from The Da Vinci Code?

Dan Brown’s bombshell novel The DaVinci Code has rapidly become a record-setting best-seller. I read it in an energetic all-nighter last summer and then almost immediately read the 1982 book it is largely based on, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent et al (henceforth abbreviated as HBHG). Since then I’ve read both books again, more carefully. But I’ve also read lots of other material on the Holy Grail, Mary Madgalene, her alleged marriage to Jesus, and the ensuing bloodline allegedly preserved in some of the royal families of Europe, as well as the diversity of early Christianity. My views have moved from faith to skepticism on some of Brown’s key assumptions, but from original skepticism to greater faith on others. Let me enumerate some of each. Dan Brown takes mainly from HBHG the following eight assumptions:

#1 – Mary Madgalene was a key disciple of Jesus with an important role in the early Christian movement.
#2 – Jesus and Mary were married and probably produced several children.
#3 – After Mary escaped to France their bloodline was preserved in the royal families of Europe, especially the Merovingians.
#4 – Secret societies have protected this knowledge for at least 1000 years and still do so today, hoping to restore Merovingian
descendants to positions of power.
#5 – Church leaders and especially the Vatican have conspired to resist this underground movement and preserve their own power.
#6 – They have also conspired to conceal the historical role of Mary Magdalene and the feminine side of Christian theology.
#7 – The Holy Grail is not only the chalice used at the Last Supper and/or to collect blood from Jesus on the cross, but also the bloodline
of Jesus, the womb of Mary Magdalene, and the restoration of the Sacred Feminine to its proper role in Christianity. True Grail
seekers are thus seeking much more than a mere lost cup. But church orthodoxy has never wanted them to succeed.
#8 – There’s something fishy about the accepted view of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, allowing church orthodoxy to prevail.

I will now discuss these eight assumptions seriatim:

#1 – There is considerable biblical evidence, and even more evidence from a variety of other sources, that Mary Magdalene was a key disciple, that Jesus shared things with her that he did not share with others, that Peter and some of the others resented this, and that Peter’s attitude toward Mary soon came to dominate the early Christian movement. Although Peter claimed to see and touch the risen Jesus, Mary saw him sooner, though he told her not to touch him. Instead he communicated with her more spiritually, as if his physical body were just as irrelevant to their post-crucifixion relationship as it had perhaps been crucial to their previous relationship. This led to a controversy as to who were the true successors of Jesus. Those who had actually touched him claimed priority, and became the early Church Fathers. But those who accepted Mary’s alternative view became a strong minority movement, which allowed any truly spiritual follower to have his or her own relationship with Jesus independently of the church hierarchy and bureaucracy. Mary was unfairly stigmatized as a prostitute and the Gnostics were unfairly branded as heretics. After the more literal view of the Resurrection was institutionalized in various dogmas and creeds, the minority movements gradually diminished. But they never completely died out, and still exist as Christian undercurrents today. Meanwhile the relatively recently discovered “Gospel of Mary Madgalene” was written in her name by unknown authors while the four synoptic Gospels were being standardized. The Gospel of Mary echoed the Gnostic view and emphasized the spiritual role of the individual believer in the quest for personal enlightenment and salvation. Most contemporary Unitarians who are seekers of spiritual truth would probably side with the Gnostics in this controversy. If so they should read some books of feminist theology by authors like Karen King, whose popularity has recently been helped by Dan Brown’s.

#2 - Karen King does not believe that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus. Perhaps this is partly because King stresses spirituality rather than physicality in relation to the Gnostics’ interpretation of resurrection and salvation. However, there is good evidence that Jesus was probably married to someone (see appendix), and if so Mary Magdalene is as good a candidate as the limited historical record provides. Jesus was probably of considerable social status as a descendant of King David. Mary Magdalene on the other hand was a Benjamite, coming from a Jewish tribe that already had been partially exiled to southern Europe for political reasons. She too was most likely of considerable social status, and a marriage between them would have been a potential dynastic union quite threatening to the imperial hegemony of the Romans. In HBHG this possibility is discussed in considerable detail, some of which is lifted almost verbatim by Dan Brown in his novel. I’m not sure it really happened that way, but it could have. And if it did, the Benjamite community in southern Europe would have had a good political motive to assimilate and conceal Mary and her progeny after their alleged escape to France with Joseph of Arimathea. I’m keeping my options open on this one.

#3 – Although my maternal grandmother Klea Clovis Hyde told me we were distantly related to King Clovis of France, a leading early Merovingian, which would make me a descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene if the theory of HBHG about the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were really true, this is where I start getting more skeptical. And this is despite the fact that the Merovingians were probably favorable to the Arian heresy, which has historical connections with the previous heresies that produced the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The Unitarians are fairly direct theological descendants of the Arians, so I wish the Merovingians were my own ancestors. But I just can’t bring myself to believe it without a lot more evidence, and I feel much the same way about the Merovingian bloodline of Jesus. It makes a nice story in Dan Brown’s novel, but the miscellaneous and circumstantial conjectures in HBHG don’t support it very well.

#4 – The secret society angle is the weakest link in Dan Brown’s historical chain. This is because the main evidence in HBHG that there ever was a secret Priory of Sion is derived from the clever fabrications of one Pierre Plantard, a convicted con artist who convinced Baigent et al that he was probably a Merovingian, and that he was related to other alleged Merovingians like the St. Clairs in France and their distant cousins the Sinclairs in England and Scotland. Almost all the documentary evidence cited in HBHG was most likely planted by Plantard and gullibly accepted by the authors of HBHG. After Brown’s novel became so popular a number of articles appeared that convincingly accused Plantard, who died in 2000, of a massive literary and historical hoax. The Priory of Sion most likely did not exist until 1956, when Plantard publicly chartered it with the French authorities. If so it certainly did not exist in the days when DaVinci, Newton, and others were allegedly its secret Grand Masters. The entire list of Grand Masters printed in HBHG and reprinted without acknowledgement in The DaVinci Code was thus created by Plantard, who conveniently included a number of his own alleged ancestors on the list. But it too makes a good story. Some of the other organizations mentioned in HBHG clearly did exist, such as the Templars, the Freemasons, and the Rosicrucians. It remains to be shown, however, that they had anything at all to do with the Merovingians or the bloodline of Jesus, though the Templars clearly had quite a lot to do with the Holy Grail. Secret societies are of course secretive by their very nature, so maybe they have hidden this ancient agenda so successfully that it took HBHG’s authors to ferret it out. But at the time they researched the Priory of Sion in the 1970’s they did not yet have access to recent scholarship on the Gnostics based on the Nag Hammadi scrolls and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which is a major flaw in their work. Indeed, to this day no one has carefully studied the possible relationships between underground Gnosticism and the many secret societies of the medieval and Renaissance eras.

#5/6 – Whether or not there has ever been an underground pro-Merovingian movement that threatened the power of Popes and non-Merovingian monarchs, it’s clear that church authorities have done a great deal to preserve their doctrinal and institutional authority. This began in the very early days of Peter and Paul when there was still a likelihood of their own martyrdom, which they took just as literally as they took the Resurrection of the body, adding their own blood to that of Jesus as pillars of the faith. As their message gradually spread to the Greco-Roman world and became more socially acceptable, there was more and more power to protect. Church authorities were almost all male, and behaved exactly as institutional males typically do. They defended their turf, at times quite fanatically. The Albigensian crusade against the heretical Cathars (dualistic Manichaeans and neo-Arians located in the same part of southern France where Mary Magdalene allegedly lived), the Dominicans and Jesuits with their Inquisition and Counter-Reformation, and the witchcraft trials are ample evidence of this. The celibate male clergy is one of many historical outcomes of a deliberate effort to marginalize women and femininity in the Catholic Church. The mystical, intuitive, and spiritual aspects of the Christian religion have suffered on account of this narrowing of its theology, policies, and institutional structures. It would have been a kinder, gentler, and more inclusive religious enterprise if the roles and ideas of women had been as acceptable in its formative institutional period from the writing and editing of the Gospels to the adoption of its formal creeds as they were in the very early oral tradition which focused on the actual words and deeds of Jesus. William Blake and Carl Jung recognized this long before very many authentic Gnostic texts were readily available, and prophetically declared themselves to be neo-Gnostics based on their own theological intuitions.

#7 – The popular redefinition of the Holy Grail is Dan Brown’s greatest literary and philosophical achievement. Even if it has no authentic historical basis it could signal a useful revision of an ancient myth that had lost most of its contemporary relevance. Most modern Unitarians could easily subscribe to the quest for Brown’s New Holy Grail, and that’s why they should probably read his book. Only those who then want to expose the lack of factual basis for some of Brown’s other claims should then go on to read HBHG as carefully as I did. I’m not saying it was a complete waste of time. The authors of HBHG studied a great deal of history and theology to come up with their theories, and they ended up with a new vision of the Grail that clearly inspired Brown, whose book I’m glad I read. Ironically his other novel featuring the same main character Robert Langdon has a very different conclusion. In Angels and Demons the villain is unmasked at the end as a bogus modern representative of another ancient secret society, the Illuminati, while the current secret members of the Priory of Sion are made to seem quite real in The DaVinci Code. The hyperconservative Catholic priestly order Opus Dei is in fact quite real (though it contains no monks contrary to Brown’s portrayal). But they are in fact badly miscast by Brown, and may be well justified in their righteous indignation at him. See their website opusdei.org for further details. Other websites you may want to peruse include Dan Brown’s own site danbrown.com and the site grailchurch.org.

#8 – In The DaVinci Code and especially in HBHG it is suggested that the Crucifixion and the Resurrection were not exactly what orthodox Christian theology presents them to be. Perhaps the whole scene was staged to protect the life and/or bloodline of Jesus. HBHG goes into great detail as to how this might have been accomplished. Another creative scenario is presented in The Man Who Died by D.H. Lawrence. There is some historical evidence that Jesus did not really die on the cross. We will never really know. But in any case he did not just die for your sins or mine, or for anyone’s sins including possibly his own or Mary Magdalene’s. Unitarians have always had problems with the Resurrection and the Atonement. Joseph Priestley said the Atonement was the first orthodox dogma he questioned, even before he began to question the divinity of Jesus and then eventually the Trinity. So if there’s any good reason for Unitarians to read HBHG it’s to get new insights into the meaning of Jesus’s death and its relationship to the renewal of life, in this case perhaps even the lives of his own children and their descendants. Even if I’m not one of them, I can learn something from the experience. As an aside it should be noted that the Sanhedrin could have stoned Jesus to death without Roman authority. So the fact that he was crucified instead makes it likely the Romans were behind it, not the Jews. Joseph of Arimathea, a Sanhedrin member, was on the side of Jesus. So much for the alleged historical basis of anti-Semitism, and shame on Mel Gibson. HBHG quite plausibly says the Jews were scapegoated by the early evangelists in order not to offend a Greco-Roman audience.

The main things I learned from my attempt to understand Dan Brown were that Mary Magdalene was a very important historical figure in early Christianity and that her alternative theological message of individual spiritual enlightenment is still relevant to the modern world, even to non-Christians. The Priory of Sion and the Merovingian bloodline turned out to be much less important than I expected them to be. They may even be red herrings altogether. Nothing truly important in the main lessons of either book depends on the truth or falsehood of these hypotheses.

In conclusion let me leave you with some titles you may want to read someday:

Michael Baigent et al, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The Messianic Legacy, The Temple and the Lodge, Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, etc.

Anne Brock, Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle

Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code, Angels and Demons

Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her

Karen King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala

D.H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, Beyond Belief, Origin of Satan, Adam, Eve, and Serpent, etc.

William Phipps, Was Jesus Married?

James Robinson, editor, The Nag Hammadi Library

Jane Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene

Margaret Starbird, Woman with the Alabaster Jar, Grail Bearer, Madgalene’s Last Legacy, Feminine Face of Christianity, Goddess in the Gospels

Below you will find an appendix that proves to my considerable satisfaction that Jesus was probably married, though perhaps not to Mary Magdalene. After that is another appendix from Karen King that summarizes the latest research on Mary Magdalene. When I have time to learn more about Mary Magdalene I’ll do another sermon just on her. Unfortunately some of the above sources are either very recent or relatively hard to get in Wayne NE.

WAS JESUS MARRIED? - A QUICK FACT SHEET

SUGGESTIVE EVIDENCE - 1. The marriage of Jesus Christ is a taboo subject because most Christians regard it as an impious suggestion. They think this because marriage implies sexuality, and sexuality is defiled in Christian dogma. A married Christ is rejected for theological reasons, not because of historical facts which may disprove the thesis. 2. While the New Testament "appears" to be silent on the subject, it was not until late in the 2nd Century, that any Christian leader denied that Jesus Christ was married. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria believed that a married Jesus was inconsistent with His role as the Savior of the world, not that marriage would have Him sinful, but rather, that His mission was too demanding and heavenly to allow Him the opportunity for marriage. 3. All later references in the Patristic writings show the Church Fathers following the same pattern: they deny that Jesus was married based upon the supposed silence of the Scriptures and doctrinal problems which were inconsistent with the Church's dogma (e.g. a celibate priesthood, the ritual defilement of seminal emissions, etc.). 4. There was a 2nd Century tradition among various heretical sects which taught that Jesus was married. Clement and others may have been reacting to those movements. 5. Although he didn't say one way or the other, Irenaeus' Doctrine of Recapitulation supports the notion of a married Savior. With a style similar to the Druids, Irenaeus, another 2nd Century leader, taught that Jesus Christ symbolically entered every critical stage of human existence and sanctified it. Since family life, including sexuality, is central to our lives, it seems logically consistent with the mission of a Savior to redeem and sanctify this aspect of our experience, as well. 6. In their dispute with Augustine, the Celtic Pelagians argued that the Atonement of Christ cancelled Original Sin. If Original Sin was, as Augustine argued, a sexually transmitted disease of the soul, then Christ has reversed the process and made it a transmitter of healing, health, and virtue. 7. In keeping with the Creeds of the Church, the offspring of Christ would not have represented a "divine race". The Creeds teach that Christ had two natures: one human and one divine, without mingling and without confusion. Since procreation is a human function, we can reasonably say that the children of Jesus would have been just as human as any other human being.

INDIRECT EVIDENCE

1. Jewish customs of Jesus' day required married Rabbis. Unmarried men were considered a curse to Jewish society. Jesus would not have had much credibility as a leader had He not been married. Although Jesus was a non-conformist and had many conflicts with Jewish tradition, His parents, Joseph and Mary, were not. The Bible says that they were careful to perfectly obey the laws of their people. It also says that Jesus was "subject unto them". Since Jewish culture practiced arranged marriages and early marriage, as well (a Jewish boy was marriageable at age 16), it is reasonable to assume that Jesus' parents would have performed their parental duties faithfully and arranged a bride for the young Jesus. There are 18 silent years in His life (12 - 30). The Gospel of John tells us that there were many other things which Jesus did which have not been recorded. This point is important because it shifts the weight of presumption. Given the cultural milieu in which Jesus lived and the supporting Biblical evidence, the burden of proof lies with those who do not believe Jesus was married. They must show why Jesus and His parents would have been derelict in their civic responsibilities and not contracted a marriage. 2. According to Josephus, descendants of the House of David felt a moral obligation to perpetuate their line, never knowing which one among their descendants would be the chosen Messiah. Jesus may or may not have known who He was, but regardless, He lived as a normal person until called by the ministry of John the Baptist.

DIRECT EVIDENCE

1. Hippolytus, a Christian leader from the late 2nd Century, was followed by Origen in the 3rd Century in saying that the Song of Solomon was a prophecy of a marital union between Christ and Mary Magdalene. Although they believed Mary was symbolic of the Church, nevertheless, the notion presupposed a real, albeit a spiritual (meaning non-sexual), marriage between Mary and Jesus. 2. There are hints scattered in the Gospels of a special relationship between Jesus and Mary. If she is the same Mary of Bethany in John 11, then we can explain why Martha arose to greet Jesus and not Mary. Some scholars say she was sitting shiva according to Jewish custom. "Shiva" was when a woman was in mourning. Married women were not allowed to break-off from their mourning unless called by their husbands. In this story, Mary does not come to Jesus, until He calls her.

• At the Resurrection, when Mary meets Jesus in the Garden, there is a degree of intimacy (see the Aramaic here) which one would expect between lovers, not friends.
• The Greek word for "woman" and "wife" is the same. Translators must rely upon the context in deciding how to translate it. Sometimes, the translation is arbitrary. When Mary is referred to as a "woman" who followed Jesus, it can just as easily be translated as "wife".

4. The story of Mary with the alabaster jar anointing the feet of Jesus is cited by some scholars as the most direct witness to their marriage. It is in all four Gospels and was a story in which Jesus gave express command that it be preserved. This ceremony was an ancient one among many royal houses in the ancient world, which sealed the marital union between the king and his priestess spouse. We find it mentioned briefly in the Song of Solomon. Although we may not understand its significance, Jesus and Mary knew exactly what they were doing. To be the valid Messiah, He had to be anointed first by the Bride. They were by-passing the corrupt Jewish establishment. There is more support for the marital status of Jesus. However, it involves a discussion of the Old Testament prophets which would be too tedious to undertake, here. It is important to realize, however, that belief in a married Jesus does not require any more faith than a resurrected Jesus. And if you know where to look, you can find just as much biblical evidence for both.

Recommended reading: Was Jesus Married?, by William E. Phipps, Harper & Row, 1970
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, by Margaret Starbird, Bear & Company, 1993

The above is taken from Hierogamy & the Married Messiah which is now available. It is the most complete analysis of the "married Jesus" doctrine to date. The first three chapters are now available via e-mail subscription. For a free subscription, contact: hierogamy@grailchurch.org.

Letting Mary Magdalene Speak, by Karen King. Tradition is not fixed. Newly-discovered texts let us hear other voices in an ancient Christian debate.

In an article about recent interest in Mary Magdalene, Kenneth Woodward writes “the news is not what is being said about her, but the new context in which she is being placed--and who is doing the placing and why.” As he points out, scholars have agreed at least since the 1960s that she was not a prostitute. Likewise, the speculation that Mary and Jesus were married is hardly new. “The real news,” he says, is found in the work of “ideologically committed feminist scholarship”—a statement I heartily agree with. The rest of his article, however, is more an expression of Woodward’s distaste for feminism than a review or even a critique of that scholarship. Readers may want to evaluate for themselves examples of the best work in rhetorical criticism and feminist scholarship on Mary of Magdala, such as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s classic work, In Memory of Her, and Jane Schaberg’s recent book, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene.

Part of the recent excitement about Mary Magdalene has to do with discoveries of previously unknown early Christian writings from Egypt, like the Gospel of Mary, the Dialogue of the Savior, and the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Mary is found in a fifth-century C.E. papyrus book that came onto the Cairo antiquities market in 1896. It was purchased by a German scholar and taken to Berlin, where it was first published in 1955. In 1945, two Egyptian peasants made an astonishing discovery while digging for fertilizer at the foot of the Jabel al-Tarif, a cliff near the town of Nag Hammadi in Middle Egypt. They uncovered a sealed clay jar containing a hoard of papyrus manuscripts. Known as the Nag Hammadi Codices, these fourth-century C.E. papyrus books included a wealth of ancient Christian literature, a total of 46 different works in all, almost all of which were previously unknown. These and other original writings offer new perspectives on our diverse Christian beginnings.

Early Christians intensely debated such basic issues as the content and meaning of Jesus’ teachings, the nature of salvation, the value of prophetic authority, the roles of women and slaves, and competing visions of ideal community. After all, these first Christians had no New Testament, no Nicene Creed or Apostles Creed, no commonly established church order or chain of authority, no church buildings, and indeed no single understanding of Jesus. All of the elements we might consider essential to define Christianity did not yet exist. Far from being starting points, the Nicene Creed and the New Testament were the end products of these debates and disputes. They represent the distillation of experience and experimentation—and not a small amount of strife and struggle.

One consequence of these struggles is that the winners were able to write the history of this period from their perspective. The viewpoints of the losers were largely lost since their ideas survived only in documents denouncing them. Until now. The recent discoveries provide a wealth of primary works that illustrate the plural character of early Christianity and offer alternative voices. They also help us to understand the winners better because their ideas and practices were shaped in the crucible of these early Christian debates. The Nicene Creed, for example, was never intended to be the full statement of Christian faith—after all, it does not ask Christians to affirm anything in the teachings of Jesus even though they were of fundamental importance to faith and practice. Instead every article of the Creed was formulated as a hedge against views that were considered to be wrong.

To take the new texts seriously as historical documents does not mean considering them to be theologically authoritative for contemporary believers. That determination has to be made—as it always has been—by communities of faith. Meanwhile, placing the figure of Mary Magdalene in this new context helps us understand how the erroneous portrait of her as a prostitute could have been invented and how it could have flourished in the West for well over a millennium without any evidence to support it. Several of the newly-discovered works portray her as a favored disciple of Jesus and apostle after the resurrection. In the Gospel of Mary, for example, she calms the other disciples when they are afraid and gives them special teaching that Jesus had conveyed to her alone. The text states that Jesus knew her completely and loved her more than the others. It also draws upon a tradition of Peter in conflict with Mary, a topic handled with great sophistication by Anne Brock in her new book, Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle: The Struggle for Authority.

But in these newly-discovered books, Mary is the apostolic guarantor of a theological position that lost out in the battle for orthodoxy. The Gospel of Mary, for example, presents a radical interpretation of Jesus’ teachings as a path to inner spiritual knowledge, not apocalyptic revelation; it acknowledges the reality of Jesus’ death and his resurrection, but it rejects his suffering and death as the path to eternal life; it also rejects the immortality of the physical body, asserting that only the soul will be saved; it presents the most straightforward and convincing argument in any early Christian writing for the legitimacy of women’s leadership; it offers a sharp critique of illegitimate power and a utopian vision of spiritual perfection; it challenges our romantic views about the harmony of the first Christians; and it asks us to rethink the basis for church authority. All written in the name of a woman.

The Gospel of Mary lets us see that by making Mary Magdalene into a repentant prostitute, the leaders of the Church could achieve two aims at once. They succeeded both in undermining appeals to Mary Magdalene to support women’s leadership, and at the same time they were able to undermine the kind of theology being promoted in her name—theology which the Church Fathers condemned as heresy.

Mr. Woodward is quite right that the discovery of such sources challenges the traditional portrait of Christian history, a history which states that Jesus gave the true teaching to male apostles who passed it down untainted to the bishops who succeeded them. The purity of this gospel is secured especially through the Nicene Creed and orthodox interpretation of the Biblical canon.While the new texts do not show a “raging gender war” in the early churches, they do provide evidence that one issue being debated concerned women’s leadership. In the Gospel of Mary, Peter is portrayed as a hothead—just as he is in many episodes in the New Testament gospels. Here he is jealous of Mary and refuses to believe that Jesus would give her special teaching. This portrait seems to suggest that Christians who, like Peter, reject women’s right to teach do so out of jealousy and lack of understanding.

In my book, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, I argue that this gospel offers an alternative voice to that canonized in 1 Timothy, where women are enjoined to silence and childbearing in order to gain salvation. The Gospel of Mary lets us hear another voice in the ancient debate, one that was lost for almost 2000 years. It expands our understanding of the dynamics of early Christianity, but it does not offer a voice that is beyond criticism. For example, the Gospel of Mary’s rejection of the body as one’s true self is highly problematic for contemporary feminism which affirms the dignity of the human body.

Of course the issue of women’s leadership has not gone away. It is not just an ancient controversy. In our own time feminists work to ensure that the true story of Mary Magdalene, as well as other alternative voices, are heard—not only by readers of the 1967 New Catholic Encyclopedia, but also by a broader range of the public as well. On the other hand, scholars and others who find these new works challenging tend to dismiss them as heresy and try to marginalize their impact on current debates. It would seem, then, that all this commotion about Mary Magdalene is just another episode in the long history of Christians arguing amongst themselves.

Why should anyone pay attention? This is why: Since so much in Christian belief and practice rests upon historical claims, an accurate view of history is crucial. One criterion for good history is accounting for all the evidence and not marginalizing the parts one doesn’t like or promoting unfairly the parts one does like. Whether or not communities of faith embrace or reject the teaching found in these newly discovered texts, Christians will better understand and responsibly engage their own tradition by attending to an accurate historical account of Christian beginnings.

Moreover, given the importance of religion in today’s world—especially notable in the intersection of religion and violence—I believe it is important for non-Christians as well as Christians to recognize that all religious traditions contain many voices and offer a variety of possibilities for addressing the complex issues of our day. In that sense, tradition is not fixed, but is continually being constructed as believers draw upon the past to address the present. Therefore religion is not simply given—something one can only accept or reject. Religions are constantly being interpreted, which means that people must take responsibility for their religion and its effects.

Far from suggesting that religious claims are always true and offer no errors, this perspective insists that communities of believers need to engage critically with their tradition and be held responsible for how they appropriate it. Although nothing can guarantee that people will live wisely and morally, an account that includes all historical sources of tradition might create a surer basis on which theological judgments are made. An accurate historical account will not ensure that the figure of Mary Magdalene won’t continue to be prostituted for polemical purposes as she has been for centuries—but it does restore some dignity to this important woman.