There Is Something About Mary Series

THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

John 20:11-18

Adapted from “The Da Vinci Code: Fact Or Fiction (Part Four: Mary Magdalene’s Big Role)” by Jim Butcher

John 20:11-20:18

The Da Vinci Code’s Claim: “Mary Magdalene’s most important role was being married to Jesus.”

According to the book, the Holy Grail was never a cup, it was not a chalice that Jesus passed around the table at the Last Supper nor was it the cup that caught the blood of Christ at the Cross as Grail Legend would have it. Instead, according to the Da Vinci Code, the Holy Grail was a person, but not just any person, as Dan Brown notes, the Holy Grail is…

"A woman who carried with her a secret so powerful, that if revealed, it threatened to devastate the very foundation of Christianity!" 239.

Who was this woman you ask and what was her secret?

Well, according to the book, this woman was Mary Magdalene and her secret was that she and Jesus were married and had a daughter by the name of Sarah.

So, the Holy Grail was not a cup that held the blood of Christ, instead it was Mary Magdalene who held the blood of Christ in the form of a baby in her womb.

Now, the book claims that the marriage between Jesus and Mary is "a matter of historical record", and Da Vinci was certainly aware of that fact. The Last Supper [painting] practically shouts at the viewer that Jesus and Magdalene were a pair." 244

SHOW PICTURE OF THE LAST SUPPER

The Mary of Da Myth. We don’t know a lot about Mary Magdalene we don’t know her occupation, the color of her hair, if she was old or young, homely or beautiful but of course that doesn’t keep people from speculated. It’s that old adage; never let an absence of facts stand in the way of a good story.

Here is what we know -

1. She was from Magdala in Galilee

2. Jesus cast seven demons out of her.

3. She joined the band of disciples and followed Jesus where ever he went. Luke 8:2

4. She was at the cross when all the male disciples had fled (Mk 15:40, Jn 19:25)

5. She observed Jesus burial (Mk 15:47)

6. She came with the other women to the tomb (Matt 28:1, Mark 16:1, Luke 24:10

7. She was the first to discover the resurrection, and first to report it to the disciples, and first to see the resurrected Christ as she lingers by the tomb, after all the others have gone.

(John 20:1,2, 11-18)

- As we noted last week, Dan Brown claims in his book that Mary Magdalene is of monumental importance because she was married to Jesus. (We also noted that Brown claims that she had a child with Jesus and that that bloodline continues to this day in France, but that’s not our focus for this morning.) How did Dan Brown even get the idea for this book. The main source for the information in the Da Vinci Code comes from a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, first published in 1982.

- I want to spend most of this morning talking about how important Mary Magdalene is, only not at all in the way that Brown claims. But first, let me note again that there is no evidence in the Bible for the claim that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married.

- Brown claims backing from the Gospel of Phillip for his historical backing for Jesus being married. There are a few problems there.

First of all, the Gospel of Phillip is a Gnostic text that is widely considered by scholars to have been written at least a century after the canonical gospels. So it’s not authoritative.

Second, even that debunked book does not refer to Jesus having married Mary Magdalene, but simply states that he kissed her. The word used does not even denote a romantic kiss, but denotes something more like a kiss on the cheek or forehead.

A kiss was a common way for men to greet each other. Phillip, in mentioning that Jesus kissed Mary, is telling us that he treated her like other disciples. Brown makes a big deal about the word “companion” which he claims, in Aramaic, is equivalent to “spouse”. First, I think his Aramaic is questionable, but that doesn’t matter. The Gospel of Philip was written in Coptic. Dan Brown didn’t even get the language right.

However the copies of Philip that the scholars have is not complete, it has been nibbled away at by worms and the inconsiderate critters sometimes ate letters, words and entire passages from the text and so what it really says is Gospel of Philip 63:32–36 The companion of the ___ __ Mary Magdalene. But ____ ____ her more than __ the disciples ___ __ __ kiss her ____ on her ____