Magdalene: Wife of Jesus?
Feminist theologians hope that a new pope would be willing to be more inclusive of women at every level, from meetings in the Vatican to liturgy in the parishes. A bestselling thriller is helping outsiders understand how much the institutional church has silenced women over the centuries.
The Da Vinci Code is a novel by Dan Brown that explores the church's suppression of women's stories, including the story of Mary Magdalene, a woman the book says was married to Jesus.
In Sightings, an online column collection, University of Chicago theologian Margaret M. Mitchell takes a look at what part of the fiction is true -- and what part is false.
"Brown propagates the full-dress conspiracy theory for Vatican suppression of women. Feminist scholars and others have been debating different models of the "patriarchalization" of Christianity for decades. Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza's landmark work, In Memory of Her (1983), argued that while Jesus and Paul (on his better days) were actually pretty much pro-women, it was the next generations (the authors of letters in Paul's name like 1 and 2 Timothy and others) who betrayed their feminist agenda and sold out to the Aristotelian, patriarchal vision of Greco-Roman society.
Others (unfortunately) sought to blame the misogyny on the Jewish roots of Christianity. More recently it has been argued that the picture is more mixed, even for Jesus and Paul. That is, they may have been more liberal than many of their contemporaries about women, but they were not all-out radicals, though they had ideas (such as Gal 3:28) that were even more revolutionary than they realized (in both senses of the term). Alas, no simple story here.
And while obsessing over Mary Magdalene, The Da Vinci Code ignores completely the rise and incredible durability and power of the other Mary, the mother of Jesus, and devotion to her which follows many patterns of "goddess" veneration (she even gets the Athena's Parthenon dedicated to her in the sixth century).
