Keeping the Faith, Without Da Vinci

Keeping the Faith, Without Da Vinci

How the blockbuster gets it both wrong and right about women in Christianity.

By Bryan Collinsworth

Denouncing surprisingly trivial things—beach reading, summer action flicks, Tom Hanks’ hair—as mortal threats to faith seems to be an essential attribute of any self-respecting religious establishment.

Still, one can see why the high-ranking Vatican officials who recently called for a boycott of the book and film phenomenon collectively known as The Da Vinci Code might be concerned. After all, some 60 million people have read Dan Brown’s novel, and the film version just opened to the second-highest first-weekend box office of all time after last year’s Star Wars: Episode III.

And there’s no doubt that the appeal of Da Vinci has something to do with the grandiose, faith-challenging conspiracy theory that lies at its cheesy, pulpy heart. (Spoiler alert for the two of you out there who still haven’t read the book or seen the movie.) What could be more enticing than the contention—laid out in between a series of car chases, gun battles, and code-cracking challenges, no less—that the last 1800-some odd years of Christianity have been a massive scheme to suppress the truth that Jesus was just a man, and more than that, was the coequal marriage partner of one of the most famous biblical women, Mary Magdalene?

The earliest followers of Jesus accepted and documented all of this as basic fact, posits The Da Vinci Code; but the Christian clergy hierarchy that arose by the third century could only maintain its power by claiming a divine Jesus as the one true way to salvation while simultaneously suppressing the most popular alternative in that era: namely, women, the “sacred feminine,” with their mysterious powers to create and sustain new life in a world fraught with decay. And so the real, egalitarian Jesus was buried beneath a masculine deity, and the women who had found equality and even honor in his initial community were subjected to millennia of marginalization and oppression by the church.

In other words, Brown’s story suggests not just a centuries-old cover-up but a potentially utopian resolution: If the hidden truth about Mary and women in the early church can only be revealed, the theological and institutional support for almost two thousand years of Western misogyny will be cast aside. Or, as Sir Ian McKellan’s character grandly declares in the film, sexism and even other human divisions may cease to exist.

It’s all a wonderfully radical notion, but do the assertions behind it hold water (or communion wine, as the case may be)?

Admittedly, the details of Brown’s story leave something to be desired. The Da Vinci Code devotes much time to ancient texts that allegedly reveal the truth about Jesus and Mary’s relationship, but which, it says, were purposely excluded from the “official” Bible. It focuses particularly on several excerpts from what are called the “Gnostic gospels” or “Nag Hammadi Library,” long-lost papyrus writings about Jesus rediscovered within the last 150 years.

These texts do indeed exist, and they do offer portrayals of Christ, Mary Magdalene, and Christian faith that differ from the well-known Biblical accounts in striking ways (though they’re far from the straightforward counter-story Brown suggests).

The Code’s contention that these were more accurate portrayals of Jesus’ life than the accounts that made it into the Bible, however, is nearly impossible to support. The main problem is that while the non-biblical texts Brown cites are old, the New Testament texts are even older. The best biblical historians date the Gnostic gospels mentioned in the Da Vinci Code to the second century—about 100 years after Jesus’ death. The gospel of Mark, meanwhile (the oldest of the four biblical accounts of Jesus’ life), is dated to 40 to 60 years after his death.

There are telltale signs in these “Da Vinci gospels” that make some surpassing authenticity unlikely—particularly the tendency of the Jesus portrayed therein to speak in long, polemical discourses, rather than the concise, pithy phrases typical of the style of Jewish teachers of his time. (These are how he speaks in the biblical books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.)

And while the names of the specific texts Brown quotes from may sound impressively legitimate—there’s even the Gospel of Mary Magdalene herself!—more in-depth biblical scholarship has long established that claims to authorship in the era of early Christianity were a complex and tenuous affair. The text attributed to Mary (her last name isn’t actually specified) was almost certainly written by later authors seeking to legitimize their version of the Christ story by connecting it with a famous name.

But here’s the kicker: While Brown’s dramatic story of Mary, wife of Jesus may be a stretch, his broader assertion that Christ and the first Christians were a remarkably egalitarian and female-friendly bunch later suppressed into a patriarchal church has a heck of a lot going for it.

It doesn’t take any secret archaeological finds to figure that one out, though; the evidence is in the Bible itself. Take just one famous story from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is teaching his male disciples while they stay in the home of two women, Mary and Martha. As Martha rushes about trying to fulfill her expected duties as a hostess, Mary does something deeply frowned upon if not totally unheard of in the culture of her day: She forsakes her womanly duties to sit down alongside the men and learn from Jesus as their equal. Martha is shocked at her sister’s audacious behavior, but Jesus tells her that “Mary has chosen what is better.”

This striking pattern continues throughout the rest of the New Testament stories. While the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ life diverge at many points, all four tell us that it was his female companions who remained with him until he breathed his last on the cross, long after his male disciples had fled. All four hold that it was a group of women, Mary Magdalene among them, who first discovered his empty tomb and experienced the revelation of the resurrection.

And in the writings of the early church that make up the rest of the New Testament, we read again and again of women holding high status—often equal to or even greater than that of men—in the first Christian communities. In a bold departure from contemporary Jewish and Roman practices in which women were often entirely separated from men at best and relegated to second-class status at worst, we find the story of Priscilla and Aquila, a missionary couple who seemed to work only as equals; or references to Phoebe, “a deacon [minister] of the church at Cenchraea”; or countless other leading women. For a brief time at its inception, Christianity was a genuine force for progressive equality of the sexes, offering liberation to a group that could find it almost nowhere in the surrounding culture.

So what happened next? Did Dan Brown’s massive cover-up actually take place after all?

To paraphrase another (slightly more time-tested) world-renowned writer, the end of women’s high place in the early church came not with a bang so much as a long, painful whimper. As we progress through the New Testament, further and further from the birth of the movement, we watch the misogyny that so thoroughly dominated almost every other aspect of contemporary life in the Roman Empire creep back into these faith communities, as well.

Stories of precocious women are gradually replaced by admonitions to silence; the Phoebes and Priscillas leading worship services fade into anonymous figures seated at the back of the church, forbidden from teaching, to “be saved through childbearing.” At some points, it even appears that later writers brazenly inserted anti-female passages into the scriptures of earlier, revered Christian leaders like the Apostle Paul, in an effort to set the more egalitarian record crooked. (Try reading through the 14th chapter of I Corinthians and see if you catch any suspiciously drastic shifts in subject matter.)

Unfortunately, we all know how the history unfolds from there. In an important way, the true suppression of Christianity’s early gender egalitarianism is even worse than The Da Vinci Code’s great cover-up: There will be no sudden, all-correcting revelation to rescue us from the millennia of discrimination that have ensued.

On the other hand, the reality also relieves us of the need for any breathless, death-defying romps across Europe in search of secret codes and hidden treasures, Dan Brown-style. The cultural counter-tradition to Western patriarchy may have been suppressed, but it was never fully concealed; it hides in plain sight not only in the early Christian stories but a thousand other cultural cues and experiences in Western history. From Ruth and Esther in the Hebrew scriptures down through the women’s suffrage movement to modern-day feminism, women seeking progress have seized on this alternative vision of empowerment and equality, forced it into the light of day, and found in it the strength to achieve genuine change.

While the literal truth of The Da Vinci Code’s story about Jesus and Mary Magdalene is tenuous at best, it can still be deeply resonant as a metaphor. Despite the dark history of women’s treatment in the West, far more progressive possibilities have indeed arisen and persisted again and again. At times, as in early Christianity, these visions have even flourished, and we find ourselves struggling toward their fulfillment again today.

Dan Brown and Tom Hanks aren’t going to be the ones to complete this quest for us, though. We’re going to have to take it from here.

Illustration: Matt Bors

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