 |
Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Questions about Christianity > (No Subject)
| Forum Quick Jump
|
| 
DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 11/4/2003 4:16 AM (GMT -6) |   | Critic's Notebook: The Volatile Notion of a Married Jesus
November 3, 2003
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
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?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/arts/television/03HEFF.html?ex=1068949523&ei=1&en=604dff82fa75d75b
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
 |
Tigress
Registered Member
Date Joined Feb 2003
Total Posts : 1252
| Posted 11/4/2003 11:54 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
|
Starkman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2001
Total Posts : 1747
| Posted 11/5/2003 6:52 AM (GMT -6) | | Hey, ya'll want a to read something very interesting about why Mary Mag may be more prominent in the Gospels then we realize? Check this out ...
"Mary Magdalene: Author of the Fourth Gospel?"
by Ramon K. Jusino, M.A.
ramon_k_jusino.tripod.com/magdalene.html
Starkman | | Back to Top | | |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 6:31 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|