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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: Why The Fundamentalists Are Freaking Out Over Da Vinci Code : Was Jesus Married To Mary Magdalene? Did They Have A Daughter? May 16, 200 Skewering the Patriarchs of the Church Why The Fundamentalists Are Freaking Out Over Da Vinci Code By HARVEY WASSERMAN Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene? Did they have a daughter? Questions about Christ's love life will dominate debate over the release of the DAVINCI CODE this weekend. The answers do matter. But what really counts is the story's pagan/feminist core, and its role in the Culture War. The spin has begun. As freaked-out fundamentalists focus on Jesus's sexuality, and on petty documentary talking points, they'll try to obscure DAVINCI'S lethal assault on the Church's reactionary male theocracy. What's at stake is not the fine points of documentation and detail. Rather it's the contention that male-dominated Christian/Catholic fundamentalism as a repressive dictatorship that has thrown sexuality and sexuality out of balance. Fiction it may be. But with 45 million copies in print, Dan Brown's DAVINCI is a force of nature. How Ron Howard's upcoming feature film deals with its core content will have significant impact. Opening amidst the catastrophic failure of the macho neo-con Bush putsch and its moral, spiritual and fiscal bankruptcy, it's no wonder the Church hierarchy is mobilizing Rove-style against DAVINCI'S profoundly subversive truths. The dramatic vehicle on which DAVINCI rides is a gimmicky Paris-London-Scotland murder mystery filled with riddles and gadgets. It is saturated with Church intrigue and the usual greed. The documentation around which it's constructed is as inventive as it is irrelevant. For the book's spiritual core---and popular appeal---rests on its invocation and adoration of feminist spirituality and pagan naturalism. With wild invention and literary flair worthy of its namesake, DAVINCI flaunts the heretical, anti-clerical homosexuality of western civilization's leading intellectual superstar. Leonardo's Mona Lisa plays as a coy, cutting smirk, exalting female power and the demand for gender balance. In its most crucial exposition, DAVINCI cuts to the heart of today's culture war, in which the "tradition of perpetuating goddess worship is based on a belief that powerful men in the early Christian church 'conned' the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine." The Priory of Sion is DAVINCI's heroic secret society. It worships Mary Magdalene as "the Goddess, the Holy Grail, the Rose, and the Divine Mother." It is dedicated to sexual liberation and a vital balance of the global spirit. It "believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever." In the words of DAVINCI's protagonist, a Harvard professor, the Grail "is literally the ancient symbol for womanhood, and the HOLY Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess, which of course has now been lost, virtually eliminated by the Church." These are the ultimate fighting words to a rigid, eco-hating fundamentalist movement that preaches sexual repression and violent male domination, whose prelates "claim to speak the truth about Christ and yet lie to cover up the sexual abuse of children by their own priests." "The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred," says DAVINCI, "but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and called unclean. It was MAN, not God, who created the concept of 'original sin,' whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. Woman, once the sacred giver of life, was now the enemy." For today's right wing, She still is. As it mobilizes to fight this story, that will be the core complaint, no matter how carefully concealed. "This concept of woman as life-bringer was the foundation of ancient religion," adds another DAVINCI scholar. "Childbirth was mystical and powerful. Sadly, Christian philosophy decided to embezzle the female's creative power by ignoring the biological truth and making MAN the Creator. Genesis tells us that Eve was created from Adam's rib. Woman became an offshoot of man. And a sinful one at that. Genesis was the beginning of the end for the goddess." Darwin may have marked the beginning of the end for Genesis. But pagan naturalism has never ceased its struggle against the Church of totalitarian testosterone. When the film comes out, the talk/gossip circuit will focus on Jesus's sex life. Best would be for Mel Brooks to counter with a sequel showing mother Mary, the sainted virgin (aren't they all?), nagging poor Jesus (oy! a carpenter!) to get hitched, already. And, of course, he will. For "Jesus was a Jew," says DAVINCI, "and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned." If so, then what have all these Catholic priests and popes been doing---or NOT doing---for centuries, suffering in what DAVINCI calls the "unnatural state of bachelorhood"? DAVINCI says Mary Magdalene was pregnant at the Crucifixion, and that she mothered "the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ." But "a child of Jesus would undermine the critical notion of Christ's divinity, and therefore the Christian Church, which declared itself the sole vessel through which humanity could access the divine." So the hate-nature anti-feminists have waged a never-ending Crusade to cover it all up. Thus the Grail story "is everywhere but it is hidden," something an effective rendering of DAVINCI in a block-buster film could end. Count on the bloviators to blab endlessly about this detail and that document while avoiding like a plague DAVINCI's searing feminist critique. The fundamentalist right has already gone to war over THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, which dared portray Jesus as being profoundly human (not to mention speaking with a Brooklyn accent). With DAVINCI, the stakes are far higher. Jesus's sex life is one thing, and the documentation surrounding the plotline yet another. But it is the pagan gender war that poses the ultimate threat to the hard-right theocracy of today's neo-con nightmare. Small wonder the fundamentalist fanatics are arming for battle. If DAVINCI the movie gets beyond the petty gossip and Rovian spin, and into the heart of Magdalene's Grail and her liberationist followers, watch for the blood of the patriarchy to warmly flow.
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#1. To: Mind_Virus (#0)
There are scholars who can prove that Meriam Magdala (Mary Magdalene)was the disciple whom Jesus loved and that she was the one who understood his teachings best. She went on to found the dominant Christian community in Greece. Though Holy Bloood, Holy Grail accepts the fiction of her being the ancestor of the French royal family, the Merovingians. That claim was made to boost the claim to the divine right of the European monarchy. Jesus was named tou Nazareth in Greek, the Nazarene. There was no such town in ancient Israel. Tou Nazareth is genitive and means that he had taken the Nazarene vow of rebellion that Samson had taken. The Bible says there was a place named Golgotha meaning skull. It means no such thing. The NT Bible writers were ignorant of Hebrew. Mary Magdala likewise was said to be from Magdala meaning tower. No. She was Meriam Magdala or Meriam, the Braider according to Robert Graves and Joshua Podhro. Between them Podhro and Graves were experts in both Grrek and Hebrew, Judaism and Christianity.She braided tapestries in the Temple and was therefore a young Jewish Levite who had many priests in her family. This would explain how she was able to get into the Jewish court area after the arrest of Jesus. The disciples could not enter without her help because she was a Levite and they were Galileans who had been forcibily converted to Judaism around 100 B.C. by the Hasomonean dynsaty. The Book of John was re-written to reduce the feminine role. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene was also probably re-written to reflect the Gnostics than her original teachings which if they had survived would have been closer to the true doctrine of Jesus than anything else we have from ancient times. I don't know if she had any children by Jesus. But I do know that he was called rabbi or teacher. He would not have been allowed to teach without being married. Actually, an unmarried man would not even have been allowed to study let alone teach. And amongst the accusations against Jesus none said he had no wife. Many of his followers were priests at the Temple. According to Eusebius, James the Just, the author of the Book of James was a priest at the Temple until his death around 64 A.D. He is called the leader or oversser (Bishop in Greek) of the "Church" at Jerusalem. He would not think of himself as a Christian. He was a vegetarian. And He was a pacifist as were all the early followers of Jesus. They believed the prophecy in the Book of Daniel that the end of the "times of the Gentiles" would come in 45 A.D. And that a 7 year period of tribulation would begin in 38 A.D. Thw disciples told Jewish men to have a sister-wife which was to say "do not have sex or children" even though you may be married. Because during the 7 years of tribulation there would be much starvation and war. Meriam Magdala did not buy into the fear of the disciples which is probably another good reason why her teachings were stolen and rewritten by the early church fathers.
I reckon 'ancient' is in the eyes of the beholder. I found this blurb about Nazareth on a website Nazarethvillage or something like that, in the section regarding the archaeological work being done there: Archaeological excavations carried out by the Center for Study of Early Christianity (CSEC), show this land was being quarried and farmed in the Late Hellenistic- Early Roman Period (2nd Century BC to 1st Century AD). The ancient agricultural features which were discovered include three watchtowers, a wine press, stone quarries, farm terraces and a spring-fed irrigation system carved from bedrock. The south facing hillside gave plenty of sun and drainage, with a high calcium soil which was ideal for growing grapes and making wine – a main industry of ancient Galilee. As one of the last surviving 1st Century farmlands of Nazareth, this ancient landscape carries significant historical, scientific, and religious meanings. Nazareth Village is committed to careful study and preservation ...
Duh! I had the website open so I could have pasted the URL in: http://www.nazarethvillage.com/NVWeb/site- archaeology_files/frame.htm They have pictures there, including irrigation, wine presses, watch towers, etc.
#7. To: rowdee (#4)
cool, thanks
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