Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene?
One of the key elements of The Da Vinci Code's back story is that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
Dan Brown says that there's solid historical evidence for this. So let's look a bit more closely at the evidence that he relies on. This comes from three main places:
- Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper
- the Gnostic Gospels
- Jesus's historical setting
The Last Supper
Brown has Leigh Teabing say, 'Christ himself made that claim,' (about being married to Mary Magdalene) - and he points to a copy of Leonardo's famous painting of 'The Last Supper.'
Well, most art historians don't accept Dan Brown's interpretation of 'The Last Supper' - not just Christian art historians, but whatever their personal beliefs are. It's highly speculative.
But suppose this interpretation was right. What would it actually prove? Leonardo painted 'The Last Supper' between 1495 and 1498 - more than fourteen centuries after the event. Even if he believed that Jesus was married to Mary, he wasn't much closer to the events than we are today. He didn't have any more access to the evidence than we do. In fact, we have more evidence than he did in his day, because of discoveries such as the Nag Hammadi library.
Of course, Dan Brown's argument is that Leonardo was one of an illustrious line of Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion. This means that he did have access to secret information about Mary that isn't available to the rest of us.
But what he does not mention is that the 'Dossiers Secrets' (which list the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion) have been exposed as a twentieth century French hoax. There isn't any genuine historical evidence linking Leonardo to the Priory of Sion.
So when one of the characters says 'Christ himself made that claim,' - and points to 'The Last Supper,' this isn't really evidence of anything at all. It sounds like it has proved something, but it hasn't really. It's a sort of magician's trick with words.
The Gnostic Gospels
The second piece of evidence that Dan Brown appeals to is the Gnostic Gospels. He gives the impression that these say that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
But in fact, they don't say this anywhere - and remember, these Gospels have been available for anyone to read, in English translation, since 1977.
Jesus must have been married
The third piece of evidence that Dan Brown refers to is that the Gospels in the Bible don't say that Jesus was single. He says that Jewish customs condemned singleness, and it was unthinkable for a Jewish man to be single
So Jesus must have been married, because the Gospel writers would have mentioned it if he was single.
The Jews certainly saw being married as the normal state. But there were exceptions. Two Jewish writers from this time, Josephus and Philo, both speak about Jews who weren't married.
Probably the best known example were the Essenes - the Jewish community that had a base at Qumran. Most specialists believe that this was the group responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls. They didn't marry.
It was less common for people in those days to be unmarried than it is today - but it wasn't impossible, and it was not condemned. So it simply isn't true that Jesus 'must have been' married.
So none of the evidence Dan Brown relies on supports the idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. In fact, this is a speculation that arose in the Middle Ages. There isn't any historical evidence for it - not from the Gnostic Gospels nor from the Gospels in the Bible. And there are good reasons to believe that Jesus wasn't married.
Jesus's family
When the Gospels talk about Jesus's family, they mention his mother, his brothers, and his sisters. If he'd been married, it would have been far more natural for them to speak about his wife. But they don't.
Paul's letter
One of the earliest Christian documents that we have is the Apostle Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, written about 55 AD. In 1 Corinthians chapter 9 verses 4-6, Paul is making the case that a Christian minister has the right to be married. He gives the example of various leaders who were married, including Peter.
Now if Jesus had been married, Paul could have made his point beyond any doubt, just by mentioning Jesus - but he didn't. The obvious conclusion is that Jesus wasn't married.
People's names
Ordinary people in Bible times didn't have surnames. A man could be identified by who his father was: 'Simon, son of John,' or 'Zechariah son of Berekiah.' Or he could be identified by where he came from: 'Philip of Bethany.' Or he could be identified by what he did for a job: 'Simon the Tanner.'
For women, the situation was more complicated, because it was a male-dominated world. The most common way to identify a woman was by the man she was connected with: 'Mary the mother of Jesus,' 'Mary the mother of James,' 'Mary the wife of Clopas,' 'Mary the mother of John Mark.'
But the other common way to identify a woman was by where she came from: 'Mary of Bethany,' 'Mary of Magdala.'
People used this way when the woman in question wasn't connected to a man - for example, when she wasn't married. And they used it to identify where the woman came from, not where she happened to live at the moment.
So if Mary had been married to Jesus, they would have called her 'Mary the wife of Jesus.' They wouldn't have called her 'Mary of Magdala.'
So there isn't any reliable historical evidence that Jesus was married to Mary. The evidence that Dan Brown relies on doesn't stand up to being examined.