Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] A bizarre scene in the Gospel of Philip jesus Kissing Mary by Bart D. Ehrman read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:10] Did Jesus and Mary Magdalene have an affair? Now that I've mentioned the Gospel of Philip, I can't help but repost a blog from a few years ago dealing with one of the most intriguing, not to say titillating, passages from this otherwise somewhat obscure Valentinian Gospel. My original post on the topic was in a thread that was discussing whether Jesus was celibate or not, and I argued that the modern idea that he and Mary were intimately involved is a modern idea without any foundation other than wild imagination and wishful thinking. A number of readers responded to my post by pointing out that the non canonical Gospel of Philip sure does seem to say they were intimate. So what do I have to say about that?
[00:00:55] I have a reasonably full discussion of the relevant issues in my book Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene. In the book, I put the discussion in the context of yes, you guessed it Dan Brown's DA Vinci Code, the one source many people turn to for the Gospel of Philip. Few people who talk about the relevant passage have actually read the Gospel itself.
[00:01:17] It strikes many readers today as unusually strange. But in any event, this is what I say about the book and the Kissing passage there. I also say a few things about the Gospel of Philip in general and repeat them here, since, well, repetition is good. Pedagogy. Some of the historical claims about the non canonical gospels in The DA Vinci Code have struck scholars as outrageous, or at least outrageously funny. The book claims, for example, that some of these gospels were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. That, of course, is completely wrong. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not contain any gospels or any Christian writings of any sort. They are Jewish texts which never mention Jesus or any of his followers. And the novel claims that Jesus'marriage to Mary Magdalene is frequently reported in the Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament. On the contrary, not only is their marriage not reported frequently, it is never reported at all in any surviving gospel, canonical or non canonical. I'll have more to say about this in a later chapter. For now, I want to consider The Gospel of Philip, which is The DA Vinci Code's star witness for the case that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife.
[00:02:32] The Gospel of Philip is one of the most puzzling and convoluted of the gnostic writings discovered near Nagamadi, Egypt, in 1945. It consists of a number of sayings and reflections about the nature of reality and human's relationship to it, all within the context of a gnostic understanding of the world. The book is filled with hard to interpret parables, metaphorical statements, theological claims, analogies, exhortations, and so on in what appears to be a random sequence. This is not an easy text to interpret, many readers simply throw up their hands in despair.
[00:03:08] Just to give you a taste, consider one of its early statements quote A gentile does not die, for he has never lived in order that he may die. He who has believed in the truth has found life, and this one is in danger of dying, for he is alive. Since Christ came, the world has been created, the cities adorned, the dead carried out. When we were Hebrews, we were orphans and had only our mother. But when we became Christians, we had both father and mother, those who sow in winter reap in summer. The winter is the world, the summer the other eternal realm. End quote. And so it goes. Despite its generally opaque quality, there are some fascinating statements made in the Gospel of Philip, and two of them involve Mary Magdalene. These are the two that come to be quoted in The DA Vinci Code. Unfortunately, both of them are problematic in ways that Brown, or at least his fictional characters, evidently don't realize. The first involves one of the real historical howlers of the novel. This involves the passage of the Gospel of Philip, where we are told quote There were three who always walked with the Lord Mary, his mother and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary, one of the main characters in The DA Vinci Code. The historical sleuth and Holy Grail expert Lee Teebing quotes this saying and then points out that it shows that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married because, as he indicates quote as any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion in those days literally meant spouse, unquote. The DA Vinci Code, page 246 the problem, unbeknownst to Brown, is that the Gospel of Philip was not written in Aramaic. It was written in the ancient Egyptian language Coptic. Moreover, when you look up the passage in the Coptic, the word used there is actually a lone word from Greek, the word coininus. And what does this word mean? It is not the Greek word for spouse. It normally means associate or companion. Thus, this passage from the Gospel of Philip tells us only that Mary was an associate of Jesus, the same information that we can glean from the canonical Gospels. The other passage of relevance in the Gospel of Philip may appear more promising for showing an intimate relationship between Jesus and Mary according to The DA Vinci Code. And in the view of many interpreters, the passage indicates that Jesus and Mary used to kiss one another frequently on the mouth. The problem with this particular passage, however, is that the manuscript has worn out in places so that there are holes where the words used to be, making it hard to know exactly what the author wrote. The text reads as follows quote and the companion of the gap in the manuscript mary Magdalene gap in the manuscript, her more than gap, the disciples gap kiss her gap on her gap in the manuscript, unquote. It looks at least that the passage must have indicated that Jesus loved Mary more than the others and used to kiss her on her mouth. Some other body part we'll probably never know. But if nothing else, this passage appears to show that this author remembered Mary as being particularly close and intimate with Jesus. It would be going too far, however, to think that he is portraying them as sexually intimate. That might be our natural response. They are, after all, kissing. But here again, it is important to put the text in its own context. As it turns out, the Gospel of Philip and other Christian gnostic texts mention kissing on other occasions. And it is clear from these other passages that whatever is going on, it is not some kind of divine foreplay. At an earlier point, for example, the Gospel of Philip says the following quote it is from being promised to the heavenly place that man receives nourishment gap in the manuscript him from the mouth and had the word gone out from that place, it would be nourished from the mouth and it would become perfect. For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth. For this reason we also kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace which is in one another unquote. As with other passages in the Gospel of Philip, it is difficult to understand what all of this means. What is reasonably clear is that a person reaches perfection through what issues forth from the mouth. That is, the words of knowledge that are delivered by an inspired teacher. It is this perfect issuance that leads people to experience the new birth as they come to know the truth that brings liberation from their entrapment here as material beings. This notion was symbolically portrayed in the Christian ritual of the quote kiss of peace, unquote. Which was practiced through the early church. Just as many churches today have a moment during their worship services when people in the pews greet one another with a chaste kiss or handshake. By kissing another, you show that it is through the mouth and the truth it delivers that one can find life, one thereby conceives and gives birth.
[00:08:36] When Jesus kisses Mary, then it is not a prelude to sex. It is a symbolic statement that she received the revelation of truth that he conveyed to his disciples. According to the Gospel of Philip, she understood this truth even better than the others. If this notion was widespread through Christian gnostic circles, it is no wonder that Peter and the others felt more than a tinge of jealousy towards her. She had usurped their place as the one most intimate with Jesus not sexually, but spiritually.
