You’ve written this book Breaking the da vinci code which is a great book. Summarize what you saw in the da vinci code and tell me the hype, the historical errors, why it was based on the hidden gospels and what does true history tell us here about this. Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene?
Okay let’s summarize what we’ve already covered. We’ve already suggested that Jesus didn’t become divine at the council of Nicea and Constantine didn’t have anything to do with it. That goes back to the very beginning roots of Christianity and can be seen in the encounter that he has with the Jewish leadership. So we’ve taken care of that one.
We’ve talked about the fact that the canon, even though the naming of the books didn’t end up being finalized until the fourth century, that the gospels themselves were functioning by the end of the second century and that if you look at the material within the gospels, there are traditional materials, hymns and worship rites that were teaching theology and that theology was consistent all the way through. That includes the doctrine of God, the person of Jesus and the nature of salvation and we’ve gone through that already in great detail. The one detail that’s left to deal with is the idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and in some ways this is the easiest point to deal with.
beliefnet.com asked me and John Dominic Crossan who is a theological liberal to write on the question was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene and we both responded that he was single that he wasn’t married to her. And that was interesting in and of itself because as you can tell it isn’t very often that conservatives and liberals agree with one another. In fact I tell my classes that when you get a conservative and a liberal agreeing about something on historical Jesus it’s probably true. But what was interesting was the way John Dominic Crossan made the argument. He basically used a proverb and the proverb went “if it acts like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, it must be a camel” and he said that’s the argument. The argument is all the evidence points to the fact that Jesus was single. In fact we don’t have a single text that states that Jesus was married anywhere in the alternative materials or in the traditional materials and yet the claim is that two texts that suggest that Jesus had a special relationship to Mary Magdalene gets magnified into being the fact that she was married. This is just unlikely. We have gobs of material, I have 38 volumes in my library in my office on church history. Now these 38 volumes are hundreds of pages long single-spaced small font double columned and out of all that material 38 volumes multiple hundred pages each there’s not a single text that says that Jesus was married. The idea that Jesus was married is so far-fetched that even liberal and conservative Christians agree it’s not the case.