I forgot something in my blog post yesterday about Robert Price’s The Da Vinci Fraud.
On page 36, Price states:
“Was something going on between Jesus and Mary Magdalene? You don’t
have to read the Gospel of Philip to suspect that there was! Martin
Luther thought so. So did Garner Ted Armstrong and numerous others, who
apparently all came up with the idea from their own reading of the
scriptures.”
I grew up in Garner Ted Armstrong’s church, so I was thinking back in
order to determine if I found what Price was saying on this to be
plausible, or at least something I could envision. On the one hand, the
back cover of Garner Ted’s book, The Real Jesus, said that
Jesus was attracted to beautiful women. On the other hand, I recall
attending one of Ted’s campaigns, and he was highly critical of the Last Temptation of Christ
movie, which had recently come out. He was particularly upset about
the scene in which Jesus “had sex with a prostitute.” That prostitute,
of course, was Mary Magdalene. Ted may have thought that Jesus was
attracted to Mary Magdalene, but that he never had sex with her. Of
course, technically-speaking, Jesus did not have sex with her in The Last Temptation of Christ:
that was a dream that Jesus was having, and the point of the movie was
that Jesus gave up starting a family so he could be the Messiah and die
for the sins of the world.
Incidentally, I watched The Last Temptation of Christ a
couple of nights ago. I had already seen it, and I read the book for a
class over a decade ago, but I wanted to watch it again with my Mom and
step-Dad on account of the Ewan McGregor movie that is coming out about Jesus’ temptation in the desert. I appreciated the Last Temptation of Christ
movie more this time around than I did when I first saw it. The first
time around, I was nitpicking whether it was orthodox or not, and the
movie just struck me as plain weird. The second time around, I
appreciated it as a picture of a man grappling with his mission and his
identity. My favorite scene in the movie is when the disciples and
Jesus are marching to Jerusalem, and the disciples are sharing with each
other their dreams about the coming Messianic reign, along with their
fears. The music in that scene is awesome!