#BooksOf2025

3. Mary Magdalene: Women, the Church, and the Great Deception

6/10

GOOD: Brief, accessible, and interesting points
BAD: Feels a bit cursory; an assemblage of proofs of a point that doesn't need much proof

Not thrilled to be sharing only my third book of the year well into March! In fact, February was dominated by The Thin Red Line, with which I was nearly finished when Lent arrived and I decided to only read explicitly Christian literature until Easter.

At any rate, this little volume had caught my eye in The Strand a while back, so I picked it up.

At its heart, the book critiques the denial of authority of women in the Church, pointing to Mary Magdalene as the first Apostle; having been the first to proclaim the news of Christ's resurrection. Interwoven is an examination of the conflation of unnamed women in the Gospel with her, making her, in church tradition, a prostitute though this is not a Biblical view.

That's really about it, but the point is illustrated by various gnostic texts and apocrypha (new to me was the x-rated Greater Questions of Mary.)

Quick and interesting read, but probably not especially memorable.

No idea why this stupid, inane thing had me laughing until I cried.

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=FwRRt-LpJoA

Walked into the Harry Potter Store amid a light drizzle and somehow emerged to find a blizzard.

Rewarded myself after a long visit to the dentist yesterday with a trip to the Strand. Mostly to look for a copy of Strong's Concordance, which they didn't have, but in the section where it would have been, this little book on Mary Magdalene caught my eye (my interest kindled from the recent read of HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL). Then I had the idea to buy a French novel to see if throwing myself into the deep end might bear any fruit. It's interesting to slowly crawl over a sentence as one might when one is four years old.

Had a birthday dinner with a thirteen-year-old at the River Cafe last night.

#BooksOf2025

2. Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln

6/10

GOOD: Fascinating history from a number of discrete periods
BAD: Since debunked; Silly logical contortions to align with the desired conclusion

I'm going to be in Paris in May for meetings and wanted to take advantage of being on the continent by squeezing in some culture. Somehow I heard of a basilica in the South of France where Mary Magdalene's purported skull is displayed inside of a golden body. Evidently, there's a monastery with spartan accommodations to host pilgrims who then have to hike through the woods to access it. It seemed interesting, like something the characters in an Italian neorealist movie would do.

I mentioned it to a friend who referenced this book and some complex conspiracy about Mary Magdalene having been married to Christ and borne his children and carried the Holy bloodline to France. Popularly known more recently as the underlying conspiracy of The Da Vinci Code. So I bought the book and dove in.

It begins with the story of a priest in the late 1800s having been assigned to a tiny parish in the South of France. He eventually refuses the Church's order to be moved to another parish, seems to exhibit a sudden great wealth, behaves strangely, and finds hidden ancient parchments left by a Knight of the Crusades.

From there we try to establish that the famous Knights Templar were patronized by a secret society later connected to a particular Frankish royal family which lost power but seemed to have many prominent descendants in later centuries behind many major historical events.

SPOILER ALERT: This royal line was sired by Jesus, who was just a man, and if it is ever restored, it will unite Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the human view of Jesus is acceptable to all.

It's a pretty dense book, and they work through each step of this methodically. Much of their source material has, in the forty-plus years since publication, been debunked as fraudulent, but while they contort and connect and make spurious leaps, they do it all over a background of well-researched and interesting history. I learned a lot about the Knights Templar, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the history of Franks and France and Visigoths. I also learned a lot about the Holy Grail (for instance that the word 'grail' has no other meaning than to refer to the Holy Grail...) and the literature around it.

But the part of it I enjoyed the most was the Biblical criticism. I consider myself a Christian Fundamentalist, and genuinely hold the admittedly absurd and indefensible view that the Bible is literally true and inerrant. But if you really believe in something you should be comfortable with it being assailed.

Reading about the Roman Emperor Diocletian's role in destroying much of the Christian Canon was fascinating, and I find arguments that the established Gospel was molded to be acceptable to Roman authorities compelling. There are also some compelling arguments that Jesus was not a humble carpenter but a well-to-do and well-connected member of an established Messianic line. Even relatively minor arguments that, for instance, the beloved disciple of the Gospel of John was not John, but Lazarus, were fascinating.

So on the whole, I don't ascribe a lot of value to the book, but it proved as fun a way as any to learn about topics I might not otherwise have been exposed to. And I admire a peripheral stated goal which is to united discrete scientific disciplines in the pursuit of truth. There's an aside about that I found thought-provoking:

"Why, then, had the fragments of the puzzle not hitherto been assembled into a coherent whole? [...] Since the so-called Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness has been toward analysis rather than synthesis. As a result our age is one of ever-increasing specialization... In consequence the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments... [F]ew experts on the Grail romances have been historians... Similarly historians of the Templars and the Crusades have, like all historians, adhered closely to "factual" records and documents... To suggest to such a historian that the Grail romances might contain a kernel of historical truth would be tantamount to heresy, even though Schliemann, more than a century ago, discovered the site of Troy by dint of careful reading of Homer."

I love this as a defense of "fiction" as often being a greater aid of truth than "non-fiction" and as an exploration of what truth is generally.