From: Ouko joachim omolo
The News Dispatch with Omolo Beste in images
MONDAY, JUNE 17, 2013
One of you posed a very concerned issue about Mary Magdalene. He writes: “Fr Beste thank you for your homily of eleventh Sunday-but one thing I would like you to clarify-who was Mary Magdalene? I am asking this because some people who have read the Da Vinci Code are almost convinced that Jesus and Mary Magdalene got married and sired children-what is your take on this?”
According to Luke 8:2 Mary Magdalene was a woman from whom Jesus cast out seven demons. The name Magdalene likely indicates that she came from Magdala, a city on the southwest coast of the Sea of Galilee. After Jesus cast seven demons from her, she became one of his followers.
In John 11 Mary Magdalene is identified as the sister to Lazarus who was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who anointed Jesus with fragrant oil and wiped his feet with her hair. She is believed to have been a reformed prostitute.
Mary Magdalene was one of the women who stood near Jesus during the crucifixion to try to comfort him. Some scholars argue that John mentioned the woman as Mary Magdalene because he wrote many years after Mary’s death. Luke, they say, may have wished to obscure this fact when he wrote his gospel out of respect for the still-living Mary.
The recent fiction novel “The DaVinci Code” makes the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. Some of the non-biblical early Christian writings (considered heresy by the early Christians) hint at a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. However, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. The Bible does not even hint at such an idea.
Against the background that U.S. Catholic bishops launched a website, JesusDecoded.com, refuting the key claims in the novel that were about to be brought to the screen. The bishops were concerned about errors and serious misstatements in The Da Vinci Code.
The Peruvian Episcopal Conference (CEP) declared the movie — and the book — as part of a “systematic attack on the Catholic Church”. Both the book and the film were banned in Egypt due to pressure from Coptic Christians.
The film was banned in Jordan where authorities said the film “tarnishes the memory of Christian and Islamic figures and contradicts the truth as written in the Bible and the Koran about Jesus”.
The novel goes on to describe Opus Dei as “a Catholic Church” and portrays it as an order of monks with members serving as assassins, one of whom (a “hulking albino” named Silas) is a key character in the book.
The book claims that Jesus got Mary Magdalene pregnant, and the two had a daughter. The book states: Mary Magdalene was pregnant at the time of the crucifixion. For the safety of Christ’s unborn child, she had no choice but to flee the Holy Land. . . . It was there in France that she gave birth to a daughter. Her name was Sarah.
Later the book claims that this union gave rise to a bloodline that still exists in prominent European families (including one of the book’s main characters, Sophie Neveu). It also claims that the Catholic Church knows about this and has covered it up for centuries, even resorting to murdering Christ’s own descendants to protect the secret: Behold the greatest cover-up in human history. Not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father.
It claims that the early Church feared that if the lineage were permitted to grow, the secret of Jesus and Magdalene would eventually surface and challenge the fundamental Catholic doctrine-that of a divine Messiah who did not consort with women or engage in sexual union.
Brown’s book includes a number of other episodes guaranteed to upset the faithful – including a Pope conceiving a child via artificial insemination, thereby circumventing celibacy rules.
Dan Brown asserts that early Christians viewed Jesus as merely a “mortal teacher” and that it was only at the Council of Nicaea in 325, under pressure from the Emperor Constantine, that belief in Jesus’ divinity became official Christian teaching.
This is simply not true.
Dan Brown writes that at the time of Nicaea, there were “thousands” of texts documenting a very human life of Jesus. His story claims there were 80 gospels in circulation, 80 gospels that give the story of the “original Christ” that the Church later repressed.
Even though the gospels do not describe Jesus as being married, the story of The Da Vinci Code asserts that Jesus must have been married because that was the norm for Jewish men at the time and he wouldn’t have been taken seriously as a religious teacher if he had not been married.
If Jesus had been married, given the frequency with which other relations are mentioned, the marriage would have been mentioned as well. There was no reason not to. Furthermore, being unmarried would not have diminished Jesus’ authority as a Jewish teacher.
Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ
Tel +254 7350 14559/+254 722 623 578
E-mail omolo.ouko@gmail.com
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Real change must come from ordinary people who refuse to be taken hostage by the weapons of politicians in the face of inequality, racism and oppression, but march together towards a clear and unambiguous goal.
-Anne Montgomery, RSCJ UN Disarmament Conference, 2002