Who Was Mary Magdalene?
(The Da Vinci Code – Part 3)
Various Scriptures
June 4, 2006
Introduction
Have you ever had a situation where you found out you had a reputation for something that was totally against your character and history?
A rumor gets started, and the next thing you know you’re having to defend yourself against preconceived notions.
Nobody likes that kind of thing, that’s for sure.
There was a time during my senior year in college where some people were saying that I was “on the hunt” for a missionary wife. They told a certain girl I had taken to a dance that I was only interested in her because she was thinking about being a missionary. And just for the sake of full disclosure, this wasn’t Debra. She and I didn’t start dating until I had been out of college for about a year.
When I found out that this girl was told she was only on my “wife radar” because she was open to missions, I knew I needed to do something about it. So I talked to her after church one night and told her that this wasn’t the truth.
It’s true that I was hoping that one day I would marry someone who was willing to go wherever God would lead, even if it was overseas.
But the fact of the matter was that this young lady was a solid Christian who loved Jesus and loved people.
My point is that I had a reputation that was inaccurate and undeserved.
Mary Magdalene was the same way, although her reputation became shaped hundreds of years after she was dead.
Because of a mistake by a pope about 1500 years ago, a perception about Mary Magdalene was given that has been popularized in literature and even film.
The Da Vinci Code perpetuates more myths about Mary, and the idea today is to help dispel these, as we look at the question, “Who was Mary Magdalene?”
Before we get into that, let me just very quickly review what we’ve covered so far in this series on The Da Vinci Code.
Week 1 – Reliability of the gospels.
Week 2 – Who was Jesus?
If you would like a tape of those messages, just talk to Jim back there. If you want a print copy of the messages, come see me and I’ll get you one.
Next week – The place of popular media in the life of the Christian.
Today, as I mentioned, we’re going to look at Mary Magdalene and her place in the life of Jesus.
We’re not going to cover everything there is to know about Mary. We simply don’t have the time, and quite frankly, it’s not necessary for what I want to accomplish today.
If you really want me to look at some of these things, feel free to let me know. I’m willing to cover those things somewhere down the road, but today we have enough to cover, and as it is, you won’t be beating anyone to Steak and Buffet by the time we’re done anyway.
As before, I have quoted some portions of the book in your note-taking guide because I wanted you to see what I was trying to refute with these messages.
For the sake of time, I’m not going to read them aloud here, though.
Page 243 –
“Sophie examined the figure to Jesus’ immediate right, focusing in. As she studied the person’s face and body, a wave of astonishment rose within her. The individual had flowing red hair, delicate folded hands, and the hint of a bosom. It was, without a doubt…female.
“’Who is she,’ Sophie asked.
“’That, my dear,’ Teabing replied, ‘is Mary Magdalene.’”
Page 244 –
“…the early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that describe earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible. Unfortunately for the early editors, one particularly troubling earthly theme kept recurring in the gospels. Mary Magdalene. More specifically, her marriage to Jesus Christ….It’s a matter of historical record, and Da Vinci was certainly aware of that fact. The Last Supper practically shouts at the viewer that Jesus and Magdalene were a pair.”
Please allow me to give just a smidgen of background info here. Leonardo was supposedly part of a secret society called the Priory of Sion whose job it was to guard the secret of Mary Magdalene and her descendants. The existence of this group has been disproved, and the man who started it was discredited as someone who was seeking to be crowned the king of France.
That hasn’t stopped Dan Brown and others from claiming that the group is alive and active, doing everything it can to protect the “secret.” Like most conspiracy theories, it finds new life once in awhile and continues to circulate.
But the goal today is to shine some light on who Mary really was, and to give you the information you need to discuss this aspect of The Da Vinci Code in a reasonable and reasoned manner, which has been the goal of each of these messages.
But let’s get into the subject matter, shall we? And let’s start by looking at the first of three main questions:
Who was Mary Magdalene?
The book makes a number of claims about Mary, and I’ll deal with some of them in a few minutes, but I want to start off by discussing three things we can know for sure about her, from the gospels.
All four gospels mention her. In fact, she’s mentioned 13 times in the gospels. So what can we learn from the Bible about her? First…
* She had been healed of demon-possession by Jesus and was a close follower of Jesus.
Luke 8:1-2 –
Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out…
She and other women traveled with Jesus as he walked, taught, healed, and whatever. It wasn’t just a lonely bunch of guys walking around talking about stuff. There was a little bit of a crowd following Jesus, and it included Mary Magdalene.
* She supported Jesus’ ministry.
Mark 15:51 –
In Galilee these women had followed him and cared for his needs.
* She was the first witness to the resurrection.
Mark 16:9 –
When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene…
In fact, she had witnessed his burial, according to Matthew 27:61.
So that’s what we know from the Bible about Mary. It’s not a lot, but it is enough to look at this next question…
Who was she NOT?
> She was NOT a prostitute.
How many of you have seen, Jesus of Nazareth, the movie by Franco Zeffirelli, starring Brian Powell as Jesus?
That movie, along with countless other movies, books, and sermons, promotes the idea that Mary was a prostitute.
But it’s not the truth. So how did that whole mess get started?
It was the result of Pope Gregory I, and a mistake he made by confusing Mary with the “woman who had lived a sinful life” in Luke 7:37, back in the sixth century.
And the reputation was born.
> She was NOT chosen by Jesus to lead the Church after His death.
The claim of The Da Vinci Code is that Mary was the one who was supposed to lead the church, not Peter, and that Peter and the early Church worked to suppress this because they wanted the church to be led by men instead of women.
But unfortunately for Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code, there is absolutely no support for that view in any historical source whatsoever, whether in Scripture or in early church history.
> She was NOT married to Jesus.
This is one of the more fantastic claims in the book – that Jesus was married to Mary, and it forms much of the basis for the book’s themes and plot.
He quotes from The Gospel of Philip, which describes Jesus as loving Mary above all the other disciples and kissing her.
But as we saw in the first message in this series, the other “gospels” that are not included in the Bible are not included for good reason: they were not written by an apostle or close associate of one, and they are not in accord with what we know the earliest Christians knew and believed about Jesus.
But beyond that even the feminist historians interviewed on NBC’s Dateline had to say that there is no historical evidence that Jesus and Mary being married.
And contrary to the claims of The Da Vinci Code, it is not “a matter of historical record.”
And therefore, since she was not married to Jesus…
> She was NOT the Holy Grail.
Sorry to blow the story for you. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, then you may or may not know that they claim that the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene.
But don’t worry – I haven’t blown the ending, okay, so don’t freak out.
The Grail has always been believed to be the cup that Jesus passed at the Last Supper. But according to The Da Vinci Code, the Grail is not a cup, but a person, and this person, Mary Magdalene, was pregnant with Jesus’ child when He was crucified.
But again, history dares to prove the book wrong. She did not bear the children and bloodline of Jesus, which later became the royal bloodline of France, etc., etc.
But what about The Last Supper?
In the book, Sir Teabing uses the painting of The Last Supper to show evidence of the relationship between Jesus and Mary.
He claims that the person to Jesus’ right is not John the apostle as has always been thought, but rather Mary Magdalene.
Two main claims in the book about the painting:
- “Her” position with Jesus makes an “M,” which is a secret code symbol for “Mary.”
This is just one of many things Dan Brown says about how Mary is the one in the painting. We don’t have time to go through them all, but this one is indicative of a theme of the whole book – that there are hidden symbols in Da Vinci’s paintings.
I wish I could show you a copy of the painting, but I’ll do my best to describe what he’s getting at.
He claims that if you look carefully, you will see that the angles of Jesus’ and “Mary’s” bodies clearly make this “M.”
And the second claim is that…
- The person is feminine looking with no beard, so it must be a woman.
Answers to these two claims can include these points:
First, the “M” isn’t clear at all. It’s simply a v-shaped separation with some other lines going off of it.
How many of you here are old enough to remember the big hullabaloo about “back-masking,” or as some say it, “backward masking?”
I remember it well, and bought into it hook, line, and sinker.
The premise is that there were Satanic messages in secular rock music that you could hear if you played the song backwards. Remember that?
For a while, if you turned on Christian TV, all you would see were programs that were talking about this and even playing the songs backwards so you could hear the messages for yourself.
I remember catching one of those shows and going, “Not ELO!! They CAN’T be Satanic!”
Well, the problem was mainly that the messages weren’t nearly as clear as we were being told.
In fact, unless you were told what to listen for, you wouldn’t be able to pick them out. So what happened? People were conditioned to listen for something specific that probably wasn’t really there in the first place.
And when they “heard” what they were supposed to hear, it was all of a sudden clear as a bell.
We had a guy come to our campus one night to show us all this, and you could see eyes light up and hear the breath being sucked up by people who realized that Satan was living in their albums.
Well, back-masking has, for the most part, been debunked, although there are still some who feel it’s valid. Besides, isn’t most of that stuff bad enough when it’s played FORWARD?
What’s that got to do with Mary being in The Last Supper? Well, if you look hard enough, you can see what Dan Brown wants you to see.
But you can also see other things as well. One art historian on the NBC Dateline show I mentioned earlier showed how you could find other words or symbols if you really tried, whether they were really there or not.
I’m sure that if someone really cared to, they could probably find something to freak out about with the painting of Jesus at the end of the hall down there.
Bottom line: There is absolutely nothing to indicate that Leonardo Da Vinci was trying to communicate through a hidden code that Mary is the person next to Jesus or that she was the Holy Grail.
As for the second claim, that the person is a woman because it looks feminine, the answer is very simple.
The answer lies in the fact that the apostle John was often viewed as a very young man, maybe even a teen. Young men painted in Da Vinci’s time were often painted in a way that can be seen today as feminine. They usually did not have beards, as is the case with John in The Last Supper.
This is the view of art historians all over the place. So you don’t have to take my word for it.
But let’s move on to what I really want you to leave with today. We can spend forever talking about the errors in the book, but I’d rather talk about what we can learn from the truth of Mary, so let’s take a look at this last question:
What are some lessons we can learn from Mary?
Four lessons I want to bring from the life of Mary.
1. There is no spiritual problem too big for Jesus.
Folks, Jesus is bigger than whatever problem you have, even it’s as bad as Mary’s.
I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be possessed by demons, but Scripture tells us that it was horrible for the person.
Sometimes these people were unable to speak, see, or hear. Other times they hurt themselves like the guy who lived in the caves and couldn’t even be bound by chains.
Mary had seven demons inside her. That had to be immeasurably rough.
Some of us face problems that maybe aren’t quite like Mary’s but seem immeasurably rough just the same.
Maybe your fighting a low self-image or you’re depressed. Maybe you’re facing doubts about your faith.
I don’t know what it is, but the Bible says that God knows. And He’s ready to help you with it.
I won’t pretend to know exactly how to help you in whatever situation you find yourself in, and I wouldn’t dare to think that if you’re facing some of these things that I can stand up here offer you some magic steps to get through it all.
I’d love to talk with you, pray with you, and do all I can to help you.
But above all, Jesus can help you. He’s ready, willing, and able. And He’ll never abandon you. He didn’t abandon Mary, and he won’t abandon you.
2. Remain with Jesus even after the problem has been “solved.”
We read in the gospels about Jesus healing all sorts of people, but we don’t read about many people sticking around and following Jesus.
But Mary stuck around. She saw that Jesus wasn’t just in town to heal her problem, but to change her life.
She found her sins forgiven, and she found a new purpose in life – to live for Jesus.
There are lots of people with what are called, “foxhole” conversions. They call out to Jesus when there’s an emergency, and maybe even promise to live for Him when they get out of whatever they’re facing.
And while some of these people follow up on those promises, most don’t. When the hard times are gone, they forget about Jesus. They said what they thought would convince Jesus to help them, but they don’t really mean it in the depths of their heart.
Not Mary. She saw that Jesus wasn’t just a fire extinguisher for one-time use. She knew that Jesus was for real, and that He was the Master. And she became His servant.
Here’s the third lesson:
3. Jesus can use anybody, no matter their background.
Can you imagine Mary coming to a church and saying, “I’d like to be involved in the ministry here, okay?”
“Well, Miss Mary, what is your main qualification for ministry?”
“Oh, I used to be demon-possessed, but now I’m healed and I follow Jesus.”
“Umm, okay…don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
A lot of churches might be willing to take a chance with someone like that and say, “Cool! How about a job with the Youth group?"
Now just so no one’s feelings get hurt, I don’t feel like our Youth group acts like it’s demon-possessed, okay?”
But listen. I don’t have the most perfect spiritual resume. I didn’t grow up in a Christian home. I did things that were sinful and illegal growing up. I had a foul mouth, smoked cigarettes and marijuana, and drank too much.
And in spite of my Hollywood good looks (some of you are thinking Howie Mandell on Deal or No Deal – it’s okay – you can admit that to my face…), I was a mess spiritually until Jesus got hold of me.
I’m still not perfect. I blow it sometimes, and I’m not proud of that. But Jesus is still working in me. He hasn’t given up on me, and He’s still using me in ways I never would have imagined before coming to Him all those years ago.
You know what? Jesus doesn’t care where you’ve been or what you’ve done, as long as you’re willing to live for Him NOW.
Mary found that out, and it’s just as true today as it was back then.
Here’s the last lesson I want to point out from the life of Mary:
4. Jesus has a high view of women.
One of the biggest criticisms about Christianity in general is that we feel that women are second-class citizens of God’s kingdom, and good for nothing except keeping the house and bearing children.
Well folks, nothing could be further from the truth.
Who did Jesus first appear to after His resurrection? A woman.
Who did He compare the church to? A bride. If He was afraid of women, He would have compared to the church to His best fishing buddy, right?
Let me read a couple passages to help put this in perspective a bit, okay?
1 Peter 3:7 –
Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.
Ephesians 5:25 (NLT)–
And you husbands must love your wives with the same love Christ showed the church. He gave up his life for her…
Does that sound like Jesus has a low view of women? No! And if you’re a guy who claims to love Jesus, you need to be treating the women in your life with love and respect.
Mistreatment is not only un-Christian, it’s anti-Christian. It’s against what Jesus taught and modeled.
Mary was honored by Christ, and throughout the New Testament we see that God loves and esteems women.
Conclusion
I’m getting ready to wrap this up, and I promise I won’t take very long.
But I just want to say this: the Scriptures are trustworthy. Men have attacked it from the beginning, but it’s stood the test of time and it’s withstood the attacks of people.
Don’t take my word for anything you’ve heard today or over the last few weeks. Check it out for yourself.
Allow God to not just prove Himself to be true in the Bible, but to live and breathe in you, giving you a real purpose for living – Jesus Christ.
I mentioned earlier that I did things I wasn’t proud of. But I can move on from those things because Jesus gave me something worth living for. He gave me purpose, He gave me salvation, and He gave me significance.
Mary Magdalene moved on and got everything Jesus could give her. And the offer’s open for you, just like it was for her.
I hope you’re letting Him do the same for you. If you haven’t, I would love to talk with you about how to do that. Let’s pray.
