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Inside the Louvre Museum, under the mysterious gaze of the Mona Lisa, a museum curator is gunned down. In his dying moments, he leaves behind a bizarre trail of clues, some written in his own blood. The gunman is a towering albino monk, but police suspect the murderer is a Harvard professor of religious symbols and art.
As the professor races off into the Paris night to prove his innocence, he embarks on a journey through ancient history, art, and the Bible, and the discovery of dangerous truths hidden for 2,000 years -- secrets, that if revealed, could "devastate the very foundation of Christianity."
That scene, from the opening pages of “The Da Vinci Code” is, of course, fiction. But readers are told right from the start that "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." That provocative statement gives an air of credibility to the book's elaborate conspiracy theories and it's caused millions of readers to wonder how much they really know about Jesus and a woman named Mary Magdalene.
In the book, the monk kills the curator in a quest for the legendary Holy Grail, a mythical vessel often thought of as the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. But in “The Da Vinci Code,” the grail takes on an entirely new meaning. It might not be a cup at al, but a secret, the author suggests, that would radically change our understanding of Jesus and the life he led.
To understand that secret and to separate fact from fiction in “The Da Vinci Code,” we pieced together a portrait of the novel's key figure, a woman who lived 2,000 years ago: Mary Magdalene.
Mary Magdalene was born, it is believed, in the town of Magdala, a fishing village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. She lives in our memory as the biblical figure with the flowing red hair, a fallen woman until she is forgiven by Jesus.
Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King is an authority on women's roles in the early church and author of a recent book on Mary Magdalene.
Stone Phillips: "How important do you think she was to Jesus?"
Karen King: “Mary Magdalene had to be one of the most important people in Jesus' life. And she's said to be the first witness to the resurrection. That role in his story places her at the center of the Christian message, and, one has to assume, at the center of Jesus' life."
Few scholars doubt that Mary was an important follower, but there is another label that has stubbornly shadowed her through the ages -- prostitute.
Phillips: “Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute?"
Dr. Ben Witherington, III, Asbury Theological Seminary: “No. No, she wasn't. In no text in the New Testament is Mary Magdalene ever said to be an adulterer or a sinful woman.”
Even so, in a 6th century Easter sermon, Pope Gregory the Great declared that Mary was a prostitute. Why would he do that? Many believe he simply mixed her up with another Bible figure, an unnamed prostitute who appears just before Mary is introduced in the Book of Luke.
Ehrman: “They’re clearly different women. But Pope Gregory the Great identified the two and said they were the same. And from that point on, in the 6th century, it came to be thought that Mary Magdalene must have been a prostitute.”
But the novel's professor, who's trying to unravel the mystery of the grail, suggests something more sinister behind the slander, a conspiracy by the church to hide the true nature of Mary's relationship to Jesus. The fictional professor points to some tantalizing clues, buried in the sand for almost 1,600 years, that help explain Mary's secret connection to the grail. Clues that are, in fact, based on something real.
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