The first thing to note is
none of these ideas Brown implies are new discoveries. The idea that there is secret knowlege buried within Christianity has been around since, well, the beginning of Christianity. Paul even addresses it in his letter to the Colossians (around 60 AD). It's just an attempt to deny that Jesus is God by creating something else so secret and special that not everyone can know about it.
There is
no evidence to suggest that Mary and Jesus were married.
The gospel of Thomas says that "Jesus kissed Mary on the..." and that is where the text ends. We don't know what it said. Feel free to speculate whatever your mind desires and to base conspiracy theories on this alone. (This is not even a true gospel because it has a lot of gnostic teachings and disagrees with the themes of the 4 Gsopels in the Bible today, which were written by actual eye witnesses of Jesus life (Mathew and John) or close companions and followers (Luke and Mark who may have been followers of Jesus, and who were also missionaries with Paul).
The gospel of Phillip (another Gnostic gospel written long after Jesus' time) calls
Mary a close companion of Jesus. Brown claims this means she was his wife, because in Aramaic that term was synonomous with spouse. The problem is that Phillip wasn't written in Aramaic, but in Coptic, which used the term companion to mean friend.
Phillip also records that the other disciples were jealous of Mary and asked Jesus "Why do you love her so much more than us?" If they were married, wouldn't that be a dumb question to ask? Remember- these are gospels that Christians don't consider accurate, so I don't think it likely they went doctoring that text to "hide the truth".
Nowhere in John does it say Jesus was married. Yes, he had several brothers an sisters, including James and Jude who wrote books in the New Testament.
The
Bible does not teach that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. That is a combination of two stories that was first "connected" by Pope Gregory the Great in a sermon about 500 years after the Gospels were written, and has since then become "common knowlege". The Bible refers to Mary Magdalene as a woman who Jesus cast 7 demons out of (Luke 8:2). She was at Jesus death, along with several other woman (including Jesus mother and James' and John's mother). She was also one of the first to see him resurected. Mathew 28:1 says "Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went out to see the tomb (the "other Mary" was probably Lazarus' and Martha's sister who washed Jesus' feet with perfume).
The Priory of Sion, the secret society which guarded the secret of Jesus and Mary Magdalene for a thousand years, is not that old.
The Priory of Scion was created in 1956 by a Frenchman. FYI, it is now 2006. I think that is 50 years, not 1000. This was debunked and shown on national television by
60 Minutes.
The idea that Jeus was elevated to diety somewhere around the 4th Centry AD is crap. Jesus himself claimed to be God by saying "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58). This is a direct reference to Exodus 3, when Moses asks for God's name, and the Lord responds "I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.' " This is the
meaning of Yahweh, the name used most in the Bible to refer to God, the most sacred name in Judaism, actually considered so sacred that they wouldn't even speak it aloud. When Jesus said "I am", he was claiming to be God, which is why in the very next verse the
religious leaders tried to stone Jesus for blasphemy. There are plenty of other references in the Bible to this if you want them.
The reason there are 4 Gospels in the Bible and the many others are discounted is not because they spread ideas that Christians want to cover up. It is because those 4 can be accurately and historically shown to have been written by who claimed to write them and written in the early days of the church. By 180 AD at least 22 of the 27 books in the New Testament were considered canonical (meaning true and inspired by God). That is 150 years before the Council at Nicea.
So while these other documents do exist (Gospels of Thomas, Phillip, Judas to name a few), none of them were written anywhere close to Jesus time (Meaning at best it was information that had been passed on orally for hundres of years, and at worst made up to push some agenda), and they certainly were not written by the Thomas, Phillip, and Judas they claim to be written by. They also all contain really strange and twisted stories that don't mesh with anything else written about Jesus, like how as a child he used his powers to kill other children who were annoying him.
So yes, you can study them and base theories on them, and that is great if you just want to make up your own ideas. But there is no more truth in them than if I were to write my own Gospel and talk about how Jesus told me that Satan looks like a giant pig with a yellow triangle of power but you can overcome his evil by eating the magic red mushrooms and getting really big. I call it the Gospel of Shiggy.
The truth is that
Jesus honored and respected women far more than anybody else in that time and culture. And instead of recognizing that, we somehow create the idea that Christians are anti-women and the church wanted to deprive Mary of her true power and position. There is no factual basis for this at all.
You guys, if you research this just a little on your own you will find that what I just wrote is all true. Just google da vinci code mary magdalene or any of those other terms and check out what comes up. Every site I found talked about how there is no fact to any of this stuff- and most of those were not Christian websites. This is news sites like 60 Minutes and Time and National Geographic. I really didn't find a single site that claimed all this stuff was true-
they all marveled at how inaccurate it all is.
References:
Citizen Magazine (Focus on the Family)
National Geographic
History in the Movies This was the best at debunking this stuff, and it's a site devoted to judging how historically accurate movies are
60 Minutes Same as linked to above
You will note that only one of those sites is a Christian site. I don't care if people enjoy the movie as a fun tale of fiction like Lord of the Rings or the Matrix. The scary thing is when people start trying to tell you that there are rings of power and you can re-write the code of the universe- and other people start to believe it. Especially on an issue as important as eternity and the truth about God. At least study things for yourself and find out what truth is, because it doesn't matter what I think or you think or what we want to think. All that really matters is what is true.
*clicks "Post Quick Reply" after 2 hours of research and typing...*