Romancing Jesus: Mary Magdalene’s Breast and the Holy Foreskin

Mary’s feast day is coming up in the Catholic Church this month, so it gives me an excuse to discuss a subject near and dear to my heart—so much so that I wrote an entire book about Mary: The Crucifixion of Mary Magdalene: The Historical Tradition of the First Apostle, and the Ancient Church’s Campaign to Suppress It.

But Mary Magdalene is also a subject that I dread talking to people about outside the academic community because so many of them have bought into the anti-Christian fairytale of Jesus, Married with Children. This New Age fairy tale claims that Mrs. Christ got knocked up by the Son of God, and produced grandkids for God the Father. At some later point, Mary moved to the French Riviera with the kids, and Jesus had to pay child support. Apparently the Holy Grail was part of the dissolution agreement, and Mary wound up with it.

The original myth of the Holy Grail was invented during the Middle Ages, and claimed that the Grail was the cup that Jesus drank out of at the so-called Last Supper. Certainly this is what Indiana Jones and Monte Python believed. But such New Age books as Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code and Mary Magdalene: Bride in Exile all claim the Grail was actually Jesus’ kids—the royal bloodline. Jesus a royal? I must have missed that in the Gospels.

The readers of these books seem to be the same type of people who believe in the recently discovered “Jesus Family Tomb.” This presents a problem. If Mrs. Christ moved to Provence with the kids, who’s buried in the Jesus Family Tomb in Jerusalem?

Such stories are especially interesting because apparently none of the authors of the roughly four hundred gospels, written over the first three centuries after Jesus was crucified, knew any of this! You’d think that at least Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would have reported Jesus and Mary’s nuptials. But no, the real truth is apparently hidden in the Vatican basement—and guarded night and day against exposure to the light of reason.

But what New Agers and Christian fundamentalists don’t want to accept is that the Gospels are fictional romances about the historical Jesus. They are really no different than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, works that no educated person reads as actual Greek history.

The canonical Gospels were written to encourage the faith of Greek speaking Christians at the end of the first century, C.E. They also served as recruitment propaganda. There are a few historical clues about the historical Jesus in these Gospels, but not nearly as many as most people suspect. In any event, romances about the life of Jesus and the doings of the apostles did not stop with the four canonical Gospels. Hundreds of gospels, epistles, apocalypses, and acts of various apostles appeared over the next two centuries. They are, for the most part, pure fiction. As a collection, they are referred to as the Christian Apocrypha.

Such romances about the life and times of Jesus and his disciples—Christian dime store novels, really—continued to be written right up until the fourth century when Helena, the mother of the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine, had an even better idea. If Christians were gullible enough to believe that such fiction was history, they’d also believe in, and love, Christian relics! And Helena was right on.

Fantasy Christianity reached a new level when Helena traveled to Jerusalem and “discovered” the cross Jesus died on and brought it back in little pieces for people venerate. Before Helena was finished, she had “discovered” numerous phony relics and imaginary locations, such as the very spot where Jesus had been buried.

Helena’s efforts were rewarded. Christians revered the relics, and before you knew it, their manufacture became a new cottage industry. Along with relics, Helena, encouraged Christian tourism (pilgrimages) to the Holy Land, which made it the world’s first theme park.
So the bandwagon got rolling and everyone jumped on. In 390 C.E., two monks found not just one, but two heads of John the Baptist! In 415 C.E., several churches claimed to have the holy foreskin of Stephen the martyr! Another relic hunter discovered the hem of Jacob’s coat of many colors.
Many relic manufacturers concentrated on Virgin Mary memorabilia. They produced her hair, her bones, her girdle, her grave-clothes, and—I love this one—her virginal milk! The other Mary, Magdalene, was also extremely popular. Various churches owned her hair, for instance, and claimed that this was the very hair that had dried Jesus’ feet of her tears. It mattered not a bit that the Gospel story clearly states that this woman was Mary of Bethany, not Mary of Magdala. Why quibble about details?
One church claimed to own Mary Magdalene’s forehead and even one of her breasts! And five churches all claimed to house her complete corpse. A church in France that supposedly owned one of Mary’s arms was visited by a bone collector who actually tried to chew off one of Mary’s fingers in order to add it to his collection! Even Monte Python couldn’t have written better material than this.
In order to explain why there were so many of Mary Magdalene’s body parts lying around the French countryside, it was necessary to claim that Mary had actually lived in France. It was Gregory of Tours (c. 538-94) who invented this legend and, not to be outdone, Pope Gregory the Great during this same century invented the rumor that Mary had been a prostitute saved by Jesus.
Fairy tales about Mary Magdalene, especially sexual ones, have survived history, while new ones are continually being invented. Myths are ok if people understand that they are myths. But two thousand years of Christian history proves that a lot of people will believe just about anything you tell them—especially if you put it into a book. Jesus and Mary Magdalene deserve a lot better than this.