not being (currently or past) a christian, i'm lacking in some of the foundational knowledge that makes some of this information make sense, but also to matter to me one way or the other. which is to say that i've got no stake in it being either true or false, but some of it didn't make a lot of sense to me because i wasn't sure what she was talking about. that said, the postulations (that jesus was married to mary magdalen, that mary magdalen wasn't a prostituted woman at all but actually of a respectable family that was worthy of marrying jesus, that his mother mary was neither a virgin nor celibate during her marriage, that there are other children of mary and joseph, that there was a daughter born to mary and jesus) seem utterly believable to me. i was not under the impression that jewish history ever saw jesus as the potential messiah or even of the bloodline of king david, but i can believe this, too. the thing is, though, is that the author used a lot of art in her discussion (which makes sense,) but it seemed to be a bit like i remember english class in high school - where you find meaning in the smallest things that could have been what was intended, or maybe not. she wrote "i conclude," "i am convinced," "i believe" a lot without doing a sufficient job of convincing us. but in her defense, what she's saying is that the meaning and the true history has been erased from record, so to find evidence of it requires some leaps. i'm just not sure, without knowing what some of the meanings of things were, that she did a good enough job to convert someone who has been taught forever about the opposite of this history.
( )

Best book I've read on Mary Magdalene. ( )

According to the blurb, Margaret Starbird was a Catholic scholar when she read Holy Blood, Holy Grail and was moved to repudiate the book. Instead, she found more evidence that Jesus Christ may have been married to Mary Magdalen.

This book exams that belief through the artists, mythologies, traditions and symbolism of various eras.

Starbird believes that Mary Magdalen typifies the ‘forgotten feminine’ in the Bible which focuses on not only a father figure God, but that aspect of Jesus that is victor, ruler, Lord of the Universe and seated at God’s right hand. Starbird says that this version of Jesus clearly echos a male divinity in the tradition of such gods as Egypt’s Ra, Greece’s Apollo, Rome’s Jupiter and Persia’s Zoroaster and Mithras. The Jesus of the Gospels, however, is a Lord of wisdom, gentleness and compassion. ( )

When Margaret Starbird read the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail she was infuriated by it and decided to do some of her own research to refute it. However she found herself caught up in the story and with her own variant on it. Unfortunately some of the sources she found weren't particualarly historical or accurate and some of her leaps of faith are a bit overdone.

To my mind sometimes a flower is just a flower. There are many examples of artisans finding particular shapes and colours that just appealed to them, and I'm sure they could have done in their sleep to fill in backgrounds. I stitch myself and I find myself being attracted to some of the same imagery over and over, sometimes I look deeper for the meaning but sometimes that pattern just plain appeals to me. I'm sure it was the same with some of the papermakers that Starbird mentions in the book. There may have been some who had meaning but there may have been others who just picked a shape because it was easy, well known, had a relationship with their master or just plain appealed to them.

And this is the main flaw of the book. Just because an image has certain meanings to certain people does not mean that everyone imbues it with that meaning. Just because certain people or peoples imbue certain items with certain meanings does not mean that all people do the same.

It may be that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and some of the arguments for are quite compelling (the fact that non-married men were a rarity and that this would have been mentioned in the Bible is one of many); but we may never know the truth. The truth at the moment is that Christianity has ignored the female and the feminine for a long time and this is begining to be something they may not be able to ignore for much longer.

This book gained a few points for making me think but lost some for it's slightly rigid view of the feminine and the masculine. Some of the flights of literary fancy are a little overwritten, but her heart is in the right place. ( )