News Alert

Sunday Herald (Scotland) 7/17/05: Jesus, married with children, says author [Excerpts]—Author Dan Brown [defends] claims he makes in the book that Jesus Christ married and had a child. "I began as a sceptic," he says. "As I started researching Da Vinci Code I really thought I would disprove a lot of this theory about Mary Magdalene and holy blood and all of that. I became a believer."

Brown reaffirms his "belief" in the book's key theory-that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and their French-born child started a bloodline stretching to the present day. Critics have denounced the new claims as "bonkers".

The Da Vinci Code claims Leonardo Da Vinci's painting "The Last Supper" holds the key to the Holy Grail. According to the book, the Grail is not a chalice, as traditionally believed, but Mary Magdalene.

It alleges Jesus and Mary married and had a child and that their bloodline survives to this day-a secret kept by the Catholic Church.

Brown argues that efforts to describe Mary Magdalene as a prostitute were part of a smear campaign against the wife of Jesus.

Brown contends that Jesus must have wed because "in that time in history, for a young Jewish man to not be married... it was practically a sin." He insists that there are grounds for taking seriously his theories.

[Critics] tried to find the sources from which Brown said he gleaned the information to compile his theory. However, they noted that some of the claims were not supported by historians, theologians or in academic works. A spokesman for the Church of Scotland's panel on doctrine was also unmoved by Brown's comments.

[TBC: Perhaps Dan Brown should be a guest expert participating in the Jesus Seminar, a collection of pseudo-scholars that tell us about the historic Jesus through a process of best guesses, which are then put to a vote.]