She’s Back

The Jacobovici-Wilson book, released to press fanfare on November 12, follows hard on the heels of Harvard Divinity School professor Karen L. King’s revelation in 2012 of a scrap of ancient-looking papyrus bearing the words “and Jesus said to them, ‘my wife.’ ” King argued that the “wife,” although not named in the fragment, was probably Mary Magdalene. Journalists, academics, and clergypeople alike went all aflutter for months speculating whether Dan Brown’s blockbuster 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code—which also unites Jesus and the Magdalene in wedlock—could have a grain of truth to it, and what it would mean for the future of Christianity had its founder, traditionally regarded as celibate, turned out to be not so.

Early in 2014 the results of carbon-dating tests revealed that the piece of papyrus wasn’t so old as King had thought (it dated from the 8th century, nowhere near the time of Jesus), and many scholars concluded that King had been duped by a modern forger who had copied some words from another ancient text onto the tiny fragment. King herself, while continuing to maintain that the writing was genuine, withdrew her assertion that it referred specifically to Mary Magdalene.

But at least King’s papyrus scrap did use the words “Jesus” and “wife” in the same sentence. The Lost Gospel is a far more ambitious attempt to cater to people’s willingness to believe what they want to believe—because the supposed “lost gospel” that Jacobovici and Wilson say they have uncovered never actually mentions Jesus at all. Nor Mary Magdalene. Furthermore, as Robert Cargill, a professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa put it in a scathing online review, “Mr. Jacobovici’s The Lost Gospel is neither ‘lost’ nor a ‘gospel.’ ”

Instead, it is a well-known ancient text that scholars call “Joseph and Aseneth” because its two leading characters are the biblical patriarch Joseph and his bride Aseneth, briefly mentioned in the Book of Genesis as the daughter of an Egyptian priest and the mother of Joseph’s two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. “Joseph and Aseneth” elaborates on their courtship and wedding, which includes the pagan Aseneth’s conversion to belief in the God of Israel. No one knows exactly when “Joseph and Aseneth” was written—perhaps as early as the first century b.c. or as late as the second century a.d. Most scholars believe that it’s a Jewish text, written to explain how it happened that a pious Hebrew patriarch married a pagan woman. But some scholars think the romantic tale has Christian overtones, including references to bread and wine that might be allegories of the Christian Eucharist. Manuscripts of “Joseph and Aseneth,” believed to have been originally composed in Greek, have been surfacing since the 19th century. The version that Jacobovici and Wilson claim to have unearthed, a 6th-century manuscript written in Syriac, a Middle Eastern dialect related to the Aramaic that Jesus probably spoke, has been on the shelves of the British Library since 1847 (“gathering dust” is the way the two put it, although that manuscript has in fact been extensively studied).

No matter. Jacobovici and Wilson claim to have “decoded” the manuscript by substituting “Jesus” for “Joseph” and “Mary Magdalene” for “Aseneth.” “There is now written evidence that Jesus was married to Mary the Magdalene and that they had children together,” they write. During “the missing years of Jesus’ life” before he began his public ministry, “he became engaged, got married, had sexual relations, and produced children,” Jacobovici and Wilson say.

Some of the 544-page Lost Gospel consists of an English translation of the Syriac text by Tony Burke, a colleague of Wilson’s teaching biblical studies at York University in Toronto, but Jacobovici and Wilson devote the bulk of it to interpreting what they insist that text actually says. Some of those interpretations are bizarre indeed. For example, “encrypted” in the Aseneth story is a plot by the Roman emperor Tiberius’ adopted son, Germanicus, to assassinate Jesus and his two sons, they say. They interpret references to “blood” in the Aseneth story as allusions to Mary Magdalene’s menstrual periods—much in the way that Dan Brown decided in The Da Vinci Code that the Holy Grail of medieval legend was actually Mary Magdalene’s vagina. Jacobovici and Wilson argue that “Joseph and Aseneth’’ was originally written during the first century by a group of dissident Christians—in code, because the mainstream Christians of ancient times wanted to eradicate memories of Mary Magdalene’s high status in the early church as Jesus’ wife.

Neither Wilson nor Jacobovici responded to requests for interviews. Wilson is best known for his 2009 book How Jesus Became Christian, which repackages the oft-told narrative that Bad Cop Paul of Tarsus invented the Christian religion by hijacking the teachings of Good Cop Jesus of Nazareth, who wanted nothing more than to be a Jewish rabbi. Jacobovici is a more flamboyant figure, known for his archaeological documentaries, typically aired by the History Channel and the Discovery Channel, that retail sensationalistic theories that mainstream archaeologists deem dubious.

Jacobovici’s The Exodus Decoded (2006), produced by James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar), claimed to have located the Ark of the Covenant, among other artifacts. Another Jacobovici documentary, The Lost Tomb of Jesus (2007), asserted that a collection of ancient ossuaries, or bone-boxes, found in Jerusalem once contained the bones of Jesus and various members of his family, including a son and a “Mary” who Jacobovici argued was the Magdalene. Jacobovici’s The Nails of the Cross (2011) claimed to have located Jesus’ crucifixion nails—or at least something close. His The Jesus Discovery (2012) argued that squiggles on yet another Jerusalem ossuary spelled out the story of Jonah and the whale, which early Christians regarded as a prefiguring of Jesus’ resurrection. Jacobovici deemed the first-century ossuary to be the “earliest Christian artifact,” but most New Testament scholars were unable to see much more than decorative lines on the bone-box.

Even the Church of England, not known for its hostility toward adventurous theories about Christian origins, has condemned Jacobovici’s latest Jesus-and-Mary Magdalene venture as more fiction than fact. Yet The Lost Gospel is already No. 2 on Amazon’s ancient history list, only a week after its release. There seems to be an insatiable public appetite these days for theories about a match between Jesus and the female disciple who was so close to him that John’s Gospel describes her as the first person to encounter Jesus after his resurrection.

Part of the reason is that “Mary Magdalene became sexualized from early on,” Anthony Le Donne, a New Testament professor at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, said in a telephone interview. Le Donne is the author of The Wife of Jesus: Ancient Texts and Modern Scandals (2013), a book that explores what the search for the historical Jesus’ wife tells us about our own culture. Early Gnostic texts seemed to identify the Magdalene as Jesus’ lover. Later, as Le Donne pointed out, church fathers in the West identified her with a repentant female “sinner”—perhaps a prostitute—in Luke’s Gospel who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. Mary Magdalene the long-haired prostitute soon found her way into Christian art and Christian devotion. “She’s a follower of Jesus who’s not attached to any male, such as a husband or son, so she’s always been intriguing,” Le Donne said.

Mary’s vampish identity persisted in popular culture until nearly the end of the 20th century, in such films as Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927), Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Then—along came The Da Vinci Code, with its narrative that Mary Magdalene, as Jesus’ spouse, had been a powerful woman leader whose story and very identity had been ruthlessly suppressed by the men who dominated the early church. This is the same narrative that Wilson and Jacobovici present in The Lost Gospel.

“Nearly all the interest in Jesus’ wife is post-Da Vinci Code,” said Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor at Duke University who maintains a website on “Joseph and Aseneth.” “Most people love conspiracies, and Jesus’ wife is one of them. It’s anticlerical, it’s about the hundreds of gospels people think were banned from the Bible, it has the nasty old church suppressing alternative forms of Christianity, and it has sex and romance. It has everything.”

Charlotte Allen, a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, is the author of The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.