THE SAINTLY SINNER.

The Catholic Church presumably has enough on its hands right now without worrying about popular fiction, but the Holy See cannot have failed to notice that Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," a novel claiming that Jesus was married, has been on the Times best-seller list for almost three years. (Its message will soon spread more widely: the paperback is due out next month, and the movie version will be released in May.) Brown is by no means the first to have suggested that Christ had a sex life--Martin Luther said it--but the most notorious recent statement of the theory was a 1982 book, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. "Holy Blood," which was one of the main sources for "The Da Vinci Code," proposes that after the Crucifixion Jesus' wife, with at least one of their children, escaped to France, where their descendants married into the Merovingian dynasty and are still around today. Nobody knows this, though, because, according to the authors' scenario, the truth has been kept under wraps for a thousand years by a secret society called the Priory of Sion. The book offers a fantastically elaborated conspiracy theory--involving Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Jean Cocteau (all "grand masters" of the Priory of Sion), plus Emma Calve and various others--that cannot be briefly summarized, but the upshot is that the Priory may now be ready to go public with its story. The authors warn that the organization may intend to set up a theocratic United States of Europe, with a descendant of Jesus as its priest-king but with the actual business of government being handled by some other party--the Priory of Sion, for example.

And who is the woman who caused all this trouble? Who married Jesus and bore his offspring and thereby laid the foundation for the overthrow of post-Enlightenment culture? Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene gets only fourteen mentions in the New Testament. Luke and Mark describe her as the subject of one of Jesus' exorcisms--he cast "seven devils" out of her--and as one of several women who followed him. In all four Gospels, she is present at the Crucifixion. Nevertheless, her role remains minuscule, until, all of a sudden, after Christ's death, it becomes hugely magnified. Each of the Gospels tells the story a little differently, but, basically, the Magdalene, either alone or with other women, goes to the tomb on the third day to anoint Jesus' body, and it is to her (or them) that an angel or Christ himself announces that he is risen from the dead, and instructs her to go tell this to his disciples. That command gave the Magdalene a completely new standing. The Resurrection is the proof of the truth of Christian faith. As the first person to announce it, Mary Magdalene became, as she was later designated, "the apostle to the apostles."

But there was a problem. Why her? Why a person who previously had been referred to only in passing? Above all, why a woman?

The fact that all four Gospels say that the Magdalene was the one strongly suggests that this indeed is what people said had happened. If so, however, she needed to be improved upon. That was easy enough. Today, with so many Biblical literalists around, we have to fuss about what Scripture actually says, but in the early centuries after Christ's death such questions were less important, because most people couldn't read. The four Gospels, for the most part, are collections of oral traditions. Once they were written down, they served as a guide for preaching, but only as a guide. Preachers embroidered upon them freely, and artists--indeed, everyone--made their own adjustments. The English scholar Marina Warner makes this point in her book on the Virgin Mary, "Alone of All Her Sex" (1976). As Warner shows, many of the details of the Nativity so familiar to us from paintings and hymns and school pageants--"the hay and the snow and the smell of animals' warm bodies"--are not in the New Testament. People made them up; they wanted a better story. Likewise, they made up a better Mary Magdalene.

Jesus, for his time and place, was notably unsexist. In Samaria, when he talked with the woman at the well--this is the longest personal exchange he has with anyone in the Bible--his disciples "marvelled"; a Jewish man did not, in public, speak to a woman unrelated to him. In another episode, in Luke, Jesus is dining with Simon the Pharisee when a "woman in the city," a "sinner"--presumably a prostitute--enters the house, washes Jesus' feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses them, and then anoints them with balm from a jar. Simon says to Christ that if he can accept that tribute from such a person then he is surely not a prophet. Christ answers that the "sinner" has shown him more love than Simon has.

According to some scholars, Christ's equanimity regarding gender was honored in some early Christian communities, where women served as leaders. But by the second century, as the so-called "orthodox Church" consolidated itself, the women were being shunted aside, along with the thing that they were increasingly seen to stand for: sex. It was not until the twelfth century that all Roman Catholic priests were absolutely required to be celibate, but the call for celibacy began sounding long before, and the writings of the Church fathers were very tough on sex. By the fourth century, Christ's mother was declared a virgin. Chastity became the ideal; women, the incitement to unchastity, were stigmatized.