This column may contain strong language, sexual content, adult humor, and other themes that may not be suitable for minors. Parental guidance is strongly advised.
As all Christians know, Holy Week commemorates the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
It’s easy to forget, in the course of two millennia, that Jesus—if he did, in fact, exist—was a political dissident during Roman times who advocated, rather radically for the era, non-violent resistance to the regime and respect for human rights regardless of one’s status and station in life. And for that he was crucified, the preferred mode of execution for those who challenged the legitimacy of the Roman Empire.
These were perilous times, after all, when Jews were indeed Palestinians as well as Jews who were pretty much fed up with being under Roman occupation. Men claiming to be the Messiah were a dime a dozen then, but not many opted for the risky and deadly route of claiming to be tasked with the establishment of the kingdom of heaven here on earth. A treasonous declaration, as far as the Romans were concerned, for theirs, they believed, was the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever until of course, Constantine discovered Jesus, thanks to his mother, and converted to Christianity.
What turned Jesus into the pivotal figure of Western civilization soon after his death and alleged resurrection is largely the work of his disciples, particularly Paul of Tarsus. The extreme makeover of Jesus, however, from a short, swarthy, and almost certainly dark-skinned Semite to a whiter-than-white, gentle-eyed, rosy-cheeked, goodness-flowing-from-every-pore long-haired matinee idol in the vein of Jesus Christ Superstar, which began sometime around the 14th century, is perhaps history’s most successful evidence of the transformative powers of public relations.
Nevertheless, let’s focus on how Jesus seemed to have a special affinity with the weak and the downtrodden, the outcasts of society. He took up with company particularly questionable during his day, most notably with Mary Magdalene, so lovingly depicted as “that harlot,” a sex worker in today’s terms, a woman of such ill-repute that the notion that Jesus ever had anything more than a charitable relationship with her would be blasphemy to most Christians. Because, you know, Jesus was the first superhero ever. The dude was human, but he was divine, too. So such base desires he would have surely conquered.
That was part of the PR spin, no doubt: Jesus was pure, celibate, and resistant to earthly temptations. I mean, come on, the devil tested him during the 40 days he was in the desert, but Jesus wouldn’t budge. The image that has been carefully crafted since AD 35, thanks to the Council of Nicea, is that of a divine being made human by God to epitomize the best that mere men can aspire to be—which includes foregoing such mundane matters as sexual desire.
But to quote The Grinder, a TV sitcom protagonist with a Messianic complex, albeit on a small-town scale, what if he didn’t?
The novelist Nikos Kazantakis tackled this controversially in his novel The Last Temptation of Christ in 1951, and for this he was excommunicated from the Eastern Orthodox Church. Later, he co-wrote the screenplay for the even more controversial film based on the book by Martin Scorcese starring Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, and Barbara Hershey—with David Bowie making an appearance as Pontius Pilate in 1988.
The book, deemed “spiritual dynamite” by the San Francisco Chronicle, and duly included in the Index of Prohibited Books by panicked Catholics everywhere, imagined a wholly human Jesus aware of his divine calling yet battling a host of very real and very human issues like fear, doubt, depression, reluctance, and lust, among them.
Perhaps the single most heretical, and hysteria-inducing part, of the book is towards the end, when Jesus takes the sisters Mary and Martha as his wives with whom he lives into old age in relative tranquility until the bubble is burst by the arrival of his former disciples. Not to give away the plot, but this turns out to be a momentary fantasy, a final temptation he flirts with before his death on the cross.
The movie depicts this, er, faithfully.
I was in London when the movie first screened in the summer of 1988, braving the swarm of protesters who picketed the theater, angered—without seeing anything more than the trailer—by the presumed blasphemies it espoused, among them a dream sequence that saw Jesus imagining a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, a woman whose advances he rebuffed but whose soul he saved, according to scripture.
As I made my way to the cinema, I was interviewed on the fly by BBC Radio and asked why I was not discouraged by the presence of the protesters, who were full of fire and brimstone warnings at this point. I don’t recall exactly what I answered then, something to the effect that I wasn’t bothered at all, that it was always good to examine and challenge dogma every now and then. As to whether I believed I was going to hell for daring to watch the movie, I remember I just shrugged. I grew up in Manila; sometimes it seemed like hell, you know?
While both book and movie entertained the possibility of Jesus doing the sister wives thing with Mary and Martha, another long-forgotten and suppressed gospel suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene did indeed marry.
Evidence rests on a fragment of papyrus in Coptic text that has become known as the “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” Experts argue that evidence for Jesus taking a wife is overwhelming, and quite congruent to the customs of the time. Simcha Jacobovici, the co-author of Professor Barrie Wilson’s The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus’ Marriage to Mary Magdalene claims in a Huffington Post article that “Even before our findings, everything—everything—pointed to a marriage, and nothing—nothing—argued for Jesus’ celibacy. The only thing that continues to argue for Jesus’ celibacy is 2000 years of theological bullying. This may come as a shock to most people, but the fact is that none of the four Gospels say that Jesus was celibate. The Gospels call Jesus ‘Rabbi’ (Matthew 26:49, Mark 10:51, John 20:16). Rabbis, then as now, are married. If Jesus was married, someone would have noticed.”
I don’t quite see anyone in the Church’s hierarchy undoing millennia of dogma despite newfound and apparently convincing evidence vetted by researchers from the likes of Columbia University. Their position, I would imagine, is this: We’ll take the celibate Jesus, thank you very much. The rest of you can go to hell.
Wiser is the author of Making Love in Spanish, a novel published earlier this year by Anvil Publishing and available in National Book Store and Powerbooks, as well as online. When not assuming her Sasha Fierce alter-ego, she takes on the role of serious journalist and media consultant.
For comments and questions, e-mail b.wiser.ph@gmail.com.
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Art by Dorothy Guya