The Sacred Feminine in the News

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595083988,00.html

This article discusses the attempted modern rehabilitation of Mary Magdalene's image. I recently purchased The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, translated from the Coptic by Jean-Yves LeLoup. The Gospel itself is discussed below. Any thoughts? Anyone? *tapping on the glass*

.....The legend that they were married and had a child was "kept alive by an underground stream of art and artifacts in Western Europe" over the centuries, she said. Terming the supposed union "the most important secret of the Middle Ages," Starbird said the marriage represents God in the form of "male and female symbiosis" that goes beyond mere sexuality. As concern grew over her role as "apostle to the apostles," the one that Jesus loved more than his male apostles, early church leaders set out to suppress her role and voice in Christian tradition, Starbird said. Ancient texts discovered and translated within the past century — including the "Gnostic gospels" named after Christ's disciples including Thomas, Philip and Mary — have rekindled debate not only about Mary's relationship with Christ and her life after his death, but whether he told her information before his crucifixion that had been withheld from his apostles. Much of the book's conjecture about Mary comes from such noncanonical texts, including the "Gospel of Mary." Current liberal scholarly discussion about such questions is presented in "The Da Vinci Code" as factual information, shared during the quest by the book's protagonists to find Magdalene's remains and the documents that accompany them. Those documents — which Brown tells readers were retrieved from the Holy of Holies in ruins of the ancient Jewish temple by a real secret society known as the Knights Templar — purportedly show how the early Christian church subverted the role of women. He makes sweeping statements about an early Christian conspiracy to burn 5 million women as witches throughout Europe and another to cast Mary as a prostitute. There is some truth in both characterizations, but scholars dispute the details. More than a dozen books have been penned in an attempt to separate fact from fiction in "The Da Vinci Code."