The Woman With the Alabaster Jar
By Margaret Starbird
Published by Bear and Co
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

The legend deserves better

The ‘Mary Magdalen was Jesus’ wife’ theory gets a rather lame going-over by a converted sceptic.

** See also the afterthought following this review. **

The Nation
Published on June 13, 2004
“The Woman With the Alabaster Jar” – published in 1993 but newly reissued, probably because of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” – begins with the promise of a brave investigation.
“A courageous exploration of an extremely delicate question,” writes Rev Terrance Sweeney (author of “A Church Divided”) in the foreword. He warns Margaret Starbird that she’ll be exposed to “abuse and ridicule” and that her “journey is fraught with threats, allurements and deceptions”.
The only “ridicule” Starbird is going to get (and deservedly so) for this slim volume from the “Women’s Studies/Creation Spirituality” shelf is that she’s covering ground already well tilled in better books.
There’s nothing brave in this distillation of modern speculation that Jesus married Mary Magdalen and had a child by her, and that his line survived long after the Crucifixion.
Nearly halfway through her book, Starbird writes: “This version of the Christian story we are examining is not taught in established Christian churches, yet it may be closer to the truth than the ‘orthodox’ version.” (Italics added – hardly a bold assertion.)
Starbird admits she can’t prove any of her thesis, but that doesn’t stop her from waxing poetic in a grand conclusion:
“It is not clear what the patriarchal establishment of Christianity will do when it is discovered that the legends of the Lost Bride of Jesus are probably true. It is possible that the Vatican will continue to deny that Jesus was married.
“But it is also possible, when faced with the evidence, that the fathers will decide it is time to receive the Bride in joyful thanksgiving. Perhaps they will allow the church bells to ring out across the land and announce her safe return and to welcome her home! … Then the voices of the Bride and Bridegroom will again be heard in the land, and the desert shall bloom!”
Holy hosannahs in the highest.
This is a real shame of an ending for a book that otherwise deserves some credit for helping get across to a wider public the tremendous weight of evidence about the real Jesus – a non-divine Jew who laid claim to both a Jewish sovereign state and his royal right to rule over it and who married (as any self-respecting rabbi would do in his time) into a family with its own regal lineage.
Starbird says at the outset that she was shaken from her orthodoxy by 1982’s “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail”. So was everyone else who’s gone on to write the numerous books, often as redundant as hers, about the ancient heresy that Jesus’ offspring was or were spirited off to southern France under fear of persecution and gave foundation to the legend of the Holy Grail.
“Holy Blood” authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln were the first to popularise the interpretation that the grail was not the cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper, nor a chalice used to collect his blood on the cross, but sangraal, or “royal blood” in the Languedoc dialect of Provence in southern France, where the widowed Mary Magdalen found safe haven.
Baigent and Leigh went on, in “The Temple and the Lodge”, to explain the role of the Knights Templar of Crusades fame in both protecting and promulgating the royal line in Europe during and after the Middle Ages. In “The Holy Place”, Lincoln focused on sacred ground in Provence where the secret was hidden in the face of horrendous persecution by the Catholic Church’s Inquisition.
What Starbird has done in her not-very-weighty volume is ruminate through all this much-recycled testimony, then do the same with the wealth of mystic feminism centred on the maternal earth spirit usually dubbed Gaia (though Gaia doesn’t show up here by name), and produced a bland Christmas cake that bears no new fruit but teeters on nuttiness.
There’s nothing unsound about the premise – God knows Baigent et al were convincing enough. In essence, it’s difficult to understand how anyone can believe a story about an eternal bachelor and his virgin mother. What the prophets (and probably God) had in mind was more of a Bride and Bridegroom tale.
Even the Gospels list Jesus’ brothers and sisters, and researchers long ago explained that his mother’s “virginity” was just a misinterpretation of the Latin “young woman”. Both Jesus and his dad were tekton – master craftsmen in the mystical sense, not bloody carpenters.
And the Magdalen – from Magdal-eder, or “fortress” in old Hebrew – was no prostitute, as Catholic kids are still told with a nudge and a wink. Mary Magdalen was of the priestly (and matriarchal) line of Benjamin, whose traditional right to anoint (crown) the kings of Israel had been usurped by the latter-day (patriarchal) Jewish high priests.
She is remembered for washing Jesus’ feet and drying them with her hair. She is not remembered (unless people like Mel Gibson remind us) for being at Jesus’ side throughout the Passion.
The Gospels’ wedding at Cana was doubtless Jesus’ wedding to Mary Magdalen. The same evangelists tell us she was beloved and much closer to him than any apostle.
Jesus died for his sins, and then for some of the followers, including Mary, it was off to Europe.
Starbird does a good job of tracing the evidence of her influence there: the Black Madonna of Chartres Cathedral and elsewhere (black denoting “hidden in darkness”), the symbolic watermarks of the Provencal papermakers, the original Tarot (with a female pope and an empress) and even the paintings of Botticelli, supposedly a grand master of ancient grail cabal called the Priory of Sion.
Starbird is at her most lively in suggesting that our fairy tales began as a means of communicating the truth about the real Jesus and the false popes of Rome (who saw the Church as Jesus’ only bride). Thus we have an oppressed Cinderella with her sooty (again, hidden) face, yearning for her prince’s return.
But two pages on Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” is a bit much, isn’t it, even if Starbird noticed that the painting which the little fish-girl Ariel salvaged from a shipwreck in the movie cartoon is called “The Penitent Magdalen”?
The coming of the Age of Aquarius gets a look-in, too, before we’re treated to this:
“After 2,000 years, it is time to set the record straight, to revise and complete the Gospel story of Jesus to include his wife. Our ravaged environment, our abused children, our maimed veterans, our self-destructing families and abandoned spouses [all the results of a patriarchal society, you see] are crying for the restoration of the Bride of Christ.”
For a far better interpretation of the Gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other writings from Qumram, and archaeological evidence of Jesus’ marriage, Mary’s escape to France and especially the likelihood that their line survived for centuries (if not to this day), see Baigent at al, whose titles are probably still available at Asia Books.
For a deeper understanding of the ancient lineage – all the way back to Moses and then some – and for a few genuine shocks about what the biblical wisdom is up to these days, see “Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark”, which despite its corny name is a genuinely eye-popping read, unlike the one under review. And it’s definitely on sale at Asia Books.

@ @ @ @ @

In February 2006, New Yorker magazine published a lengthy essay on Mary Magdalen by Joan Acocella called “The Saintly Sinner”. It may still be here. Here’s what it says about Starbird’s book:

In 1993, Margaret Starbird, a good Catholic who never publishes anything without letting her pastor read it first, came out with her book “The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail”. Starbird says that when she read “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” she was “shattered” by its claim that Jesus was married. She didn’t reject it out of hand, though. She did seven years of research, and concluded that “Holy Blood” was right: Jesus was married to the Magdalene. Not only that, but the suppression of this secret — and of the “forgotten feminine” in general — had caused terrible trouble in the world: environmental pollution, child abuse, war. But now the divine goddess was fed up. Statues of the Virgin Mary “have been seen to shed tears in churches worldwide … Even the stones cry out!” So do Disney movies. In “The Little Mermaid”, Ariel’s true identity is the “Lost Bride”, the Magdalene. The forgotten feminine is on its way back.
Starbird goes beyond analysis; she writes a love story. Jesus was a tall, handsome fellow; the Magdalene was a shy Jewish maiden, accustomed to sitting in her garden and gazing at little birds. One day, they were introduced. “His dark eyes caressed her.” We are taken through their wedding night, alas. Soon afterward, Jesus tells the Magdalene, now pregnant, that he has to go on a dangerous mission and that she must stay behind. “She buried her tears in the warmth of his shoulder.” The academic feminists have very little patience with the Jesus-married-the-Magdalene plot. As Schaberg sees it, these stories are not about the Magdalene. They are about Jesus; they are an effort to make him a “real man,” and not just for humanistic, Christ-is-your-friend reasons. (In the ’60s there were some naughty suggestions that maybe Jesus was gay.) Insofar as the love plot concerns the Magdalene, Schaberg writes, it is again demeaning, an attempt to convert this independent woman into a “normal” female. Starbird’s book bears out that theory.
She is not the only one who has resorted to fiction. There have been quite a few novels about the Magdalene in the past few decades, and many of them, according to Susan Haskins, are reluctant to part with the Magdalene’s reputation as a prostitute. The trend is to celebrate her as a sexually liberated woman. Behind this, of course, is second-stage feminism, but I think there is another motive as well, an effort to smuggle a little liveliness back into the Magdalene’s story.