Phillips: Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute?Dr. That role in his story places her at the center of the Christian message, and, one has to assume, at the center of Jesus' life.įew scholars doubt that Mary was an important follower, but there is another label that has stubbornly shadowed her through the ages - prostitute. And she's said to be the first witness to the resurrection.

Stone Phillips, Dateline correspondent: How important do you think she was to Jesus?Karen King, Harvard Divinity School professor: Mary Magdalene had to be one of the most important people in Jesus' life. Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King is an authority on women's roles in the early church and author of a recent book on Mary Magdalene. She lives in our memory as the Biblical figure with the flowing red hair, a fallen woman until she is forgiven by Jesus. Mary Magdalene was born, it is believed, in the town of Magdala, a fishing village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. To understand that secret and to separate fact from fiction in “The Da Vinci Code,” we pieced together a portrait of the novel's key figure, a woman who lived 2,000 years ago: Mary Magdalene. It might not be a cup at al, but a secret, the author suggests, that would radically change our understanding of Jesus and the life he led. But in “The Da Vinci Code,” the grail takes on an entirely new meaning. In the book, the monk kills the curator in a quest for the legendary Holy Grail, a mythical vessel often thought of as the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. 'Fiction, as if it were fact, as if it were history, and say 'Well, this really rocks my world? What I’ve always come to understand about Jesus and the Catholic church is suddenly everything’s up for grabs and that shakes a lot of people up,” says NBC News analyst Father Thomas Williams of Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University. But readers are told right from the start that 'all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.' That provocative statement gives an air of credibility to the book's elaborate conspiracy theories and it's caused millions of readers to wonder how much they really know about Jesus and a woman named Mary Magdalene.

That scene, from the opening pages of “The Da Vinci Code” is, of course, fiction.

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