Marry Magdalene
Monk Kidd envisions Jesus as Mr. Right
The Book of Longings Sue Monk Kidd Viking
The kids won’t believe it now, but in 1988 one of the biggest scandals was Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, an adaptation of a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis that includes a vision of Jesus married to Mary Magdalene. Scorsese received death threats. Several countries banned the film.
In 2003, controversy erupted again over The Da Vinci Code, in which Dan Brown speculated that Jesus married Mary Magdalene. Then, in 2012, renowned religion scholar Karen King rocked the Christian world by revealing an ancient fragment of papyrus that contains the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’”
Into this arena steps Sue Monk Kidd with The Book of Longings, a novel about Jesus’s wife. Such a story from Kidd makes sense. Although known for her 2001 book The Secret Life of Bees, she began her writing career with spiritual memoirs describing her move from the Baptist theology of her youth to the insights of Christian mystics old and new.
Kidd has no desire to offend. “I am deeply and reverentially aware that Jesus is a figure to whom millions of people are devoted,” she writes in the author’s note. “His impact on the history of Western civilization is incomparable.” For better or worse, Kidd’s novel is about Jesus’s wife, not Jesus. She sidesteps the Mary Magdalene controversy by presenting a fully invented character: Her narrator-wife is Ana, the brilliant daughter of Herod’s head scribe.
Ana writes the lost histories of Eve, Bathsheba, Jezebel and other women. She’s also an activist. When a friend is raped by a Roman guard and then brutally punished by her family, Ana lashes out at the sexist cultural and legal standards of the day.
Much of the early drama involves Ana’s conflicts with her parents as they struggle to find her a suitor. Then one day Ana meets Jesus in a cave.
The story provides no critical distance, no irony. Despite its efforts to deconstruct Christian orthodoxy, it insists on its own orthodoxy. If Jesus is the Son of God, Ana is the feminine personification of Holy Wisdom.