Bart responds to readers, friend and foe, as time allows.
Jesus Kissing Mary Magdalene: A Bizarre Scene in the Gospel of Philip
A number of readers responded to my post about whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene were intimate by pointing out that the non-canonical Gospel of Philip sure does seem to *say* they were! So, what do I have to say about that? I've dealt with the issue on the blog before, but a lot of you were just a twinkle in our eye at the time, so here I'll deal with it again. I have a reasonably full discussion of the relevant issues in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. In the book I put the discussion in the context of – yes, you guessed it -- Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the one source many people turn to for the Gospel of Philip (!). Few people who talk about the relevant passage have actually read the book. It strikes many readers today as unusually strange. But in any event, this is what I say about the book and the Kissing Passage there. ************************************************************** Some of the historical claims about the non-canonical Gospels in the [...]