The Galilean Secret: A Novel (42 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

WHEN I REFLECT ON WHY I WROTE THIS NOVEL, I AM HAUNTED BY A MEMORY FROM JUNE 2006. As I visited Ground Zero with my son’s sixth-grade class, hundreds of people swirled around the observation deck in lower Manhattan. Some stared through tall iron bars at the vast crater where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood. Others studied photographs and timelines of the September 11 attack. Still others snapped pictures or strolled with their tour groups, some of them speaking foreign languages.

Then I heard singing.

“Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name” lilted over the crowd and into the gaping crater as if on the voices of angels. I recognized Malotte’s arrangement of “The Lord’s Prayer” and wove my way toward the multicultural youth choir. By the time I reached them, they were singing, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” The sprawling choir infused the words with such emotion that I felt as if I were hearing them for the first time.

I kept thinking about the monstrous evil that had been visited on Ground Zero, and how violence is humanity’s most virulent disease. Given the facts of history, thinking that a cure will ever be found seemed impossibly naive. But in that moment I was also flooded with hope. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus instructs us to pray for the coming of God’s reign on earth. With this coming, the glory of eternity will break into time, and all things will be made new. Christians serve humanity as a way of embodying this prayer.

The Galilean Secret
is about the love that gave birth to this hope. I wrote the novel out of my belief that Jesus Christ fully actualized divine love. His decisive actions flowed from an enlightened spiritual awareness—an awareness of God’s concern even for the sparrows, and for every hair on our heads. As God’s love flowed through him, it became a creative, transformative power, healing bodies, captivating hearts, and posing a dramatic challenge to the religious and political establishments of his time. Not only did this love embrace tax collectors, prostitutes and lepers, but it also compelled Jesus to forgive those who crucified him. Based on his example, he exhorts us to love others—even our enemies— as he has loved us.

I wanted the novel to reflect the connection between the personal and the social implications of Jesus’ ministry. If God’s reign on earth doesn’t come to us personally, it will remain forever unreal, a fantasy with no basis in experience. For Jesus, the love that inspires hope for us all became personal. Christians who emphasize his divinity may say that his astute spiritual awareness was eternally part of his being. As a novelist, I am more interested in the human Jesus—in what we might learn from his struggle to comprehend and live the fullness of love.

I wondered about the influences that may have shaped his awareness. The New Testament and other early Christian writings don’t give a definitive answer. We know that he was raised a Jew by working parents in Nazareth, and that he had brothers and sisters. But no reliable source tells us how these people, or anyone else, molded his thinking or his character.

I began to wonder if Jesus’ radical way of relating to women might provide a clue. Against the conventions of his time, he included women among his companions, spoke to them publicly and showed them compassion. On occasion he even used female imagery for God. How did Jesus develop this unusual sensitivity?
The Galilean Secret
dramatizes this mystery. The novel raises the question of whether Mary Magdalene had a powerful influence on him, and whether these two first-century Galileans discovered the secret of love, which can speak to our troubled times today.

The Gospels of the New Testament offer only sketchy details about their relationship. Of the twelve times that Mary Magdalene appears, eleven are in the scenes of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. That Mary stays with Jesus during his agony is significant, as is her role in all four Gospels as the first witness to his resurrection. In the Gospel of John she even has a personal conversation with the risen Lord.

All of this suggests a very close relationship.

Some passages in the ancient manuscripts discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 support this view. More than forty in number, these manuscripts include some of what have become known as the Gnostic Gospels, as well as other genres of literature. These Gospels were written by religious seekers known as Gnostics (from the Greek word
gnosis
, meaning “knowledge”) because they associated spiritual development with secret “knowledge” or experiential insight more than with belief in doctrines. Along with the Gospel of Mary, a Gnostic text found a half century earlier, some of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts mention Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Written during the second century or later, these references portray Mary as the constant companion of Jesus who has special insight into his teachings and the meaning of discipleship. She is even exalted above Peter, leading some scholars to conclude that she and Peter symbolized the conflict between Gnosticism and orthodox Christianity, with Mary standing for the former and Peter the latter.

Among these writings, the Gospel of Philip contains perhaps the most provocative verse: “The companion of the [Savior] is Mary Magdalene. The [Savior loved] her more than [all] the disciples, [and he] kissed her often on her [mouth].” Since the text discovered at Nag Hammadi is missing words in the places designated by brackets, we may never know exactly where Jesus kissed Mary. (Translators have suggested the words in brackets as guesses, based on the themes and vocabulary of the Gospel. Jesus may just as well have kissed Mary on the forehead, the cheek or the feet.)

Drawing on this Gnostic tradition, some novelists and filmmakers have portrayed Jesus and Mary Magdalene as married and the parents of a child, with a bloodline that continues to this day. The vast majority of New Testament scholars and historians of early Christianity don’t accept this view, and the longstanding tradition of the church is that the relationship was strictly platonic. Roman Catholicism even requires its priests to remain celibate, based on the belief that Jesus refrained from any intimate relationship with a woman.

I find both extremes hard to accept. On the one hand, the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married is based on conjecture, with no direct support in either the canonical or noncanonical sources. On the other hand, if Jesus were celibate, and if he never struggled with his sexuality, he would have been less than fully human, a contradiction of the creeds and historic teachings of the church.

I wrote this book in the belief that the most fruitful place of discovery is the middle ground. In
The Galilean Secret
the letter from Jesus to Mary Magdalene is fictional, but even if the scenario it describes didn’t happen, it contains insights that are true to the teachings of Jesus and to the larger framework of biblical revelation. We cannot know whether he and Mary shared physical intimacies, but we can ponder what may have happened between them—and how what they learned from one another affected the people around them.

This exploration of the middle ground illuminates one of the great mysteries of being human—our masculinity and femininity. Although we cannot completely fathom this mystery, we gain insight into it by learning how the masculine and the feminine components of our personalities relate within us, as they related within Jesus and Mary. The deeper we go into this spiritual work, the better we will understand the Galilean secret of love. Not only will this secret reveal the wonder of our creation in God’s image, but it will also give us resources to use in friendships, dating and marriage.

In the novel the relationship between Jesus and Mary tells us something about the evolution of love. Their struggle becomes an extraordinary quest to establish intimacy with the gender opposite in themselves. This spiritual approach reminds us that only the divine lover of our souls can bring us ultimate fulfillment. When a person fails to learn this lesson, as was the case with Judas Iscariot in the novel, the consequences can be catastrophic. Even those who do learn to love—Judith and Gabriel, Karim and Rachel—suffer in the process. And yet the pain is worth the price because love brings transformation.

The work of unifying the masculine and the feminine and thus maximizing the power of love is a critical need today. The Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—are dominated by male images of God and by men in positions of leadership. To evolve beyond this one-sided paradigm would be liberating for both women and men, and a huge step forward for humanity. Our tendency to set up dichotomies and become captives of their limitations robs us of the richness of integrating opposites and finding the creativity in the tension between them.

We can hardly imagine a world in which men no longer exploit or abuse women and in which women no longer distrust or fear men. The work of building such a world begins within each of us. If we fail to do this inner work, we will always live in a divided world.

Today interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, the Christian scriptures and the Qur’an that are disconnected from love incite division, violence, and terrorism. How will this change if we never learn to reconcile the opposites within us? Are we doomed to create bigger, more destructive weapons to defeat those whose religiously inspired hatred threatens the security of the world? The Abrahamic religions also contain traditions that advocate peacemaking rooted in justice for all. Part of my purpose in writing this novel was to dramatize this tradition as articulated and embodied by Jesus of Nazareth. His teachings and decisive actions give voice to the social dimension of hope.

The Galilean Secret
has both historical and contemporary plots that involve violence fueled by religion. I want readers to experience the clash of religion and politics in first-century Jerusalem and in Israel/Palestine today. The clash inevitably breeds upheaval in people’s lives and in the larger society. In today’s world, religion is often used to catalyze regional and international conflicts rather than resolve them. The novel’s historical plot bears witness to the perennial nature of this problem.

This is where fiction holds unique potential in our current situation. In Judaism, Christianity and Islam we have traditions that have been handed down for centuries. In hindsight, we can read our scriptures and identify traditions that have divided rather than united people. How can there ever be greater understanding, let alone reconciliation and peace, if we don’t find more creative ways of interpreting our traditions?

For example, the Jews have been singled out and blamed for killing Jesus. In a post-Holocaust world, it seems inconceivable that novelists or filmmakers would create art that perpetuates this fallacy. In
The Galilean Secret
, I tried to show that there are other alternatives. The Gospel of John records that Judas Iscariot brought Roman soldiers with him to arrest Jesus. Where could he have gotten these soldiers if Pilate hadn’t given the order?

The Gospels present the Roman governor as vacillating and indecisive, but we know from the historian Josephus that Pilate could be ruthless. Fiction provides a way to balance the picture. It allows us to understand the Gospels in light of history’s tragedies, which is the first step toward healing and preventing them in the future.

If we don’t take this approach, how will we ever create a better world? At present, religion is often used to support oppression and to inflict suffering, but will this always be the case? Part of the solution lies in taking our understanding further and learning to read our scriptures critically. The old paradigm of winners and losers is untenable in today’s world. With everything so interconnected, if one group or nation loses, we all lose. We must learn to communicate with respect for one another’s religious traditions, and we must become secure enough in our beliefs that we no longer demonize those who disagree with us.

I wrote this novel to lift up the kind of religion that promotes personal and social healing. I love the Christian faith in which I was raised, but I long for it to become more of a force for peace. In order for this to happen, a transformation must begin from within. By seeking the oneness of the masculine and the feminine as Jesus and Mary Magdalene did, we will better find the secret of love that inspires hope. Then we will give thanks for the spiritual progress we have made and for the light that is penetrating even the darkest places.