Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses … Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.
– VIRGINIA WOOLF
In the Introduction I wrote that no historical Jesus book is just about an ancient “him” – or, in this case, an ancient “her and him.” This book is indeed about the possibility of a wife of Jesus, but it is just as much about us: the Christianized West.
We have been in the business of creating Jesus in our own image for a long time. We have created Jesus as a romantic groom, a gay advocate, and a polygamous Mormon. We inherited Mary as a repentant prostitute (itself a fiction) and replaced that image with the image of a royal bride. In each of these portraits, we find reflections of the emerging aspects of ourselves. Here we arrive at one of the most important elements of any quest for the wife of Jesus: the search for Jesus’ wife involves playing with our own reflections. Oversexing the text of the Gospel of Philip, letting our collective imaginations run wild over Mary Magdalene, forging documents to fuel our media appetites – these are all indications that the quest for the wife of Jesus reveals our own obsessions and insecurities.
One could hardly reveal this truth better than Nikos Kazantzakis. He writes:
Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally – the supreme purpose of the struggle – union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.
The author, made famous by his scandalous portrayal of Jesus, then reveals his motives: “If we are to be able to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish.” Clearly, Kazantzakis was motivated by his own inner conflict. He felt that he could best follow the bloody tracks by reliving Christ’s anguish. In this way, Kazantzakis attempts to gain the “profound knowledge” of Christ’s suffering by suffering himself. One must ask, “Was Kazantzakis illuminating or projecting his own angst in his portrait?” Perhaps both. Either way, we the audience are witnessing Kazantzakis’ angst in Jesus’ image. He claims that Jesus “conquered the invincible enchantment of simple human pleasures.” Is this true? Kazantzakis seems convinced that it is:
Temptation – the Last Temptation – was waiting for him upon the Cross. Before the fainted eyes of the Crucified the spirit of the Evil One, in an instantaneous flash, unfolded the deceptive vision of a calm and happy life. It seemed to Christ that he had taken the smooth, easy road of men. He had married and fathered children … But all at once Christ shook his head violently, opened his eyes, and saw … He had not married, had not lived a happy life.1
Kazantzakis concludes that Christ “reached the summit of sacrifice: he was nailed upon the Cross. Content, he closed his eyes. And then there was a great triumphant cry: It is accomplished!”2
Or, in fewer words (but no less telling) Kazantzakis wrote, “My entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.”3 It is clear that in his The Last Temptation of Christ Kazantzakis was telling the story of his own struggle through historical fiction. His dehumanizing portrayal of Mary was a casualty in his wrestling match with God. What Kazantzakis really wanted was an angst-ridden – and therefore relatable – Jesus. Mary Magdalene’s portrayal as a prostitute who had lost her faith served his narrative to this end. Mary was just a prop to help humanize Jesus. Mary became the framing that Kazantzakis wanted in order to create the Jesus he needed.
This is not far from what the Gnostic Christians were doing when they wrote their fictions of Salome and Mary. It also recalls the Mormon creation of an ancient witness to Christ’s polygamy. It is less important that we agree or disagree with any of these portraits; it is more important to recognize our deep-seated need to question our own sexual insecurities with answers about Jesus.
I do not for one moment think that Jesus’ cry from the cross had anything to do with a temptation to wed and settle down. But Kazantzakis was not trying to tell the history of Jesus, he was trying to reconcile himself with Jesus. Similarly, our fascination with the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” tells us much more about ourselves than it does about Jesus.
The quest for the wife of Jesus is thus a struggle for reconciliation. Kazantzakis was trying to reconcile “the flesh and the spirit” in his struggle to find “union with God.” These are metaphors that we project in order to create sacred space for ourselves.
We find in the Christian story the archetypes of Father, Son, and Spirit. We find the metaphors of “Brother” and “Beloved” in the New Testament. Catholic tradition has given us the archetypes of “Blessed Mother” and “Virgin.” These archetypes and others have infused Western civilization with a Christocentric psyche. In other words, Jesus remains a cultural force of gravity in our religious, social, political, and media-oriented lives. And yet, Christianity has always had an awkward relationship with sexual types. Is it any wonder that we’re preoccupied with sex?
It was only a matter of time before we began a new quest for the wife of Jesus. We need the archetype of “Wife” as much as we need those other types. But our ancient texts will never reveal enough to convince us, and our modern scandals will always be too tempting to resist. As long as we project our insecurities onto our portraits of Jesus, we will continue to stare at our own uncomfortable reflections. We will continue to peep, like an anxiety-ridden Willem Dafoe, through that all-too-thin veil – begging for reconciliation and settling for spiritual voyeurism.