Parting Glances
I haven't read "The DaVinci Code." I haven't seen the popular movie. I don't plan to beg, borrow or steal either controversial blockbuster item.
I'm content to accept the little-known "fact" that one of my ancestors way back when was a prominent gay deli owner selling fish, figs, goat cheese on the pebbled shores of Galilee, a friend of a friend of a friend of You-Know-Who. (It hasn't done me or my digestion one wit of good.)
I did, however, buy a DaVinci-themed CD featuring Renaissance music. I hoped the chants would inspire my spiritual mentor, Sr. Serena Scatterpin, Renegade Sister of Mary, when holy-ghost writing my PG column (25-cents-a-word, payment going to her favorite charity, Altar Boys in Remission).
And I do confess to have taken a polymorphous perverse delight over the hissy fit caused by Dan Brown's best seller (millions of copies in several languages, including Hebrew, Koine Greek, Aramaic) among Fundie Christians and their slightly brighter Monopoly Board playmates, Evangelical Americans.
What offends these true believers is Brown's fictional claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that their kids — born of normal, time-honored missionary positioning, rather than supernatural, Big-Bang engendering — lived to found kingdoms, dynasties, amusement parks, and PR firms.
Direct-descendant claimants of the New Testament couple pop up everywhere these days. (Rumor has it three — all lipstick lesbians — live in Huntington Woods and sing alto in the MCC-Detroit choir. Their halo'd facial resemblance to the distaff side lineage is uncanny if demurely in evidence.)
Apparently the biblical brouhaha starts all over again. According to the New York Times a team of archeologists in Jerusalem says it has "proofs" that a tomb — discovered 36 years ago, recently fully excavated and cataloged — is the burial place of Jesus and family. A James Cameron Discovery Channel documentary followed, with DVD.
There's also a book (Land O Goshen! not another): "The Jesus Family Tomb: The Discovery, the Investigation, and the Evidence That Could Change History" (HarperSan Francisco; $27.95). Authors are Simcha Jacobovici and Charles Pellegrino. Simcha means "gladness" in Yiddish, and there was for a time a Detroit LGBT group of that name; but, oy vey! I digress.
The Foreword by Cameron states, "With this stunning book [the authors] have delivered not just a particle of evidence but a veritable avalanche of it. Their investigations prove beyond any reasonable doubt that a first-century tomb found in Talpiot, Jerusalem in 1980 is the tomb of Jesus and his family. It reads like a gripping detective novel, and one has to pinch oneself to remember it is real."
I won't play Devil's Advocate or Doubting Thomas about this "discovery." (A recent unearthing of the sarcophagus of Jesus' brother James proved a hoax). I do know the Amalgamated International Brotherhood & Sisterhood of the Religious Right Workers in the Last Day's Cause of Christ, Inc. is once more up in arms, doing their militant best to expunge this heresy in the making from troubling the WWJD mindset .
Amalgamates are pinching each other (and anybody else they can) black, red, white and blue over the devilish assault. Books debunking the unearthed bombshell are forthcoming. And you can bet your sweet circumcised patooty that Jacovinci, Pellegrino, and Cameron, will be denounced by Robertson, Falwell, Wildmon, the 700 Club, and Moody Bible Institute soldiers of the cross, all marching off to war.
It's all a matter of faith, anyway. Controversy over two ancient tombs. Both empty long, long, long ago. Now up for occupancy. No pets, Humanists, or gays allowed.
