Mary Magdalen and the Kings of France: Susan Haskins suggests that the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and Dan Brown, who famously faced each in court earlier this year, are guilty of the same thing--writing bad fiction.(CROSS CURRENT)

WHO WERE THE MEROVINGIANS? Today, because of The Da Vinci Code, millions of people who have read Dan Brown's novel or seen the film know--or at least think they do--who this 'Dark-Age' dynasty was. And they 'know' that Mary Magdalen apparently married Jesus, and bore his child, their descendants marrying into the French royal line and, after several generations, engendering the Merovingian dynasty. (In the seventh century, according to Brown's book, the Vatican attempted to eradicate the dynasty by murdering Dagobert H, but his son Sigisbert H survived, as did his bloodline down through history, ending up with Sophie [Sophia, Greek for wisdom, and Mary Magdalen's alter ego in the Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic text], heroine of the novel.) The 'historical' aspects of this tale were first told in The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail (1982), by Michael Baigent, Richard Leith and Henry Lincoln).

According to Luke's Gospel (8:2), Mary of Magdala was the leader of the group of Jesus's women followers, and had been healed; she was present at the crucifixion and, according to John and Mark, was the first to witness the risen Christ. In the commentaries of the Early Church Fathers her gospel figure became conflated with a nameless sinner in Luke, who wept on Christ's feet, wiping them with her hair and anointing them with spikenard (7:37-50), and Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus of Bethany (John, 11-12). This composite identification was disputed by Protestants from the sixteenth century, but it was only in 1969 that the Church of Rome distinguished the three separate figures. Baigent et al retain the link between Mary …