 Good Grief! |
Posted on 07/22/2006 4:09:17 PM PDT by Pokey78
MOVE over Da Vinci, here comes Mary Magdalene. In the latest twist to the seemingly endless literary debate over the roots of Christianity, a controversy is looming over a novel by an author who claims to be descended from Jesus Christ. It may sound familiar to readers of Dan Brown’s blockbuster The Da Vinci Code, but Kathleen McGowan, an American who began her career as a journalist in Belfast, has persuaded publishers that her claims that Magdalene married Jesus and bore his children should be taken seriously.
“I don’t want people to think I’m claiming to be some elitist figure in the [Jesus] bloodline,” said McGowan, who has pocketed a seven-figure advance for her novel, The Expected One. “But what I’m saying is that Mary and Jesus had children and after 2,000 years of procreation there are probably millions of descendants around the world. I believe I’m one.”
The book will be published in New York on Tuesday. It has earned $2m from the sale of foreign rights and will appear in Britain on August 7.
McGowan, 43, said she had submitted her proposal to publishers in 1997, six years before Brown published The Da Vinci Code. “I was laughed out of New York city,” she said last week as she toured Languedoc, in southwest France, where she is at work on a sequel. “I was told nobody would ever publish a book claiming Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.”
She published the book herself last year after selling shoes on eBay to pay for research. It sold only 2,500 copies but was snapped up by Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
The Expected One tells the story of Maureen Paschal, a journalist searching in the Pyrenees for scrolls supposedly written in the 1st century by Magdalene.
Scepticism has been fuelled by McGowan’s reluctance to publish evidence of her claim to be descended from Jesus. Asked to produce ancient family documents that she claims to have uncovered in France, she said she had been “asked not to talk about what I’ve seen. I know it sounds very cloak and dagger, but here in the Languedoc I’ve been followed, and that world is very much alive down here”.
Trish Todd, editor-in-chief of Touchstone Books, believes the claims. “Her passion and her mission are so strong,” she said.
Others are sceptical. “There is no historical evidence that would suggest that Jesus and Mary had any children [who] grew up in France and then moved throughout Europe,” said Marvin Meyer, a professor of bible and Christian studies in Orange, California.
I can do her one better. I'm a decendant of Eve.... oh, never mind.
Don't you think they would have raised their children Jewish?
I mean mom DOES have all his albums.....
Kathleen McGowan has been sent a strong delusion, and has chosen to believe the lie, and has therefore been given over to a rebrobate mind.
End of story.
| Good Grief! |
Just another hit from the gnostic gospel cult.
This history of Marie-Madeleine in the south of France, it's very old... There are thousands of legends like that everywhere in Europe. A lot of best-sellers to come ?
For exemple, in the town where I grew up, in the Middle-Ages, his cathedral was famous because she was supposed to treasure up an incredible relic : the prepuce of the Christ !
....yeah, and the earth is flat, Elvis & JFK are still alive, blah blah blah. I guess claiming to be a descendant of Mary Magdeline is going to become as popular as claiming to be Princess Anastacia of the Romanov family was years ago with the "tin foil hat" type crowd.
That's not something Jewish mothers hand down to their daughter-in-laws. I shudder to think what, in fact, the relic was.
Wishful thinking.
Here we go again.....
Hey it's saturday eve, I'll have whatever she's smokin!.....
Shabbot Shalom
Looks like she should have stuck to selling shoes.
And again, and again, and again....
I've got the Ark down in my basement. I know it looks like a Coleman aluminum canoe, but I've got documentation.
...got birth certificates?
We were better off when they were trying to pass him off as queer.
Realistic copies can be purchased at adam&eve.com
Oh really?! Then why even mention it much less try to make money off it?
We all are.
I am not a descendant of Jesus, I am the body of Jesus in this world. Big difference.
Jesus Christ was on a soccer team my son once played. The coach kept yelling "Jesus Christ, spread out! Jesus Christ, go for the ball! Jesus Christ, over the middle! Jesus Christ, get back!" Needless to say, my son's team lost.
If the coach had pronounced it with a starting H sound, the little Mexican kid would have known coach meant him.
Kathleen McGowan you are an Irish lass and you can probably trace your DNA back to Eric The Red or Beowulf or somebody else in Northern Europe. But, you sure as hell can't trace your DNA back to the Holy Land and become the long lost Irish cousin of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ didn't like Irish People. At Cana he turned the water into wine. If he liked the Irish he would have turned the water into Irish Whiskey. Every Irishman I know who drinks wine all night at a wedding ends up puking his guts out in the bathroom. We call them "Bowl Huggers".
I thought they were referring to the 80s alternative rock band.
I was just thinking that.
Get the Straight jacket , she's ready to come home now .
Well, that more evidence than she's got.
Those of you who recall the original Bugs Bunny cartoons might rememember, "I may be a screwy wabbit, but I ain't going to Alcatraz!"
Good graphic SmartA, gives me a laugh!
Everybody's got an angle. On the one hand you have to applaud this crafty scumbag for coming up with a novel scheme to separate idiots from their money. On the other hand, it's a little distressing that the scheme will probably work. In fact it already has, to the tune of $2 million.
There is no underestimating the stupidity of the mindless rabble.
Sometimes it takes awhile to find the right thread. Keep making them!
However, the Andretti brothers are definitely from Nazareth, where the Mennonites have just opened a busienss to take advantage of the fine dairies in the area,
they call it:
"Kathleen McGowan, an American who began her career as a journalist in Belfast"
It's amazing how a person with a pencil and paper want to rewrite world history, and the Bible...of course, for money! Could we be safe in calling McGowan nothing more then a cheap anti religious whore.
"Looks like she should have stuck to selling shoes."
Really? She got a seven figure advance for this book.
LOL, I wasn't talking about the money. I was talking about what an idiot she's making out of herself.
This woman cannot write. The book is full of glaring errors presented in a juvenile format. Too much of the text is taken up with her badly written 'scripture' that is hinted as genuine based on secret documents (the oldest literary ploy in the industry) but shares too much of the author's florid style to be worthy of comment.. Her spin on Magdalene feeling guilty for causing John the Baptist's death, then carries his severed head around with her? What's up with this? She didn't cause his death, why heap that guilt on her like she was a soap opera character rather than the embodiment of a sacred feminine? The discovered Gospel was so fake sounding, I couldn't help wonder if the author ever saw a secret 'gospel' how can she be sure it wasn't a cheap huckster's trick written a few years ago and aged with lemon juice? Once I got past the part about the ring she claims was given to her as a sign, I realized this author is gullible enough to believe anything. There's a name for this kind of delusion because it happens with other tourists to Israel on a mission to find God there. Hucksters abound to give those rings, secret documents, and creative sacred and secret paths to the stupid and gullible, thus emptying their wallets while feeding their egos.
McGowan isn't the first to rush home and write another book about the 'truths' these hucksters revealed (all of which have proven historically or logically incorrect) from France to the Brooklyn Bridge. Take your pick.
As I got into the book, I realized the whole storyline seems set up to promote the author's ego and visions. If she can't get simple facts correct, how can she expect to draw in a reader on to more complex notions? She repeats nearly verbatim the same litany of discredited pseudo-historical errors as other authors that have tackled the theme without being on firm ground. There is little accurate and nothing new or different about the factual lacunae that riddle this plodding, inert homage to the author's personal quest to paint herself as the culmination of the sacred bloodline--The Expected One in the flesh. Does she forget Prince Michael? He was also known as Michael James Stewart and Michel Roger Lafosse, born in Belgium and a recent migrant to Scotland. Just like McGowan, he had name changes, a checkered past, and a weird claim to the Magdalene bloodline. It's now proven that he never was an Irish Chief or Prince. By virtue of his claim to be 'the' Stuart heir to the Throne of Scotland he does appropriate some Irish lineage but certainly not the bloodline or a seat next to the Pope.
McGowan's plotline is juvenile, the characters stale, and the entire premise a self-serving hype. I hope the gullible readers won't be led too far astray before they realize they're being had.
It says it's fiction in the front of the book, but facts in the back of the book. This is a good example of McGowan's own confusion about her herself and her visions. Seems even she can't tell apart the real from the unreal. This scares me. McGowan's 1997 vision -- "vertigo" and "a blinding flash" in which Mary Magdalene appeared to her -- brings to mind an essay in Harper's Magazine a few years ago. It explains the experiences of those who have visions of deities, angels and saints ("Is this woman the living 'Code'?" Cover story, Life, July 18, 2006). Consider the experience of Saul -- later to become the Apostle Paul -- en route to Damascus. Jesus speaks to him in a vision, which causes him to fall. I believe he was having a grand mal epileptic seizure. In biographies of canonized saints who envision heavenly bodies, they're sometimes called "trances." Having witnessed victims in a seizure state, with their pupils dilated and their bodies trembling, one understands why a person might later say he or she had an out-of-body experience. I can't help but believe there are probably numerous individuals who assume they are descendants of the imaginary bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene based on visions just like McGowan’s. Years ago we would institutionalize people like this. At least “Prince Michael” attempted to produce legal documents and a checkable faulty bloodline. I’m wondering how long it is going to take before someone claims to be a direct descendant of Mary and Joseph.
The author asks 'what is truth?"
(a line lifted from the author Laurence Gardner)
Whatever it is, you won't find it in this book.
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