Such rumors have been around for hundreds of years, and this two-hour special tries to sift fact from fiction and decide whether the church has concealed Mary Magdalene's possible position as"the most important person" in Jesus' ministry, as narrator ABC's Elizabeth Vargas put it.
If this story made for a compelling page-turner, it seems a bit of a yawn in this documentary, which plays at times like a cross between a detective yarn and "Access Hollywood," what with all the speculation on Jesus' marital status. As earnest as Vargas is, it's hard not to giggle when she says in all seriousness, "It's true the Bible doesn't say Jesus was married, but it also doesn't say he was single." This leads to a strange discussion about whether a young Jewish man in Jesus' time could have gotten away with being a bachelor. We're told that such a thing would have been so unusual the word "bachelor" didn't even exist.
All this leads to a bit of comic relief from Paul L. Maier, author of "The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction?" (The success of Brown's book has spawned more responses than a rapper's diss record.) Dismissing notions of a married Messiah, Maier says: "I think, especially in the last 40 years, there have been so many books written trying to get Jesus married off like some anxious mother for her eligible bachelor son."
One believer, of course, is Brown, whom Vargas interviewed. "I began as a skeptic," Brown says. "As I started researching 'The Da Vinci Code,' I really thought I would disprove a lot of this theory about Mary Magdalene and holy blood and all of that. I became a believer." Then again, with millions of copies of his novel in print, what else could he be expected to say?
