Reactionary

This is referencing their “The Two Marys” special. It’s billed as a program that will reveal shocking, earth-shaking secrets about Mary, Jesus’ mother, and Mary Magdelene. Oh, the long, apprehensive commercial break!

But then what was this shocking revelation about Mary the Mother? She wasn’t blonde! Stop the presses. Oh, the blasphemy. Gimme a break. Has anyone truly believed she was a blonde, blue-eyed tall girl? To this day, Mediterranean women tend to have a darker coloring than those of the Great White North. Any half-blind fool can see that. Obviously, artist’s representations are just that… representations done hundreds of years after the actual events. And even if done by Italians etc, the blonde look could be due to the artist trying to make her stand out in some way and the rarity of her hair color would in some way denote her uniqueness. Germanic artists could have done it just to portray her as one of their people in a fond sort of doctoring of the facts. Art is never dominated by fact. Think of it as some kind of pre-modern airbrushing. A Jewish girl in the Near East would almost certainly look like her modern counterparts and not like Heidi Klum. This is the media at work again trying to sensationalise something that isn’t newsworthy into some cheap, quick-sell story. Go and find a real story.

And what was the great revelation about the Magdelene? She wasn’t a prostitute! So. The gospels never say she was. It has been an image sold through popular conception but never as dogmatic truth since no one would try to pass it off as such since the primary tome of the religion never says any such thing! Once again, CNN, stop playing National Enquirer or Fox Television. There isn’t a story here. Certainly nothing to shake the foundations of Christianity as they claimed in the ad.

Granted, the final premise of the show has a valid point in that the role of women has come into question in the modern Church, but I’m tired of that presentation as well. It’s billed as being linked to some great theological foundation being somehow wrong and being questioned. While it is being questioned, people should know the crux of it so they don’t believe this hype of Terrible Theological Injustice. The role of women in the Church is at root a cultural one, not having much to do with hard core theology at all. The Early Church was much different than it is today since it existed as a half-outlawed group of outsiders rather than the dominant Western religion. News for the uneducated: Church structures from the division of the population into dioceses to the role of women is a cultural remnant of the Roman Empire and not profound theological ideas. When Christianity hit the mainstream, the world was Rome. All roads, mechanical, ideological and otherwise led to Rome. Christian theology was draped over the structure of Roman law and Roman order. Among other things, this was a patriarchal society. There were no free-ruling Empresses, just the wives of the Emperors. Agrippina killed Claudius not to rule herself, but so her son Nero could be emperor. Women could not hold public office, but it wasn’t half as repressive as Victorian England or the 1950s in the United States.

When Rome fell, the last of its civilized light was held within the Roman Church where it was tended for over a thousand years during the dark times of unwashed blonde invaders who liked to rape and pillage and kill until Europe was ready for it again. Whatever the Church’s faults, the origins are more diverse and varied than people give it credit for. So your aversion to Church doctrine may be more of an aversion of Rome than actual theology (which I don’t even pretend to know a lot about). So what are you going to do? Suggest we overthrow Rome because of its unfairness to women? Reject the dominant Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman way if you like, but it was the way that civilized an otherwise backward Europe. Adopt an Eastern philosophy if that appeals to you, but I find it rather ridiculous that people who have no foundation of something, having it not be inborn if you will, try and build themselves into something they’re not. Granted, you must always stay awake and ready to learn something from everyone, but rejecting your own thousands of years of civilization to hug another that on one glance (or even a lifetime of study) seems “better” to you, go right ahead, but it’s foolish because you’ll never fit in. It’s an example of people jumping ship when there’s no leak. There may be faults in the way the Western world was built, but if nothing else, seek to fix what has given so much to you rather than rejecting it over something you feel is wrong. And believe me, you’ve gained from it. You gain every day. Those ideas of belief in the individual of trial by jury of rule by the people, those have all been part of what the quick to throw the first stone are trying to reject.

Posted on March 27th, 2005 under General •  Print •  Email • RSS 2.0 feed • Both comments and pings are currently closed