The story is that Mary Magdalen was the wife of Jesus, that she bore him a child, that she and this child ended up in the south of France, establishing there a blood-line that was still very much in existence in the late Middle Ages and may still exist today.
To this basic outline various details may be added.
> Mary was the sister of Martha and also of Lazarus, whom Jesus is said to have raised from the dead.
> Mary was either pregnant or had recently given birth when Jesus was crucified. She fled to Egypt with Joseph of Arimathea, and the baby, a girl, spent her infancy there. This may be the story which was later applied to Jesus himself and his mother when the Early Church Fathers were searching for fulfilments of prophecies (see especially the Gospel of Matthew) and this fitted "out of Egypt have I called my son".
> The daughter, named Sarah, is spoken of in stories about the arrival of Mary on the south coast of France.
This belief constitutes the heresy.
Did the Cathars believe it? Did the Templars? The troubadours adored her as their Dompna (langue d'Oc = Domina, the feminine counterpart of Dominus, the Lord, used of Jesus) and for this reason "the minstrels and their poetry were found [by the Inquisition] to be heretical." Throughout southern France and northern Italy she was revered (worshipped?) as the Lady, the Queen, the Bride. Some important early members of the Priory of Sion were artists, great ones (eg Botticelli and da Vinci), and they certainly seem to have believed it: one cannot, for instance, easily dismiss the evidence of paintings such as those illustrated in Margaret Starbird's The Woman With The Alabaster Jar, and Lawrence Gardner's The Magdalen Legacy. The former (the best) is reviewed on this site (click on the title above) and a typical illustration from it, Simone Martini's Road To Calvary, has been reproduced here. In it we see Mary Magdalen in red, like Jesus, picked out in the centre by the X formed by the Cross; this X (symbol of the Church of Amor and the Magdalen heresy) cannot possibly be an accident. Two more illustrations from Margaret Starbird's book that I would like to share with you here are, first, Mary Magdalene at the Foot of the Cross - note the red fox, symbol of the hated Catholic priesthood, and all the red Xs (symbol, as I say, of the Church of Amor - as opposed to Roma); and second Derelicta, the Bride from the Song of Songs, beaten and cast out of the city. Both are by Sandro Botticelli, said to have been Grand Master of the priory of Sion from 1483 to 1510 and certainly one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance - indeed of all time.
The Magdalene Legacy I am more reluctant to recommend. In its way it is excellent: it contains more reproductions of paintings than Margaret Starbird's book, and they are more expertly discussed. Lawrence Gardner began life as a picture restorer and came to the Magdalen controversy while restoring an eighteenth-century "Penitent Magdalen" (who, on being restored, didn't seem penitent at all), and it is on the evidence from the paintings, especially the great works of the late Medieval Period, that he shines. He is also good on the more obscure legends of France and the other western European countries in the first and second centuries AD. My problem is that he attempts to compensate for his all-too-obvious ignorance of the New Testament period by leaning heavily on Barbara Thiering, whose theories are not only unnecessary but unhelpful for an understanding of Mary Magdalen and her relationship with Jesus. In the course of three books, Thiering changes the whole story completely, making it all up as she goes along, till none of the characters are who we thought they were or does what we thought they did, nor does the story even take place where it says it did, in Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem etc, for these are nothing so simple as mere place names.
Now we do not need this for our study of Mary Magdalen; yet Gardner, whose New Testament studies seem to have consisted solely of skimming through Thiering's books, follows her like a lamb and quotes even the most obvious nonsense as "gospel". To take one simple example: Thiering discovers that the name "Mary" is always preceded by the article "the" in the original Greek and concludes that it was a title deriving from the Egyptian "Mery" (Beloved) and, without any evidence whatsoever, posits an order of nuns known as the Marys, and Gardner tells us this as if it was an established fact. And thenceforward, whenever Thiering (followed by Gardner) needs a title she does the same: so Jairus, the priest in Capernaum whose daughter (a child) Jesus is said to have raised from the dead, becomes the Jairus because they wish to nominate him for the post of Mary Magdalen's father (and have Jesus raise her from the dead, though in a quite different sense, naturally), but her father's name was not Jairus, it was Syro according to tradition, so Jairus becomes Syro the Jairus.
When one glances at the actual Greek text (which Thiering can, but ignores; Gardner presumably cannot), one finds that all names in New Testament Greek (as in Classical Greek and Modern Greek) regularly take the article "the": we have the Jesus, the Peter, the John, the Philip, the Caiaphas, and women as well, the Elizabeth (Lk 1:7, 40, 41 etc), the Martha (Jn 11:30 etc). Not only that, but the Greek word is not Mary (like Mery) at all, of course, but María, from Mariam, Miriam, Mariamne, the Hebrew and Aramaic forms.
Now Thiering knows all this she just assumes that her reader does not.
The problem arises when a respected author like Gardner (respected in his own field, which is not New Testament studies) quotes such silliness (she was called the Mary because she was a nun; the daughter of Jesus and the Mary married St Paul) as if it was fact. And much of the book is spoilt in this way.
On the other hand, Gardner's chapters on Leonardo da Vinci and The Last Supper (vital topics for any understanding of the whole Mary Magdalen question) are masterly, the best I have come across anywhere. And that is why I am taking the trouble to criticise the book here.
Similarly, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln), while excellent on The Templars and The Priory of Sion (its main concern) and the mystery of the survival of the holy blood-line during the medieval period (our main concern), is very weak on Mary Magdalen herself and the origins of Christianity.
