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Well, The DaVinci Code movie has come and gone, and conservative Christians have had to find something else to complain about as attacking their faith. In case you've been hermetically sealed somewhere for the past few years, The DaVinci Code is a mediocre thriller about uncovering a Catholic Church conspiracy to withhold the "truth" that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and the son of God has descendants. Ordinarily, perhaps, this wouldn't be getting all that much attention if author Dan Brown didn't claim his fiction is based on historical evidence.

Given that the Bible is a result of human editorship in which, like war, the winners of theological disputes are the ones who get to determine what does or does not go in the official record, it's a little hard to dispute whether Jesus may or may not have married Mary, or even had a sexual relationship, based on scriptural evidence. It doesn't say he did, but it doesn't say he didn't. So-called documentation to the contrary has about as much veracity as, well, the original source material. It's all open to interpretation. The idea of the son of God partaking of the flesh is blasphemous to some; on the other hand, if the whole point of a god taking human form is to experience physical incarnation, and thus better understand his creation, you'd might think it a requisite corollary.

To certain spiritual and political leanings, the balancing of male and female natures into a single divinity is a more attractive theology. It doesn't help matters when established religion ensnares itself in its hypocrisies and scandals in which its usually male advocates prove all too human. Which might have something to do with the popularity of a novel with a premise in which said established patriarchy suppresses the "truth," though Dan Brown certainly wasn't the first to suggest this (see, for example, the Gnostic heresy). Nor the last, if the publishing world sees potential profit in it. Though it hasn't reached DaVinci proportions (and doesn't seem likely to), a recent novel (actually a reprint of a self-published work that pre-dates The DaVinci Code) by Kathleen McGowan presents a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary and subsequent cover-up supposedly based on historical evidence. She should know, because she claims ancestry to Jesus and Mary.

I haven't read this book. I have read The Passion of Mary Magdalen by Elizabeth Cunningham, who makes no claim about providing "truth," but rather employs one of the über-texts of Western civilization to tell an engaging story. Consequently, purely as a storyteller, she achieves more "truth" than all the ones who claim to be presenting it.

Actually, Cunningham's concerns extend beyond Gospel mythology to encompass Roman antiquity, Celtic lore, the cult of Isis and goddess worship in general, primarily the notion of whore-priestess as feminist empowerment. This is The Mists of Avalon approach to retelling myth from a female perspective in which the venerated deeds of the male hero could never have happened without a woman's participation, but which role gets erased by patriarchal hegemony. It's also highly entertaining.

While the Catholic Church has officially ruled that Mary Magdalen was not a prostitute, this general perception underpins Cunningham's premise. Before she became known as Mary Magdalen, Maeve Rhuad was an exiled druid, captured by Romans and sold as a slave into prostitution. The first half of this fairly thick book concerns Maeve's first person adventures both as a whore in the high-class brothel called The Fig and the Vice and as the personal consort of Paulina Cladii (apparently an actual historical figure). Maeve's eventual release from bondage along with some plot foreshadowing ends in a trek to Palestine and the founding of the Temple Magdalen, where whoring is a form of goddess worship. Her reunion with Jesus (the origins of which more about later) then begins the story you might expect, in which the fragmentary mention of Mary in the Gospel stories are expanded to show her key role. For example, that wedding where Jesus turned water in wine? That was the wedding of Jesus and Mary.

The risk of any historical fiction -- let alone one that traffics in religious matters -- is that it's extremely difficult to avoid modern attitudes and language, particularly when your setting is two thousand years ago. It's like in the movie Spartacus when actor Tony Curtis speaks the line of Roman slave Antononus "Are you afraid to die" in a Brooklyn accent... it makes suspension of disbelief a tad unlikely. Cunningham sidesteps this by not even pretending to have her narrator write as if she and the events are of a particular time. Maeve seems to be speaking as some sort of immortal, or at least not time-dependent, entity, who is knowingly translating events into popular idiom and indeed relishes in anachronisms. Which lets her get away with such funny lines as this when the alcoholic Paulina, upset that the wine has run out, is told that Jesus has made more.

Paulina took the cup from Joseph and dipped into one of the jars for herself. Eyes closed, she lifted the cup to her nose and inhaled the bouquet. Then she took a sip, well, more like a gulp.

"My savior!" She opened her eyes and gazed at Jesus with pure adoration. Then she opened her arms to embrace us all. "L'cahim, y'all! Party on!"

David Soyka is a former journalist and college teacher who writes the occasional short story and freelance article. He makes a living writing corporate marketing communications, which is a kind of fiction without the art.