Book Review - A Letter of Mary

Guess what?  Another Sherlock Holmes book!  People, I cannot stop myself.

In this one, Mary and Holmes have been married for a couple of years.  Now, from the beginning of the series, you know that Mary and Holmes end up married but it's still weird.  He is very, very old and she...isn't.  But it's pretty clear that they are perfect together so you get past the 50 year age gap and move on.

So Holmes and Mary are just puttering about being a boring married couple when they are visited by an old acquaintance from Palestine.  The woman brings them a mysterious box and leaves.  They find out the next day that the woman has been killed in a hit and run accident.

Ya'll know it was murder, right?

So Holmes and Mary take the case and solve it.  And it's as good as all the others. 

The interesting part of this story, to me, is the letter.  (There's a letter in the box.) The letter is supposedly written by Mary Magdalene to her sister.  It's basically a rehash of The Davinci Code nonsense. (The Davinici Code was a friggin awesome book by the way but it's fiction so don't try to build a life around it, ok?)  The letter indicates that Mary and Jesus were married and had kids.

Let me try to say this as clearly as possible.  If Jesus had married Mary Magdalene, that would NOT have been sinful.  God created marriage.  He also created sex.  So if Jesus had married anyone and produced children, that would not have been a controversy that would rock the very foundations of the Christian faith.  I do not understand how this even became a point of contention.  I don't believe Jesus was married because the Bible doesn't tell me he was.  But I don't think the apostles left that out because there would have been no reason to do so.  I don't pretend to know everything about the early Christian church.  And I am sure those dudes were not perfect.  But I just can't see why they would lie and suppress stories about Jesus that were no big deal.   It's just goofy. 

The other 'controversy' is that Mary Magdalene was an apostle and the church tried to cover that up too.  Whatever.  I just ain't buying it.  There were plenty of women in the early church.  The most central event of the Christian faith is the resurrection.  Guess who the first people the risen Christ appeared to were?  Yep.  Women.  If there was ever a place that the apostles were gonna lie, this would have been it.   And, yet, they didn't.  This is just one more place where people are creating misogyny in the church that just didn't exist.  Did it ever exist?  Sure.  But don't blame Jesus.  You won't find one place where He treats women badly. 

See what I did here?  Tried to write a book review.  Went off on a rant instead.

Welcome to every day of my poor husband's life.