Dr. Doug Adams, GTU core doctoral faculty and professor of Christianity and the Arts at Pacific School of Religion, spoke on Total Living Network's May 10 program entitled "National Debate: The Da Vinci Code."

Director of the GTU affiliate CARE, the Center for the Arts, Religion, and Education, he shares his scholarship and perspective on Da Vinci's The Last Supper.

With regard to the The Da Vinci Code, the mistake of the author is to suppose that a great art work has only one interpretation when in fact the very definition of a "classic" in art is that it is polyvalent (just as a Jesus parable is polyvalent with many interpretations possible). A great story like a Jesus parable has many windows and many doors of interpretation so a hundred different sermons could be preached on that parable. Such a great story or great art work speaks beyond its own time and place. (Of course a poor story does not even allow a preacher to squeeze one sermon out of it; and a poor art work with only one meaning is more like propaganda than art.) A great story or great art work is ambiguous which means it has multiple interpretations. Ambiguity comes from the Greek military term (amphibolia) which is the condition of being attacked from two opposite sides at once so you have to divide your attention and cannot look just one way. The Jesuit Jake Empereur once noted that the fundamentalist problem is having only one window. (It may be a good window but gives only one point of view.) There can be fundamentalism of the left as well as of the right as I well know having taught here in Berkeley for 30 years. Once Archibald MacLeish was asked what a poem meant. He responded, "A poem should not mean but be." I would say that a poem or art work is not reducible to a one verbal meaning but rather is like a house which one enters and then sees many vistas through many different windows and doors. An art work is more like a film (including many episodes) than a snapshot (including only one). One painting often includes allusions to many different biblical texts and not only one verse.

There are many meanings being conveyed through Leonardo's The Last Supper; but the one meaning which the author of the The Da Vinci Code draws from Leonardo's The Last Supper regarding the relationship of Mary Magdalene and Jesus is not likely. Dan Brown identifies as Mary Magdalene the figure leaning away from Jesus to Jesus' right. Art historians identify that figure as the young disciple John. The androgynous portrayal of John is traditional in art as he was seen to be adolescent. Often in art, John is asleep on Jesus' breast or in his lap, although in the Leonardo work, the sleeping John leans way from Jesus and toward Peter. John's sleeping alludes to two future events: John and Peter and James will fall asleep three times in the garden later that night; and John (by some traditions) died of old age in his sleep. The other disciples on that side of Jesus (Peter, Andrew, Bartholomew, et.al.) are all in positions of how they died (Andrew has his hands and arms in front of him in the diagonal shape of the St. Andrew's Cross; the horizontal Peter is as upside down as one can be without slipping out of view beneath the table; the knife points down to the end of the table where Bartholomew stands for by tradition he was flayed to death, etc.)  On Jesus' other side are disciples in positions reminding us of their later encounters with the resurrected Christ: Thomas with his finger raised but otherwise showing only his head (the doubting one), others with arms outstretched in surprise as in art depicting the moment they recognized Christ at Emmaus, etc. Lots of other things are going on also to allow many other interpretations. Art historian Leo Steinberg has a book length journal article about seven different interpretations of the hands of Jesus in Leonardo's Last Supper. (By the way, Steinberg explains why death scenes are to Jesus' right and resurrection scenes to his left. Normally it would be the other way around for the blessed and life are on Jesus' right and the damned and death are on his left; but in that room there was already a last judgment art work on the opposite wall so the direction of life and death were already established. Also the church and church burial ground were in that direction (to Jesus' left in Leonardo's work). The blessed are usually to the right hand because our right hand is a hand of greeting and eating; but the damned are usually to the left hand because our left hand in near eastern cultures is our toilet paper.

Some have asked why Leonardo did not have women at the table; for Fra Angelico at the San Marco Monastery in Florence has Mary the Mother in his painting of the last supper; and inclusion of Mary the Mother was in some other earlier art). Leonardo's work simulates Jesus and the disciples at a table which is like the other tables in that refectory of that monastery in Milan. No women were ever eating in that room; so, to put a woman in the art work would destroy the very illusion he was trying to create of monks at tables eating with Jesus at every meal.

There is intertextuality in much last supper art: i.e. telling the story in terms of other biblical stories. For example, to have John and Jesus be next to each other (and sometimes bodily connected) is because Jesus is the new David (and David had his close friend Jonathan).

Such intertextuality in resurrection art at the empty tomb also connects Jesus as the new Moses and Mary as the new Miriam. As soldiers have been drowned at the Exodus of Moses, so soldiers are asleep or in disarray or tumbled over the ground before the tomb when Jesus has risen (just as Pharaoh's soldiers were is disarray as the waters engulfed them at the Exodus). As Miriam leads the other women in a dance at the Exodus, so Mary Magdalene leads other women in a procession to the tomb at the Resurrection.  In the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses in many ways (death of children at the birth of both, both go in and out of Egypt, both part or still the waters, both feed the people in the wilderness, both give the new laws, etc.); and in those gospels, Mary Magdalene is like Miriam and so seen more a sister than lover to Jesus. To have her be a wife to Jesus would disrupt the intertextuality. The biblical writers are not trying to say that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were lovers or that Jesus and John were lovers; but they were asserting that Jesus was the most important figure in their day as Moses was in his day and David was in his day. The literary strategies of each of the four gospels have reasons to cast Mary Magdalene as more sister than lover. Of course, a gospel outside the canon (such as the gospel of Mary Magdalene) has its own reasons for portraying Mart Magdalene as Jesus' wife. Some have suggested that an unmarried Jesus would be hard to sell as a messiah to Jewish groups; but there were many different Jewish groups in that period including gnostic ones; and his other departures from expectations present similar stumbling blocks: crucifixion being the primary one. Christian art did not portray Jesus on the cross until 420 and then only long after Constantine had outlawed crucifixion as a mode of capital punishment. Even then he is portrayed as a glorified perfect living divinity (the Christ triumphant) until the mid 8th century when the church decides to show him as suffering on the cross in order for the church to battle the Monophysite heresy which at that time was so emphasizing his divinity as to deny his humanity. So a suffering Christ on the cross was a way to say Christ was human (did suffer and die).

With respect to Mary Magdalene, she is sometimes seen as the new wisdom in art (see the El Greco work in my EYES TO SEE WHOLENESS). There as the baby Jesus is the new Adam, and Mary the new Eve (both reversing the actions of Adam and Eve at the fall), Mary Magdalene counsels Mary the Mother (as Mary Magdalene is the new serpent but now counseling the way to life not death). Most often in western catacomb art (and in eastern Orthodox Christian art), Mary Magdalene is seen as the Apostle of the Resurrection as the Orthodox Christians call her.

The later conflation by Pope Gregory (pope from 590 to 604) of Mary Magdalene with so many fallen biblical women may be seen as lowering her high standing in the earlier periods of the church; but such conflation may also make her more accessible to the rest of us who are sinners. Some of the conflations are with characters who are sinners but other conflations are with persons who act faithfully; for example, Gregory conflates her not only with the woman taken in adultery but also the woman who washes Christ's feet with her hair.  Biblically, Mary Magdalene is the most faithful of followers and the first evangelist. In contrast, Mary the Mother is treated with far less respect in most biblical stories. ("Who is my mother, who are my brothers?"  says Jesus as he never goes to see them when they arrive to see him.) One issue is that Jesus seems to be establishing a community not based on blood line; but later his brother James and Mary the Mother move into leadership. When Jesus' divinity is being emphasized, Mary the Mother is more prominent in art; but when his humanity is being emphasized, Mary Magdalene is more prominent in art. Thank God we have a wide range of art with some emphasizing Jesus' humanity and some emphasizing his divinity just as we have some canonical gospels emphasizing his humanity and other canonical gospels emphasizing his divinity.