Who shall be our martha?

"Martha" - marǝté - means "the Lady" in Hellenistic-era western Aramaic. Jacobovici and Wilson would allow "Mara" too given that Aramaics don't do unisex as did contemporary Greek and Latin. A monotheism doesn't allow for very many marthas.

J-W argue for a Christian feminism based on Martha Maryam of Magdala. Catholics today prefer Martha Maryam theotokos. J-W ostensibly argue only that Magdalenism used to exist (EVIDENCE 12/27 - the over(?)-reaction against it) but, let's face it, J-W aren't Catholic and they prefer that hypothetical early Christianity over the one what we got.

(At least Flanders and J-W can agree that the Prots are wrong. For a start marriage deserves to be a sacrament still. I can't even disagree with Flanders for once.)

Magdalenism, in J-W's world, is a Christianity of sexuality; Catholicism, a Christianity of childbirth. These are (literally intimately) related, but the Devil hides in the details. In history the Cult Of Mary [per Flanders - he means the Virgin-Mother] has been "orthodoxy" where Magdalenism has, at most, bubbled around the "heresies".

I admit, that argument is whiggish. But one man's (or woman's) Whig History is another man's Bayes.

The lesson on history is that, for all problems we may see in the Cult Of the Virgin-Mother, the Cult of Artemis Helios'-wife has led nowhere better. Jesus' marriage couldn't just be a sacrament; it had to be a sacred mystery and - ultimately - a secret, and abused and corrupted. Gnostic excesses tainted Christianity as a whole, as J-W do note; and very probably delayed wide acceptance of the religion. "But [X] just hasn't been tried properly!" is another argument which, I'd hope, history has disproven.

If we interrogate the process by which this classical-era Asheratism became a gnostic cult, we'll find that a society can withstand a veneration of new life without sexuality, but not the reverse. If two people want new life to come forth between them, they can have it. If they want infertility they can have that too. Guess which couple begets a legacy.

Here, then, is ONE heresy from which Our Mother protects us, and it is a doozy. And on "The Cult of the Singing Flame" : as the journalists say, I stand by my story.