Originally posted - 3/12/2017 14.22pm
This is the most overt text describing Mary Magdalene having a child by the historical Jesus. We must see this in the context of the times, as well as the occult community - of whose members some were close to Sauniere - undertook a search for the body of Christ in France! Fugairon, familiar with the work of Martin and friend of many persons connected to Sauniere, intimates that it is possible that the members of the Gnostic Church undertook to find the tomb of the historical Jesus ... and in fact this can be proved. Christian Doumergue mentions specifically, in his research, several correspondences and cross-checks that attest that some of these people (Déodat Roché, Jules Doinel, and Doctor Fugairon ...) carried out research in the Rennes region ... looking for a tomb of Christ. In a letter to Dr. Fugairon of August 20, 1899, Déodat Roché informs his correspondent that Fabre des Essart, bishop of the Gnostic Church since Jules Doinel had left, had asked him to communicate to him all and any discoveries! Nothing is said in this missive as to the exact object of the research conducted. But another letter, addressed by Roché to Fabre des Essart on 7 May 1899, suggests, however, what the nature of Roché's investigations were. He writes;
"As for the body of J.-C. why would it not have been "stolen" like many followers? Catholicism uses a little too much of its magic to convert or hold under its yoke the faithful ... " writes the "Cathar of Arques".
It seems difficult to dissociate this research from the way in which, from the 1960s, the Rennes Affair was made known to the public. Even in the English work, HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL, Lincoln et al confess that it was hinted to them that the monumental secret of Rennes was that 'the mummified remains of Jesus Christ reside somewhere in the environs of Rennes'. In the “Red Serpent” poem also, for example, the writer speaks very clearly of an holy tomb, visible from Blanchefort and specifies the existence of other burials next to it...
THE GOSPELS WITHOUT GOD
Love and Removal
At Saint-Pilon, with his face turned towards the sea, the traveler need only take a few steps to meet a hidden course among all these projecting rocks that are piled at his feet, a narrow opening into which a man’s body can quickly disappear; it is, in its current state, the entrance to a wide and extraordinarily deep underground passage that opens immediately underfoot. We descend there using a strongly knotted rope ladder; then at this depth we fall into another, and we follow the meanders that intersect to infinity, and if we do lose our way we end up going from abyss to abyss until we break through out of the cave that opens full wide before the forest.
Local traditions, which always have their basis in some probability, say that the Angels every day removed the Magdalene and deposited her on top of this rock. She then, by this mysterious method, enjoyed this wonderful view, which is a delight; having at her feet to one side the dark forest, extending away like a huge green carpet; all around, the scorching nature of the perfumed breath of the distant country, and facing the blue sea and clear sky.
Then, when she had imbibed deeply of life, she returned to fall into contemplation of Him who was the life of her heart and always alive for her, and she held the cold remains in her hands, pressing them to the burning lips of the woman.
Love is so made that once illuminated, it never goes out. Its flame passes from the torch of marriage to the most peaceful glow of the domestic hearth without ceasing to shine in all its brilliance. Once close to the heart of man, the heart of the woman continues to beat in the unity of two hearts: first burning with the husband, then warming with the son; serving as a bridge between these two beings who are joined within it. By consequence, the result is always a happy one because she is always loving, always loved and whether wife or mother she is always sovereign. This second kingdom soon came to divert Mary Magdalene from the dark drama she had hitherto seen play out constantly beneath her eyes. The moment, for her, had come to bring His fruit into the world.
Of that event there remains nary a trace, almost nothing, nothing but a name. But this name, wonderfully intentional, coupled with that of the lover of Christ, suffices to dispel all darkness that has accumulated as a thick curtain between these lives and our legitimate curiosity. It is the name of this selfsame child.
Choosing a name for the first fruit of their love is the first challenge for mothers in the delightful time following a birth. How does one name this frail life, which the whole life of two people, the treasure that alone is worth all the wealth of the earth, this joy that intoxicates them, and this pride that gratifies them so much?
Each detaches from the sky a star, the brightest, to adorn the forehead of the newborn; others in the light of day find some marvel they compare him to, or they delight in a spring flower that his parents place on his crib as a graceful emblem, one that has the most crimson, great freshness, and that stands valiantly on its stem, unrivaled because he has a name that is unrivaled, completely unique!
So certainly thought Mary Magdalene, contemplating the beloved hanging from her breast, who was babbling before he could speak, and so adorably demanding in return that she love him as much as she had loved his father. Like all who are similarly happy, she was worried about the loving name of this son, but like those who previously cried but henceforth will smile, she found herself comforted by a dazzling new vision. She saw the one she loved transfigured into the one she was now to love; the greatness of the soul of her “Lord” now living took the place of the memory of His wounds; the blood, the torture, and his death—this bleak vision vanished before the dazzling beauty and grandeur, the manliness of his proud existence; and in an outburst of maternal satisfaction, she wrapped her son in the glorious halo of his father with one of the only Latin words of which she knew the meaning, naming him “Maximin.”
Maximin, from “Maximinus,” means: “descended from that which is the greatest in the world;” it means the son of a man great beyond all expression; in a word, the little one of the great one.
The last and precious token of the love of the Magdalene for Christ has become for us a provident one and, certainly, the most unexpected of testimony. A name, from a less intimate relationship, would have been nothing.
After that, nothing is known, except that Mary Magdalene lived for another twenty-five years, and that her son, whom she had the satisfaction of seeing grow into a man, survived her for thirty years. After having deposited the body of his mother in an alabaster tomb, in commemoration of the memorable actions of his life, Maximin was in turn placed beside her in a marble tomb in the mausoleum which had been built by him and which bore his name.
According to this tradition. Mary Magdalene was dead at the time of the dispute at Antioch between Peter and Paul; and Maximin was dead at the time when St. Paul, having become free, founded the Church of Rome; both died before Christianity came out of its swaddling clothes.
Source: Louis Martin, Les Évangiles sans Dieu (Paris: Dentu & Cie,1887), 268-273.
_________________________________________________________________________
Followed by some contemporary reviews of the book;
G. Meunier, Review of The Gospels without GodThe Gospels without God. In regard to the title of this book, which is something of a paradox, the author has taken care to explain it from the very first pages of its very interesting philosophical preface: It is a work of atheism.
“Atheism is the only system that can lead man to freedom,” said Diderot; Martin develops this aphorism and concludes that, since disbelief in religion and understanding of science have actually begun to penetrate the minds of the masses, it would not be long until men attain freedom. Theism, he said in substance, remains on earth and seems to hold power because of certain residual habits and some hypocrisy that prevent admission of what everyone thinks quietly. Similarly, for believers, it is evident that God does not exist, and often those we take for such are not, but innovators who defer to the idea of a cosmic god and abandon the god of revelation, in a spirit of harmony or the pure reason of moral utility. — Seeing there, and rightly, that substitution of principles, this change in prejudice, Mr. Louis Martin began to wrest from the domain of thought all illusions, conceptions that are related to this always-pernicious belief in the same.
This task seems to him much easier because theocratic institutions have successively sunk into indifference or contempt. From these same metaphysical declines, soon and finally nothing will remain of what is called Providence, without which we can no longer determine the key attributes of the supreme intelligence, which the concept of a universal mind tried to clarify. On all of the sequentially accumulated ruins of religion Mr. Martin succeeds in building up by the principle of negation, thereby rebuilding a Gospel where Jesus, stripped of divinity which was decked in the fanaticism and superstition of ancient times, is made into a thinking human as an incarnation of a latent genius that produced through the ages a mysterious work of revolution, and therefore returns him to his rightful place as claimant and martyr. — Here, first of all, Mr. Martin may wish to allow us to make this remark, which is not as important as you might think: If God is to be placed at the door of this semi-religious monument which is called the Gospel, it loses nor gains in having a God or lacking one, since in any case, as Mr. Martin notes, its influence is negative because of the increasingly positive state today of the human mind: hence, by such rigor, one might conclude that the exegetical controversy is useless, completely useless.
The life of Jesus has already been well disputed; it was furiously dissected in the old days, his very existence is disputed, along with supporting documents and texts. Here precisely to resolve the debate, our author comes brandishing a new thesis sharpened well, thoroughly drenched in the pure sources of truth according to St. Matthew and St. Luke, who themselves are not in agreement as early on as establishing the genealogy of Christ. Fiction against fiction, I do not distinguish what need there may be to battle with the dead to destroy an enemy that we conclude does not exist, that is to say to remove a myth from a legend in order to purify that whose inspiration was a myth. But this assessment is very personal and is not, of course, relevant to a work, already weakened by the secondary role awarded to women, whose social perspective, aside from that, retains some philosophical and literary value; and is luxuriously edited.
Some chapters are very remarkable, yet not as scholarly as the poetic spirit and talent they reveal. Some pages are suffused with a warm lyricism that is nothing less than orthodox, and would have delightfully surprised Alemann, the father of the genre; and those related to Jesus’ love affair with Mary Magdalene would undoubtedly be envied by Anacreon of Theos if these two poets had not already been dead for a long time. For example, it could not be that Mr. Martin hoped for the praises of two thousand Catholic theologians, were his work to fall under their eyes, which cannot fail to happen. It is probable that, on the contrary, this exegesis, too modern for them, they cannot accept and that two centuries earlier it would have earned its author the honor of an apotheosis, and a beautiful auto-da-fe.
All the interpreters who serve the church, which is to say all of those who claim the power to interpret the Holy Scriptures, would comment in vain on the Gospels according to Mr. Martin in order to extract something sacred and mystical. But where their embarrassment fast grows to stupefaction occurs at the end of the volume, in the chapter concerning the removal of the body of the Crucified, in which they would learn that it was not abandoned in the tomb in Jerusalem but with the complicity of Mary Magdalene and some of his Disciples, it came to rest in the land of cicadas, of poets, and especially of hyperbole: in our own Provence! If this discovery is not refuted, it would shine a bright light on a few of the miracles attributed to Jesus during his lifetime, such as the wedding at Cana, the multiplication of bread, etc.; then the resurrection, too. There would be no place, then, for surprise that these facts have acquired a kind of posthumous and piquant splash, a very southern flavor that is religiously preserved and transmitted in all the texts, whose inadequacy Mr. Martin demonstrates with a rare talent.
Source: G. Meunier, “Revue des Livres,” La revue socialiste 6 (1887): 667-669.
Maurice Vernes, Review of The Gospels without GodLouis Martin’s thesis is certainly strange. […] At the root of this pretentious and bombastic essay, there is no specific knowledge of the texts or questions related to the beginnings of Christianity. It reads, in fact, as an exegetical discussion of assertions such as the following: “It is known that God does not exist,” and there is detailed information on the relationship of Christ with Mary Magdalene.
Mr. Martin, who presents himself as a free thinker and a man of science and progress, cannot distinguish between facts acquired from history to a greater or lesser extent and legends drawn straight out of the air. Much of this volume is intended to establish that, through the efforts of Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ body was taken to Provence, Mary Magdalene and the family of Lazarus went to stay with these holy relics, and that the former gave birth to a son named Maximin, the fruit of her love for Christ.
Source: Maurice Vernes, “Histoire et Philosophie Religieuses,” Revue philosophique 25 (1888), 653
Review of The Gospels without GodThe Gospels without God, by Martin (Dentu): The title is quite banal, but the work is most certainly not, because what Mr. Martin has the ambition to prove is that Christ was an atheist; but to make even more piquant his demonstration, the author does not wish to seek his evidence and arguments anywhere else than in the Gospels. Let us add that Mr. Martin is absolutely sincere and acting in good faith, and that he often puts a real eloquence in the service of his strange assertions.
Source: La Nouvelle Revue 50 (1888), 937.
Hippolyte Barnout, The World without GodBut that is not all; because, if by his family, especially his brothers, Jesus enters the human order, he returned there also by the offspring attributed to him, a certain Saint Maximin, the fruit of his love affair with the Magdalene, a version accepted by Lacordaire himself in his beautiful book on Mary Magdalene and recalled recently by Mr. Louis Martin in the Gospels without God, a rigorous historical study, based on real facts, that he just released.
Source: Hippolyte Barnout, Le monde sans dieu et le dernier mot de tout (Paris: C. Marpon et E. Flammarion, 1890), 389.
Re-posted from HERE.