Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, or romantically involved, and the Church covered it up, a claim popularized by The Da Vinci Code and drawn from the Gnostic gospels

The claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married rests on essentially two pillars, and both are weaker than the popular version of the theory suggests. The first is a passage in the Gospel of Philip, a Gnostic text discovered among the Nag Hammadi codices in Egypt in 1945 and dated by scholars to roughly the 3rd or 4th century (itself likely drawing on earlier, 2nd-century source material). At 63:32-64:10 it calls Mary Magdalene Jesus's koinonos (a Greek loanword that can mean "companion," "partner," or "associate") and says Jesus "loved her more than all the disciples" and used to kiss her, though the manuscript is damaged at exactly the point that would specify where. Scholars of Gnosticism, including specialists who work directly with the Nag Hammadi corpus, generally read this passage within the Gospel of Philip's own symbolic system, where physical pairing and "kissing" function as metaphors for spiritual union and the impartation of gnosis, not as a claim about a marital or sexual relationship. Even scholars sympathetic to a larger role for Mary Magdalene in early Christian memory, such as Karen King (Harvard Divinity School), have distinguished the Gospel of Philip's symbolic theology from a historical claim about marriage.

The second pillar collapsed entirely. In 2012, Karen King unveiled a Coptic papyrus fragment she called the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife," in which Jesus is quoted saying the words "my wife." It generated international headlines. Within two years, though, papyrologist Christian Askeland (then at Indiana Wesleyan University) demonstrated that a companion Gospel of John fragment from the same source (written, on manuscript-evidence grounds, in the same hand and on paper from the same source) was in a Coptic dialect that had already died out by the papyrus's supposed manufacture date, a fatal anachronism. Follow-up reporting, including a 2016 investigation by journalist Ariel Sabar published in The Atlantic, traced the fragment to a single anonymous seller with a documented history of forgery and fraud. The Gospel of Jesus's Wife is now treated by the field, including King herself, as a modern forgery, not ancient evidence.

Strip those two pillars away and there is no canonical Gospel text, no other Nag Hammadi text, and no early Christian writer, orthodox or heterodox, who describes Jesus as married to Mary Magdalene or anyone else. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003), which popularized the claim for a mass audience, drew on earlier speculative works like Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982) rather than on primary ancient sources, and presented as historical fact a chain of claims that even scholars sympathetic to elevating Mary Magdalene's role in earliest Christianity (recognizing her, per all four canonical Gospels, as the first witness to the empty tomb and resurrection) do not support as textual or historical fact.