Over months of reporting, I asked a wide range of Gnosticism experts whether any serious scholar saw the Gospel of Philip as portraying Jesus and Mary Magdalene as actual husband and wife. The question was usually met with a pained look or an awkward silence, even among admirers of King’s other work. “It was mentioned in The Da Vinci Code,” one told me. Like several other scholars, he sheepishly pointed to Dan Brown’s novel as the closest parallel. “That’s the argument there. So, in popular literature.”
