The Companion, the Gap in the Page, and What Was Built on It

One short passage has done more to make the Gospel of Philip famous than everything else in it. It calls Mary Magdalene the companion of the Saviour, using a loanword from the Greek koinonos, a term for a partner or associate that is used in the period for business partners and for spouses alike and does not by itself settle which is meant. It then says that Christ loved her more than the other disciples and used to kiss her often, and here the papyrus is damaged. The word naming where he kissed her is lost.

The lacuna falls at exactly the point that would decide the question. Translators supply mouth, cheek, forehead or hand, and print the supplement in brackets to mark it as conjecture; the manuscript itself gives none of them. A related consideration is that the same text treats the ritual kiss as something exchanged among the perfect as a means of grace, which makes the gesture, wherever it landed, an image of shared spiritual conception rather than a report of private conduct.

Popular writing has treated the passage with a confidence the page does not support. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and the works it drew on present the text as evidence that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child. The manuscript supplies neither a marriage nor a child, and the second-most-quoted line is itself a bracketed guess about a hole in a fourth-century Coptic book. What the passage does establish, and it is not nothing, is that some third-century Christians ranked Mary Magdalene above the male disciples, and that other Christians of the same period resented it, since the text has the disciples ask why Christ loves her more than them.