This article accompanied the one in the thread below. Note the date, 1971, when Charles Davis wrote his paper called "Was Jesus Married?" which expressed "a desire for a feminine expression of God and for sex to be incorporated in a vision of holiness."
That sounds eerily similar to Berg's writings. Is it possible or probable that Berg, famous for his plagiarism, stole this idea as well?
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/religion/article.jsp?content=20060403_124386_124386
April 03, 2006
The real Da Vinci Code
He proposed the holy-marriage fantasy long before the bestselling book. He even lived a version of the tale.
NICHOLAS KÖHLER
Edmonton-born Claire Henderson Davis had no idea her father once proposed that Jesus might have married Mary Magdalene. But on March 5, Claire, who lives in London, started getting calls. Had she seen the paper that day? Her father, dead since 1999, was making headlines -- again -- thanks to a controversial High Court copyright-infringement trial examining whether Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown had pilfered ideas for his novel from The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. Using dubious scholarship, that 1982 book suggests Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had produced offspring whose descendants live on today.
Before a packed gallery, John Baldwin, the lawyer representing Brown's publisher, Random House, attacked the plaintiffs' claim, arguing that it "relies on and seeks to monopolize ideas at such a high level of generality they are not protected by copyright." As evidence, Baldwin cited a 1971 article from the Observer headlined "Was Jesus Married?" that anticipated many of the ideas in both books. Pouncing on the courtroom reference, the Observer ran a long profile on its author, Charles Davis.
The life of Charles Davis is an odd kind of love story. Davis was 43 years old when he called a press conference in London and revealed he was getting married. For the journalists scribbling in their notebooks, the announcement made for good copy. Davis, whose square beard and page-boy haircut made him look as though he'd stepped from the pages of a medieval manuscript, was a priest and England's leading Catholic theologian. His books were widely read; some were used as seminary textbooks. Now, citing unease with the notion of papal infallibility and Rome's position on contraception, Davis denounced the Church and said he was leaving it. More, he would renounce his vow of chastity, marry, and "rebuild my life upon a personal love I can recognize as true and real." He and Brooklyn-born Florence Henderson, then 39 and also a devoted Catholic, had met years earlier at a café in Edinburgh, Scotland, and fallen gradually in love. When they married in Cambridge, both were virgins.
Davis's decision to leave the priesthood, arriving in the wake of the Vatican II reforms, generated headlines worldwide and angered many Catholics, particularly those who sought a more progressive Church. "Charles was one of the people who was going to bring the Church into a new direction," says Rosemary Haughton, an English theologian. "And the first reaction -- I know mine -- to the news that Charles was leaving was that, in a sense, he'd betrayed us." The departure, which led him to write a book-long defence, A Question of Conscience, was not easy for Davis. He came of humble beginnings (his father was a sign painter), had trained for the priesthood since age 15, and had been ordained at 23. He had known no other life. Henderson, who belonged to an organization of laywomen called the Grail -- an eerie echo of The Da Vinci Code -- was in the same boat. They found themselves more or less excommunicated. Unable to arrange a Catholic ceremony, they were married by an Anglican. Troubled by their newfound notoriety in England, they elected to leave. The experience, they would recall later, was like entering a "desert." With the offer of a teaching position for Charles, they left for Edmonton.
Their love story is also a real-life answer to Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code fantasy, which revolves around the suppression of the "sacred feminine" in the Catholic Church. By 1971, when Davis sat down to write the article proposing a married Jesus, he was living with Florence and their two children and teaching at Montreal's Sir George Williams University (now Concordia). "A married Jesus? Not an unmarried virgin, but a married man as the incarnate Son of God for Christians. Why not?" he asked in an article that reads something like an apologia of his own sexual life. Indeed, says his daughter Claire, a 35-year-old writer and artist, it was a defence of a Catholic life that permitted "a desire for a feminine expression of God and for sex to be incorporated in a vision of holiness." As she wrote in a recent response to her father's 1971 article that also appeared in the Observer, "My father probably found it easier to write about the possible sex life of Jesus than to discuss his own sexual desires." Marriage for Charles and Florence, who died four years after her husband, wasn't always easy. "In some ways it was a meeting of opposites as well as two people who had a really common vision," she says. "My father was very intellectual. My mother was very creative, artistic, gregarious." Together, at the Westmount home they shared for 20 years, they had wonderful parties, Claire recalls -- though, as she writes in the Observer, their sex life "probably wasn't great . . . . They began too late in life, with too many obstacles to overcome."