Hodnet Church in Shropshire

Above: The Bible relates how an unnamed disciple was so intimate with Jesus that during the Last Supper he leant on Christ's bosom.  Church traditions holds that this disciple was Saint John, but when Leonardo painted this scene (below) he not only depicted this disciple leaning away from Christ, he also appears to have portrayed him as a woman. 

The Da Vinci Code is a novel, but Brown based his ideas on theories proposed by a number of non-fiction authors published some years before.

The Bible relates how Christ was particularly close to one of his disciples - someone described only as "the disciple whom Jesus loved".   The New Testament does not reveal who this disciple was, but early Christian tradition held that it was Saint John the Gospel writer.  In recent years various scholars have speculated that this enigmatic phrase implied a sexual relationship between Jesus and the disciple in question, and it has been suggested that the mysterious disciple might actually have been Christ's closest female follower Mary Magdalene.  In 1982 authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, in their book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, speculated that Jesus and Mary were not only married, but that they also had children whose descendants still survive today.  The Holy Grail, the authors proposed, was not really a cup, but a symbolic reference to this bloodline.  They also claimed that a mystical society called the Priory of Sion preserved this secret down the ages.    One member of this secret society was said to have been the Renaissance artist Leonardo Da Vinci, and in 1997 two other authors, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, in their book The Templar Revelation, suggested that Leonardo de Vinci had gone so far as to depict Mary Magdalene in his famous painting of the Last Supper.  The figure seated on Christ's right which was supposed to represent Saint John, Picknett and Prince observed, appears to be a woman.  The Jesus married Mary Magdalene theory was the theme adopted by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. 

A second window in Hodnet Church depicts scenes from Mary Magdalene's life.