I hate giving any kind of recognition to claims like this, but since we may be seeing more of this in the coming months:

Is this woman the living 'Code'? (USAToday.com)

The gist of it is that Kathleen McGown claims she is from the 'sacred bloodline' as described in The Da Vinci Code. (Which in turn got its ideas from the lamentable Holy Blood, Holy Grail.) McGown is the "self-proclaimed descendant of a union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene" (emphasis mine). She's making a big claim here; not only that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child (for which there is absolutely no evidence) but also that McGowan herself is part of the resulting bloodline. Of course she is using the Da Vinci Code trick in her book by writing a "fictional" story about 'Maureen Paschal' which McGowan acknowledges is basically herself. This allows her to have all the fun of making truth claims while hiding behind the guise of fiction.

What is McGowan's evidence for her claims? There is none. From the article:

Despite the lack of hard evidence, McGowan's supporters include her literary agent Larry Kirshbaum … McGowan was one of his first clients and he helped her get a seven-figure, three-book deal with Simon & Schuster … Kirshbaum believes McGowan when she says she is a descendant of Mary Magdalene. "I feel she's entirely credible," says Kirshbaum … "She spent 20 years of her life researching this subject. You have to give her any benefit of the doubt because she's totally rational. I believe her absolutely. She had total credibility with me from the very beginning."

This lady spent 20 years researching and still has no evidence? That is not very convincing to me. Let's see what a respected historian has to say about this:

"A historian simply has to look at what evidence there is," says Bart Ehrman, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina … "You can survey anyone who is a scholar of early Christianity and they will all tell you the same thing. It's completely bogus." McGowan says evidence of her ancient French lineage and connections to the sacred bloodline have been passed down through many generations of her family but admits "there are certainly holes in it." Much ancestral documentation, she says, was destroyed during the French Revolution. Ehrman is doubtful. "People didn't keep genealogies like that in the ancient world. There are no records. We have no account of Mary Magdalene even going to France until the Middle Ages, and the legend about her going to France sprang up because there was a cult to Mary Magdalene in southern France and they used the story about her going there as a way to explain the origins of the cult."

Ehrman is entirely correct here. And notice that Ehrman is not Christian and doesn't believe in the resurrection, so don't say he's just blind to the truth or somesuch nonsense. To summarize:

1. There is no historical evidence that Jesus and Mary were married
2. There is no historical evidence that they had a child
3. Therefore there is no bloodline
4. Even if there WAS a bloodline, McGowan has no evidence (let alone proof) that she belongs to it

And people say Christians accept things based on blind faith. As per my previous article on this blog re tolerance, McGowan is free to believe this if she wants; she should even be free to try to convince others. But she is still wrong and until she can provide some evidence for her claims no one should believe her and no one should support her by buying her books.