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Looking
around the swimming pools and trains this summer, the book of the year is
Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci
Code. The first page says
“All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals
in this novel are accurate” so many people have been disturbed about the
allegations about the Church and about Jesus.
If
you have not read the book, Ben MacIntyre summarised it in The Times recently as follows: “.. Mr Brown’s book is a murder
mystery revolving around the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married
and founded the Merovingian dynasty of French kings, and that this secret
was protected by the Knights Templar and a mysterious group called the
Priory of Sion, which included in its membership Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac
Newton and Victor Hugo. According to this conspiracy theory, the Holy
Grail was not a cup but a woman, or womankind, the “sacred feminine”,
an early form of goddess worship violently suppressed by the
male-dominated Church.”
What
are we to make of these claims? What is true, and what is biased, and what
is untrue?
There
are two useful books available: Simon
Cox has written Cracking the da
Vinci Code – the Unauthorized Guide to the Facts Behind the Fiction.
Cox is editor-in-Chief of Phenomena,
“the magazine devoted to challenging dogmas, orthodoxies and
half-truths.” On the
Christian side is Breaking the da
Vinci Code by Darrell L Bock,
a Protestant Scholar, with an enthusiastic introduction by Roman Catholic
Professor Francis J Moloney. What do they have to say about these claims?
Where
does this idea come from? Dan Brown starts with the writings of the
Gnostics, in particular the manuscripts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.
There are two key texts, both quoted in The
Da Vinci Code. The first is from the Gospel of Philip 63:33. According
to Dr Bock the key part of the text is not known in full because of the
damage to the manuscript. Dan Brown quotes it as follows:
"And
the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than
all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the
disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him,
“Why do you love her more than all of us?”
A
problem, says Bock, is that the word ‘mouth’ is missing in the
manuscript text. So why choose ‘mouth’ rather than ‘cheek’ or ‘forehead’?
And even so, why does this prove they were married?
The
second passage is from the 2nd Century Gospel of Mary of Magdala where the debate is whether or not Mary
had private conversations with Jesus. The book makes a massive leap from
the few words of the text to suggest that Jesus meant Mary rather than
Peter to “carry on the Church”.
The
liberal Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan said in an interview: “There
is an ancient and venerable principle of biblical exegesis which states
that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it
must be a camel in disguise. So let’s apply that to whether or not Jesus
was married. There is no evidence that Jesus was married (looks like a
duck), multiple indications that he was not (walks like a duck), and no
early texts suggesting wife or children (quacks like a duck) .. so he must
be an incognito bridegroom (camel in disguise).”
But,
seriously, surely it was highly unusual for a Jewish male in his thirties
to be unmarried? Dr Bock looks at the evidence and concludes:
“In sum, it was not un-Jewish for Jesus to be single. Marriage
was not a necessary step for Jesus to take to have cultural credibility in
the Jewish context of His ministry.”
Simon
Cox has an interesting take on how the theory of the marriage of Jesus and
Mary got going in the last twenty years. In 1982 a book was published
called Holy
Blood, Holy Grail . Cox writes: “Written by Michael Baigent,
Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln … HBHG, as it is affectionately referred
to, is generally considered to be the ‘bible’ of the Priory of Sion….
Experienced researchers of the Priory of Sion are aware that HBHG isn’t
actually the first book to fuse Plantard’s history of thePriory of Sion
with the Sacred Feminine and the bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. A
good two years before HBHG was published, the well-known astrologer Liz
Greene released a novel about Nostradamus called The
Dreamer of the Vine, which interwove the now-familiar elements of the
Priory history into Nostradamus’s life story. In hindsight, The
Dreamer of the Vine appears to be an astonishingly prescient
premonition of the same elements that caused so much controversy when HBHG
burst onto the scene in 1982. But when one begins to dig a little bit
deeper, to discover that Liz Greene is actually the sister of Richard
Leigh and was at the same time the girlfriend of Michael Baigent, a
cunning pattern begins to emerge …. So, did the authors of HBHG really
just “happen” to evolve the Jesus and Mary Magdalene bloodline concept
during the course of their discussions with Pierre Plantard, or was this
the destination of the book all along? …. Who was really navigating whom .. and are we still on
course?”
In
other words: Holy Blood, Holy Grail
looks at the Priory of Sion and then proposes as a thesis that their
secret is that Jesus and Mary were married. What Cox is saying is that it
was the other way round: Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln thought Liz’s idea
in her 1979 novel was a cracker, and they looked around during the next
three years to see if they could find any evidence to support it. Plantard,
before he died, did not provide the smoking pistol. So the leap from the
facts to the hypothesis is a massive leap of credulity. And those who
accuse the Church are being less than straightforward themselves.
Second Claim: The Book
states that it was not until the time of Constantine that the Church
believed Jesus to be divine
In
the book, the charater Leigh Teabing (an anagram of Baigent) alleges that
Constantine was a life-long pagan who was baptised on his deathbed and who
used Christianity to further his own ends. He called the Council of Nicaea
to debate and vote on the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the
administration of sacraments, and the divinity of Jesus.
Teabing
says: “… until that moment in
history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet … a great
and powerful man, but a man nonetheless … Jesus’ establishment as “the
Son of God” was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of
Nicaea …a relatively close vote at that……. “Constantine
commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those Gospels that
spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those Gospels that made
him godlike. The earlier Gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned……
More than eighty Gospels were considered for
the New Testament and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion..”
Bock
writes: “This may be the
most misleading statement of “fact” in the entire novel..…The most
generous count of extrabiblical documents … stands at sixty, excluding
the 27 books in the New Testament. However, a vast majority of these works
were not gospels….. Attributing the selection of the Gospels to
Constantine and the Council of Nicea ignores more than a century of
widespread use and recognition of these four Gospels. There was never a
time when most Church leaders were picking and choosing from dozens of
Gospels….. The four Gospels were well established long before
Constantine was born.”
Third Claim: The Book
states that a male dominated Church has tried through the Centuries to
suppress the feminine
Dan
Brown draws from the works of Harvard scholars Helmut Koester and Karen
King. In The Gospel of Mary of
Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle , King writes: “… the
male Jesus selects male disciples who pass on tradition to male bishops.
Yet we know that in the early centuries and throughout Christian history,
women played prominent roles as apostles, teachers, preachers, and
prophets. Moreover, the use of terms like “orthodoxy” and “heresy”
immediately designates who were the winners and losers, but in practice
“heresy” can only be identified by hindsight …the clearest
contribution of the recent discoveries is in …. (disclosing) a much more
diverse Christianity than we ever suspected …”
Dr
Bock calls Karen King and her colleagues ‘Neo-Gnostics’ who in more
scholarly form have written what Dan Brown has put in his novel.
Gnosticism came in a variety of forms, but who were the Gnostics, and what
did they believe? Elaine
Pagels, author of The Gnostic
Gospels, has written a best-seller called Beyond
Belief . In a review of this book Eastern Orthodox scholar Frederica
Mathewes-Green writes:
“ The Gnostics,
developers of a variety of Christ-Flavoured spiritualities in the earliest
centuries of the Christian era, are enthroned as noble seekers of
enlightenment. The early Church, which rejected these theologies, is
assigned its usual role of oppressor, afflicting believers with rigid
creeds. …. Early Christians
rejected Gnosticism, all right. But what Pagels presents is not the part
they rejected. What they rejected, Pagels does not present.”
In
other words, there are historians out there with an agenda, who are being
selective in the material they use. Philip Jenkins in Hidden Gospels: How the search for Jesus Lost its Way (2001) alleges
that there is among some scholars a “historical amnesia” which is a
“necessary feature of the whole myth of concealment and discovery”.
Bock writes: “This new scholarship of historical revisionism is a cause worth noting
... Historians as well as members of the Catholic, Orthodox and
Protestant faiths are raising significant questions about this “new way’s”
historical credibility…. Both sides are agreed on this point: both views
cannot be representative of the roots of the Christian faith. The views
are too different. The four Gospels
and these other texts do not share the same core, theological view.”
On his website, Dan Brown
was asked: Are
you a Christian?
He replied: “Yes. Interestingly, if you ask three people what it means
to be a Christian, you will get three different answers ….. I consider
myself a student of many religions. The more I learn, the more questions I
have.” So Brown, we deduce from the book, is a Christian who does not
believe Jesus was the Son of God: can you be a Christian and not
believe in the divinity of Jesus?
Would
it matter if Jesus was in fact married?
Paul, writing to the Church at Corinth, pointed out that the only
thing that really matters is the resurrection:
“..If
Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and
your faith has been in vain .. your faith is futile and you are still in
your sins…(and) we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact
Christ has been raised from the dead …”
Are
you confident in your belief that Jesus is alive? Interested in finding out more?
Why not join our 2005 Alpha Course and come and discuss these
claims over a meal each week for ten weeks?
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