The Da
Vinci Debate
Dan
Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code has set sales records not seen
since Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (though the
New York Tines tried to ignore that one, simply omitting it from the
Best Sellers lists all those years). The two books share about the same
degree of historical and theological acumen. In other words, both are
pure bunk. Dan Brown now has both paperback and hardcover number one
slots in The Times, and the movie adaptation, as I write, is due
out in a month or so. So there is quite a lot of hype and hysteria over
Brown’s bunk. Since you and I will most likely be called upon for an
opinion on all this in the days to come, we might as well try to have an
informed one.
Gospel Gossip
I have written a whole book
(The Da Vinci Fraud) explaining what is factually wrong about
The Da Vinci Code, and there is too darn much of it to repeat here.
Suffice it to say, the author has naively swallowed a lot of propaganda
generated by supposedly “esoteric” lodges of middle-aged men with
nothing better to do than parade around in robes and claim to be the
modern successors to the Knights Templar on the one hand and the Priory
of Sion on the other. The modern Masonic Lodges, the prototype for Ralph
Kramden’s Raccoon Lodge, falsely claim descent from the Templars. A
post-World War II bunch of right-wing French monarchists called Alpha
Galates picked out the name of a monkish order absorbed by the Jesuits
back in the 17th century, the Priory of Sion, and christened
themselves with it. Dan Brown takes all this nonsense seriously, and he
has troubled himself to soak up great amounts of bogus data from books
like The Templar Revelation and Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
The punch-line of the whole joke is that Jesus of Nazareth married Mary
Magdalene, and the pair produced the line of Merovingian kings, whose
remote heirs, down on their luck, would like to rule again today. How do
we “know” this? Because the Crusader Knights of the Temple of Solomon
supposedly discovered reams of heretical documentation in the Temple
Mount catacombs while they were looking for gold. These documents tell
the tale.
Well, there is absolutely
no evidence for any of this. Hey, I love these crazy theories, and if
this one turned out to have anything going for it, I’d be the first to
jump aboard the band wagon. But I have to protect a little thing called
my scholarly integrity. That is a problem none of these Templar Jesus
authors have to worry about. None of them are scholars. None has any
real concept of what historical research is all about or how one pursues
it. Brown is admittedly just a novelist, though he assures his gullible
readers that his “factual” database is true. It is very telling that he
has just been unsuccessfully sued by the authors of his chief
sourcebook, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, namely Michael Baigent, Henry
Lincoln, and Richard Leigh. Sued? What, for utilizing their
scholarly research? No scholar would do that. Scholars are delighted
when their colleagues build on their research and carry it further. It
just demonstrates that Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh (whose names Brown
has cobbled together into that of his character “Leigh Teabing”)
correctly understand themselves, despite their overt claims, to be
novelists, fiction writers, no more scholarly researchers than Brown
himself. They make their ludicrous case by connecting the dots between
disparate sources, trying to solve one enigma with another, and building
an edifice of the most insubstantial hunches. In short, they do what
imaginative novelists do. Just look at their book (as indeed all such
books Brown drew upon): it is all first-person narration, the exciting
tale of how intrepid delvers pieced a theory together and tried to
confirm it. In other words, a novel.
Catholic Bashing?
Roman Catholic spokesmen,
including the stultifying Pope Ratzinger, have warned the faithful not
to be misled by The Da Vinci Code. Well, of course, I am, too!
But Ratzinger and his squad of thought police are concerned that the
book and the movie will make the Church look bad. If he was really
worried about that one, maybe he’d do something about all the
child-raping priests instead of kicking them upstairs, as he did
Cardinal Law of Boston. But no one should be surprised that the Roman
Catholic Church, a totalitarian institution, employs the “victim”
defense when criticized. It is the spitting image of the way the
Stalinists would yelp “Anti-Communism!” whenever anyone pointed out the
bloody excesses of their regime. And Catholic spin-doctors are bleating
the same thing now, about The Da Vinci Code. There are two causes
for complaint, it seems. The first is the depiction of Opus Dei, a
conservative Catholic devotional movement, as a fiendish bunch of
conspirators, willing to kill anyone who stands in the way of their evil
schemes. All right, I can see the problem there.
But no I can’t. Anyone who
has gotten to the end of the book knows that Opus Dei turns out to have
nothing whatever to do with the villainy perpetrated in the book. There
is a fanatical assassin sent to kill certain people who know too much,
but it turns out his evil master is not some Catholic cardinal
associated with Opus Dei, but rather our scholarly protagonist Professor
Teabing! So the Church is not the bad guy after all. Did the grumpy
Catholic spin-doctors fail to read that far? Or are they afraid their
flock will lose interest before that point?
By the way, I have a theory
about the assassin. Brown describes him as an albino: white skin and
hair, pink eyes like an Easter Bunny. Why? What does that have to do
with anything? I suspect that we are to sniff out a reference to the
Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I, who died after mere weeks in
office, and after making what some considered heretical statements. A
whole cottage industry keeps alive a conspiracy theory that John Paul I
was assassinated by Curia thugs. I think Brown is alluding to the
supposed murder of Albino Luciani, as if maybe by the same assassin.
But I said there was
another reason for Catholics to squirm at the book and movie. And I join
them in squirming. The problem is the false and dubious claims made
about Christian origins. Contra Brown, there is no evidence that Jesus
and Mary married. I am not fully persuaded that either was even a
historical character! But even if they were, the rest is the sheerest
speculation. And the notion that Christians held Jesus to be merely
human until the wicked Emperor Constantine elevated him to Godhood at
the Council of Nicea, or that Constantine picked out the books for the
New Testament: all this is blatant nonsense. And I speak as a radical
New Testament scholar who takes very little of traditional church
history for granted.
Were there, as Brown
informs us, fully eighty gospels from which the canonical four
were chosen? The only historical reference I know to that particular
number occurs in a tenth-century work by the Arab chronicler Adb al-Jabbar,
who said there had been eighty gospels. I don’t know if we can trust
that figure, but there were indeed many gospels in the first centuries.
Few are nearly as old as Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and while the
historical character of these four is in severe doubt, there is just
absolutely no chance that any of the others preserves authentic
information about Jesus. It is not as if the Gospel of Philip, for
instance, which tells us that Jesus often used to kiss Mary Magdalene
full on the mouth, is true, and the Gospel of Mark is false. All the
ancient gospels were written to set forth a theological viewpoint, and
it is doubtful any of their authors had any genuine information about
Jesus.
And this fact leads us to
the other side of the Da Vinci Debate. Why do people champion the book?
Why are there serious discussion groups centering on the novel (and
soon, I suppose, on the film)? I think it is because there are a great
many people who want to be Christians but cannot abide the more
repressive aspects of the churches’ faith. Brown tells them that there
was an alternative Christian tradition, set forth in alternative
scriptures, and that this Christianity was feministic,
Goddess-worshiping, and sex-friendly. They like this version of the
Christian story better. So they are happy to take that story to heart as
eagerly as the fundamentalist takes “the old, old story” to heart. In
neither case is it a matter of anyone opting for the historical facts,
because Dan Brown is not giving them to you any more than Billy Graham
or Pope Ratzinger is.
Where to Stand?
What is supposed to be at
stake in the plot and intrigue of The Da Vinci Code? Professor
Teabing tell us that the Catholic Church, predicating itself on the
Constantinian lie that Jesus was a God, not a man, would crumble if the
fact of Jesus’ marriage were ever made known. Would it? Suppose we did
find the caterer’s bill for the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, as Father
Guido Sarducci once said he found the bill for the Last Brunch? What
doctrine would it disprove? The only teaching about Christ that I can
see being threatened by such a discovery would be “docetism,” the notion
that Jesus was not a divine incarnation, but only a phantom spirit who
seemed to take on a body but did not. And that ancient belief was early
rejected from emerging Christian orthodoxy. Orthodox, Catholic, and
Protestant Christians have never denied Jesus was at least a
flesh and blood man. The question is rather how much more he
might have been. Thus for him to have been married would pose no
theological problem at all.
So, in the end, all the
intrigue and espionage surrounding the “secret of the ages” is much ado
about nothing. It stems from the abysmal theological ignorance of Dan
Brown and most of his readers. Insofar as Christians protest The Da
Vinci Code as a gross campaign of misinformation, we ought to join
them. Insofar as they claim that the alternative is the safe and secure
myth of Christian origins spoon-fed by the church, we ought to protest
their misinformation just as loudly.
By Robert M.
Price