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How to Talk About The Da Vinci Code
by Amy Welborn
Is it really “only a novel?”
After all, that’s the sage advice I
regularly receive from correspondents
scolding me for my work on The Da
Vinci Code.
“It’s only a novel,” they cluck. “It’s
on the fiction shelf. Didn’t you
notice?”
Well, yes, I did notice that. The
problem is that there a good number of
readers who seem to have forgotten that
fact.
Those readers, in my experience, fall in
three categories:
·
Those who believe every assertion made
in the novel is true. These people come
to my talks clutching copies of The
Woman with the Alabaster Jar, one of
Brown’s main sources for the novel. They
stand in front of reproductions of
Leonardo’s Last Supper and
solemnly point out the presence of Mary
Magdalene.
·
Those who are startled by the claims of
the novel, suspicious because they’ve
never heard them before, but at the same
time accepting of the possibility. These
folks usually lack any background in
history and suspect that there’s no way
to know the truth anyway.
·
Finally, there are those who really
don’t care about the exact content of
The Da Vinci Code, but are glad that
it subverts Christianity, and so
“believe” in the project in general, and
heartily approve of it. I regularly get
email from people who entitle their
letter “Your Da Vinci Review” and then
proceed to never once mention The Da
Vinci Code, concentrating, rather,
on my willful ignorance of the evils of
the Catholic Church.
The Da Vinci Code
exploits ignorance. Hardly any of us
have ever been taught anything about the
development on the New Testament or the
nature and history of early
Christianity. Into this breach steps
this novel, written with authority,
bearing a bibliography, even, and full
of scholars claiming that “the
historical evidence” shows that Jesus
and Mary Magdalene were married or that
the eventual shape of Christianity was
determined by power and politics, rather
than fidelity to truth.
That’s why The Da Vinci Code
matters. It’s setting the agenda for how
many people think about the history and
claims of Christianity. No, they may not
buy the “Mary Magdalene is the real Holy
Grail” business, but they are agreeable
to the notion that since all of these
events happened so long ago, there’s no
reliable way to ascertain what really
happened anyway, so pick the Jesus story
you’re happy with and be on your way.
This just won’t do. For Christianity is
rooted, not in abstractions or an
agreeable story, but in the concrete way
that God was present in history through
Jesus Christ. As Paul says, if the
resurrection of the body didn’t happen,
then what is our faith about anyway? The
earliest Christian preaching, as
recorded in the Acts of the Apostles,
wasn’t, “Jesus taught about love, but
beyond that..who knows?” No. It was,
“This Jesus whom you crucified, God
raised from the dead.”
It happened.
But The Da Vinci Code strikes at
the core of that, and it strikes at the
core of simple history as well. Some
people write to me, accusing me of being
“afraid” of the truth and motivated by
blind religious faith. Not quite. I have
an MA in history. I like history, not
because it’s full of good stories, but
because I have a passion for
understanding what really happened and
how people really lived and thought.
The Da Vinci Code
is a problem, not because it’s
“blasphemous” or “anti-Christian.” It’s
a problem because it’s wrong about
history from beginning to end, in the
details as well as in the big picture,
and too many readers are letting their
understanding of the past be shaped by
this drivel.
So what’s wrong with The Da Vinci
Code? I don’t have enough time to
detail all the errors – since there are
2 or 3 (at least) on every page, that
would take a book. (Gee, someone should
write one! Oh…never mind…) . What those
of you in dialogue about this book and
movie need to have is a firm grasp of
the foundational and logical problems
with them, and to never set those
problems aside.
Sources
The Da Vinci Code
purports to tell the “real” story of the
“real” Jesus whose mission and identity
has been hidden by Christianity. Brown
says that Jesus was actually a wisdom
teacher who preached the reunion of the
masculine and feminine principles of
reality, selected Mary Magdalene, not
Peter, as the leader of his movement,
not to speak of his consort, and that
she is the “real” Holy Grail since she,
being pregnant with Jesus’ child carried
the blood of Jesus within her.
Really?
And…is this scenario taught at any major
or minor university department of
history on the planet? No? So – are they
in on the conspiracy, too?
Of course not. This scenario is culled,
sifted and lifted from some fraudulent
pop-faux-history books published over
the last two decades, among them Holy
Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar
Revelation (co-authored by two people
who also wrote The Mammoth Book of
UFO’s.)
Even non-believing scholars look to the
New Testament for the story of Jesus and
early Christianity. There may be
ambiguities and disagreements about
meaning, but they all agree: Jesus was
taught the Kingdom of God, radical love
of God and neighbor, was arrested and
executed, and, his followers reported,
rose from the dead.
In addition, Brown’s version claims that
the followers of Jesus didn’t believe
that Jesus was divine until Constantine
forced them to via the Council of Nicaea
in 325. Of course, this is silly, and
not borne out by evidence. The Council
of Nicaea was convened to combat the
heresy of Arianism.
Jesus’ divinity wasn’t invented at
Nicaea – after all, what would all of
the bishops who gathered at Nicaea been
preaching and teaching before then,
anyway? Oh, and by the way – the
preaching and teaching of early
Christians before Nicaea is easily
available. Check out Ignatius of
Antioch, Irenaus of Lyons, Tertullian
and Athanasius, for starters, and see if
they revered Jesus for teaching them
about the sacred feminine.
Then, take a look at Paul’s letter to
the Philippians, chapter 2, written 30
years after Jesus’ death and
resurrection. There, as in the rest of
Paul, you see an incredibly high
Christology, in which Jesus is praised
as “Lord.” But of course Brown doesn’t
mention that. He can’t, because it would
cut the legs out from under his
fantasies, instantly.
Logic
It’s really important to shape our Da
Vinci Code thinking around the demands
of logic. When we do, we see how little
sense it makes. It’s also a good angle
for discussion, because it doesn’t rest
on anything specific about religious
beliefs, and therefore you can’t be
accused of being a “brainwashed
Catholic” (as I have) as you question
the piece.
Some people will try to tell you that in
those first centuries, there were widely
accepted alternate visions of
Christianity, and they were brutally
suppressed by the Church so that Mary
Magdalene’s presence would be erased and
women’s voices would be silenced and the
males in charge would retain power.
In response, try these points:
If
early Christian leaders were determined
to suppress Mary Magdalene’s role in
their history, they did a lousy job of
it. They forgot to take out the part in
every Gospel in which Mary Magdalene is
the first witness to the Empty Tomb, the
witness on which the whole story rests.
If
the Church through history were
determined to silence and demonize Mary
Magdalene, again, they failed,
considering that by the 8th century her
feast day had been established, she was,
after the Blessed Virgin, the most
widely-revered saint of the Middle Ages,
and she’s called, in Eastern
Christianity, “Apostle to the Apostles,”
among other honorifics.
If
those early Christian male powers wanted
to suppress the “real story” of Jesus’
ministry and purpose, you would frankly
wonder about their sanity.
Given the fact that a female disciple
carrying on a movement based on the
wisdom purveyed by one of many wandering
teachers of the time would have not
caused one Roman eye to blink in
surprise during the first century, much
less prompted anyone to arrest and
execute followers of such a
movement….you’d have to wonder why these
power-hungry men decided to make up a
story that would get them arrested and
executed, and then stick to it during
those same arrests, tortures and
martyrdoms.
This, in my experience, is not what
power-mad people do.
Finally, let’s get to the core of this
business: Jesus.
I once had a letter from a woman who
said that her young adult son had read
The Da Vinci Code and was so glad
to discover within it a Jesus who was
“human” to whom he could really relate.
So much more real that the Jesus of the
Gospels and the Church.
Really?
If that echoes what you believe, I guess
you’ve never read a Gospel.
If you believe that, you’ve never set
foot in a Catholic Church.
Because, when you read the Gnostic
writings, you meet the most unearthly,
abstract, and frankly, boring and yes,
barely human figure you can imagine. He
walks around talking, talking and
talking. He doesn’t suffer, and for sure
he doesn’t die.
But when you actually sit down and read
a Gospel, what do you see? Or
rather…who?
You meet a man who was born of a woman,
who, it is said in the Gospel of Luke
“grew in wisdom.” He eats with his
friends, goes visiting, gets into
arguments, has to get away from people
at times, weeps, and is even afraid. He
dies. On a cross, in agony, he dies.
You’re going to tell me that’s not
human?
Think about Christian iconography, as
well. What are the two most frequent
ways of depicting Jesus that you see in
2000 years of devotional art from this
church intent on suppressing the
humanity of Jesus?
An infant on his mother’s lap…and a man
suffering his death throes. Sometimes,
once again, on his weeping mother’s lap.
You’re going to tell me that’s not
human?
So yes, those who are enraptured and
obsessed with The Da Vinci Code,
who believe its lies, are being misled.
For the truth is exactly the reverse of
what this work would have you believe:
it’s the Christian Church that has
preserved, in that mysterious but
necessary tension, the full humanity of
the One it also proclaims as Lord.
I sometimes wonder why people are so
fascinated with the Jesus of The Da
Vinci Code and why they so
resolutely ignore the Jesus we meet in
the Gospels and through the Church, why
people don’t want to take that Jesus
seriously. Why they just want to brush
him off and focus on esoteric, abstract
windy speeches on inner light offered by
a stick figure.
But then I go back to the Gospels, and I
read… Sell everything you have and give
the money to the poor…love your
enemies….Feed the hungry…clothe the
naked…visit the imprisoned…Blessed are
the poor…those who mourn…the
peacemakers…what you do to the least of
these, you do unto me…the last shall be
first…
Of course. No surprise. No wonder we
don’t want him to be the real Jesus. No
surprise at all.
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