DECONSTRUCTING BY RICK HOWE DIRECTOR DAYSPRING CENTER FOR CHRISTIAN STUDIES BOULDER, COLORADO

Transcription

1 DECONSTRUCTING BY RICK HOWE DIRECTOR DAYSPRING CENTER FOR CHRISTIAN STUDIES BOULDER, COLORADO

2 Deconstructing The Da Vinci Code By Rick Howe Executive Director, Dayspring Center for Christian Studies If you have walked by the book section of Sam s Club or Costco, or the Best-Seller shelf of Borders or Barnes and Noble, you have no doubt seen the large inventories of Dan Brown s novel, The Da Vinci Code. It has been on the New York Times Best-Seller List for some forty weeks now, ranks first in sales at Amazon.com, and has even inspired an ABC News special. Even if you haven t read it yet, chances are you have talked to someone who has, or you have heard people talking about it at the office drinking fountain or around a lunch table. It is shaping shop-talk about Christianity in circles all over the country. The Da Vinci Code tells the story of a contemporary quest for the Holy Grail, with a very surprising twist. While Christendom has always thought of this holy relic as the chalice Jesus used in the Last Supper, we discover, according to the story, that this was just a symbol of the true Grail, which turns out to be Mary Magdalene, to whom Jesus was allegedly married, who allegedly bore him a child, allegedly fled to France at the time of the crucifixion, and allegedly established a royal bloodline of Christ, kept secret down through the ages by the Priory of Sion (a secret society) under the ever-searching eye of the Roman Catholic Church, bent on its destruction. The themes of attack and advocacy run through the entire book. It is an attack against traditional Christianity. The key figures in the story claim that Mary Magdalene s relationship with Jesus was known and embraced by the true followers of Jesus until the council of Nicea in 325 A.D., convened by the Roman Emperor, Constantine, at which time the truth was suppressed, and its advocates were branded as heretics. Here are a few examples of the claims that are made: The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever. (p. 124). The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. (p. 231) It was all about power.... Christ as Messiah was critical to the functioning of the Church and state. Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power. (p. 233) The novel is not only an attack against biblical Christianity, but advocacy for a return to the sacred feminine, or goddess worship. Here are a couple of quotes to give you a feel for this:... the Priory s tradition of perpetuating goddess worship is based on a belief that powerful men in the early church conned the world by propagating lies that devalued the female and tipped the scales in favor of the masculine. (p. 124). The Grail is literally the ancient symbol for womanhood, and the Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess, which of course has now been lost, virtually eliminated by the Church. (p. 238)

3 Why So Many People are Buying the Claims Of The Da Vinci Code While the story itself is very short on facts, the most important fact is that millions are taking its claims as Gospel truth. Why is that? It s worth exploring. First of all, The Da Vinci Code is a great story. It is what the critics call a real page turner. That was true for me. I couldn t put it down! If it were poorly written, few would take its claims seriously. Secondly, Brown clothes the chief advocates for his Grail theory in scholarly robes. Robert Langdon is a Harvard professor, and Sir Leigh Teabing is a British Royal Historian, and they both assure the reader that there are many other credible scholars who share their beliefs. Never mind that the research bibliography supplied by Brown on his website does not cite a single work of scholarship on the New Testament or early Christianity; the professors in his story display great erudition, and somehow that is enough for many readers to accept their fictional claims as historical truth. Third, before the story begins Brown gives a Fact page which claims that 1) there is a secret society called the Priory of Sion, which has seen itself as the guardian of the secrets of the Holy Grail; 2) there is a Vatican prelature known as Opus Dei (which, in the story, is hell-bent on the Priory s demise); and 3) quoting directly: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. (I have no reason to doubt most of this, except his claims about the accuracy of documents which are the fulcrum of his conspiracy theory! It can t get off the ground without this piece, but it is the least credible part of his case. When it comes to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostic documents found at Nag Hammadi, the New Testament, documents of Christian writings from the Church Fathers and documents about the council of Nicea, there is no resemblance to the facts at all.) Fourth, we Americans are always for the underdog. We were in that position in our colonial quest for independence, and ever since we have made heroes of those who have stood against the strong and the many, and have prevailed against the odds. The Priory of Sion gets our sympathy as a national audience because it is cast in the role of the oppressed minority. It is the victim, struggling for survival against a strong and powerful Church. Fifth, as Langdon himself muses, Everyone loves a conspiracy. (p. 169). Being let in on a secret that few other people know connects profoundly with our pride. It makes us feel important to be in the know. And to be let in on a secret of this magnitude would put us into a very elite circle, indeed! Lastly, and sadly, even if this conspiracy theory isn t credible (that is, it isn t supported by the facts) it is plausible to many people (that is, they could easily imagine the Church engaging in such a cover up). Brown aims his literary guns especially at the Roman Catholic Church, which is currently struggling with claims of conspiracy and cover-up of priestly abuse of children. If this conspiracy theory has teeth, is it so hard to believe that we might find the same kind of thing in theological and historical areas? But the situation isn t very different for evangelical Christians. In the political arena, liberals are wary of conservative Christians and their perceived cultural agenda. And evangelicals have had their own share of notable corruption with the tele-evangelists of the 1980 s and the never-ending parade of pastors and Christian leaders whose moral lapses are exposed year-in and year-out. The mistrust of institutional Christianity that began to take root in the 1960 s is now in full bloom. Even if it has often been misunderstood and falsely accused, the Church, ironically, has contributed to the culture of mistrust which makes the claims of The Da Vinci Code plausible to so many.

4 Why No One Should Believe the Claims Of The Da Vinci Code In the first part of this response we looked at the plausibility (cultural attractiveness) of The Da Vinci Code. In this second section we will look at the credibility of its historical claims. Brown has Robert Langdon, Harvard professor, and Sir Leigh Teabing, British Royal Historian, argue that until the time of the council of Nicea, a theological forum created by the Roman emperor, Constantine, in 325 A.D., Christianity was matriarchal in nature, celebrating the sacred feminine and worship of the goddess. That power-play of Church and State changed everything, they contend (e.g., p. 124). Now, when I read this I was incredulous. I thought, What about Jewish religion for two thousand years before that? One of the things that separated Israel s understanding of God from that of its neighbors was that Yahweh had no female consort. For Israel there was no father god, mother god and baby gods. Yahweh did not bring the world into existence through an act of procreation; he spoke it into being (Genesis 1; Psalm 33:9). The rejection of a yin/yang, god/goddess understanding of deity was hardly a power play of the council of Nicea! It was the Jewish cradle in which Jesus was born, and mother s milk for his earliest followers. Brown s claim makes the Titanic look like a sea-worthy vessel in comparison. I think he knows this, and makes an attempt to rescue it later in the book. Unfortunately, the lifeboat itself can t float on the sea of evidence: The Jewish tetragrammaton YHWH the sacred name of God in fact derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-hebraic name for Eve, Havah. (p. 309) First, he gets the etymology of the word exactly backwards. YHWH does not derive from Jehovah; Jehovah is derived from Yahweh. Originally the Hebrew form of the sacred name had no vowel points. These were added later by Jewish scribes from the word Adonai (translated Lord ), and in the sixteenth century this hybrid form was transliterated into English, resulting in the word Jehovah, as found in the King James Version. It is unfathomable that Brown could get this so wrong, but even more incredible is his conjectural combination of masculine and feminine in the sacred name. Every first year Hebrew student knows that the sacred name of God is based on a form of the verb hayah, to be, which is found, for instance, in answer to Moses question about the name of the God whose presence burned in a desert bush before him: This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you. (Exodus 3:14) It gets worse: Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon s temple housed not only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah. Men seeking spiritual wholeness came to the Temple to visit priestesses or hierodules with whom they made love and experienced the divine through physical union. (p. 309) First of all, the word Shekinah (as in Shekinah glory), is not found anywhere in the Jewish Scriptures. It was used later in rabbinic literature and by early Christians to refer to the luminous presence of Yahweh among his people, for instance, on Mount Sinai, in the wilderness wanderings, in the tabernacle, and later in the temple. It comes from the Hebrew verb, shakan, to dwell, and refers to the manifestation of God s presence or dwelling among his people (which is why the early Christians saw

5 Christ as the ultimate expression of the Shekinah glory, as in John 1:14). Because of its absence in the Old Testament itself, to make this a claim about early Jews is anachronistic in the extreme. Not only that, it is a supreme irony that the description of men seeking spiritual wholeness through physical union with priestesses was the very practice of Canaanite religion uniformly condemned by the Hebrew prophets (See, for instance, Ezek. 16:16; Hosea 4:14, and the many references to high places during the prophetic period, which refer to Israel s adoption of Canaanite worship). Now let s move chronologically from the Old Testament to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Also known as the Qumran documents, these scrolls were found in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds in caves above the Dead Sea. They are important documents, not only because they include portions of the Old Testament, and thus provide the oldest manuscript evidence for the Old Testament, but because they also describe an Essene community, about which scholars knew very little before their discovery. As anyone knows who knows anything about these documents, while they provide important historical background for Jewish life from the third century B.C. to 68 A.D., they say absolutely nothing about Jesus or early Christianity itself. They tell us something about the period in which Jesus lived, but nothing about Jesus himself. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. And yet Brown has British Royal Historian, Leigh Teabing, claim that these were among the earliest Christian records, (p. 245) which allegedly support the veneration of Mary Magdalene. One of the great ironies of Brown s book is that while he asserts that the Dead Sea Scrolls support his claims about the sacred feminine, if anything the opposite is true! The Essene community in Qumran was monastic. Sex was prohibited as an evil (though there may be some evidence of a branch of the Essenes who tolerated in a very limited form as a necessary evil for procreation), and women were regarded as the source of this evil, responsible for sins of lust and concupiscence. You can read about this in any scholarly text on Qumran. Let s move forward chronologically to the New Testament, beginning with the central claim of the book, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and fathered a child by her. Of course the fact that the Gospels say nothing about this is alleged to be part of the conspiracy. Brown has Teabing make a circumstantial case: Jesus as a married man makes infinitely more sense than our standard biblical view of Jesus as a bachelor... Because Jesus was a Jew... and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned, and the obligation for a Jewish father was to find a suitable wife for his son. If Jesus were not married, at least one of the Bible s gospels would have mentioned it and offered some explanation for His unnatural state of bachelorhood. (p. 245) Let me say, first, that there is a prima facie soundness to this. Although he overstates the case, he does describe the general norm for Jewish society at that time. However, he overlooks very significant exceptions to the rule. For instance, many of the Jewish prophets were single: Elijah, Elisha and Jeremiah come immediately to mind. More significantly, there is John the Baptist, the prophet who heralded the coming of the Messiah, and with whom Jesus shared the message of the coming of God s kingdom. Jesus himself taught the possibility of celibacy for the sake of the kingdom (Matthew 19:10-12). Here again we come to another of the ironies about the Essene community at Qumran, and the contradictions created by Brown s unawareness of the historical facts. As we have already seen, the Dead Sea Scrolls do not support his claims about an ancient celebration of the sacred feminine. Here again, they actually refute his claims. The scrolls describe a Jewish ascetic community in the time of Jesus that was committed to celibacy! Here you have an entire community that viewed marriage as an evil to be avoided. (No wonder they didn t last long, relatively speaking. As someone has said, Celibacy isn t hereditary! ) In addition to the scrolls themselves, the ancient writers, Philo, Josephus and Hippolytus all agree on this point in their commentaries on the Essenes.

6 Perhaps the strongest argument for Jesus single status, apart from the fact that the Gospels say absolutely nothing about his alleged marriage, is the case that Paul makes for the rights of apostles: Don t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord s brothers and Cephas? (1 Cor. 9:5). If the brothers of Jesus (James and Jude) were married, and that was an important precedent, if the Lord himself (Paul s customary way of referring to Jesus) had been married, it would have clinched the argument altogether. Clearly he couldn t make that case, however, because he knew as everyone else did that Jesus was unmarried! While we are in the New Testament, let me call attention to the one historical claim made by Brown that has some truth in it (though, not surprisingly, it is seriously distorted for the sake of Brown s attack and advocacy). It comes after the Holy Grail is revealed to be Mary Magdalene, and her popular epithet as the prostitute is brought up: Magdalene was no such thing. That unfortunate misconception is the legacy of a smear campaign launched by the early Church. The Church needed to defame Mary Magdalene in order to cover up her dangerous secret her role as the Holy Grail. The New Testament never does refer to her as a prostitute. That tradition began some five hundred years later when people began identifying her with the sinful woman who anointed the feet of Jesus in Luke 7: Brown gets that part of the story right, though the rest of his claim is entirely specious. Now let s make another chronological step forward to the Gnostic gospels that Brown makes so much of in his conspiracy theory. His favorite is The Gospel of Philip, and not surprisingly, because it speaks of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and her special relationship with him. It claims that Mary was loved by Jesus more than any of the male disciples, and that he kissed her often. The Gospel of Philip is one of the books discovered in Egypt in what is called the Nag Hammadi Library. These works are all examples of Gnostic literature from the second and third centuries A.D. Prior to the discovery of these documents, our only knowledge of Gnosticism was what we learned from Church Fathers from that era who unanimously condemned it as heresy. The Nag Hammadi Library has enabled us to learn about Gnosticism first hand. And what do we see there? The New Age movement loves these books because they oppose the views found in the books of the New Testament. Brown wants us to believe that they support his views on the sacred feminine and goddess worship. The truth of the matter is far from that, however. Gnosticism uniformly believed that the physical, material world was evil. Salvation lay in finding secret ways of transcending and escaping it. Like the Essene community at Qumran, the Gnostics held a very low view of women. Women were regarded as defective males. Androgyny was viewed as an ideal for them. Thus, in the most popular of the Nag Hammadi gospels, The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus reportedly says this about Mary Magdalene (When you read it, you will no doubt find yourself asking how in the world this comports with Brown s claim about Mary!): Simon Peter said to them: Let Mary go out from among us, because women are not worthy of the Life. Jesus said, See, I shall lead her, so that I will make her male, that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. First of all, if Mary had been married to Jesus, as Brown insists these Gnostic gospels teach, we would expect him to say to Peter: Peter, we re talking about my wife here! Of course I m not going to make her leave! Instead he agrees with Peter that her femininity is a problem (her primary obstacle to entering the Kingdom of heaven!), and his solution is not to marry her so that she gets a ticket in, but to transform her into a male. Is it any wonder that the Church rejected this? Thank God it did!

7 Brown claims that until the council of Nicea in 325 A.D., the Church had believed Jesus was a mortal, with no trappings of deity. This quote is representative: My dear... until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet... a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal. (p. 233) Only someone with no knowledge of the pre-constantinian history of Christianity could make such a claim. Allow me once again to point out an extreme irony created by Brown s historical ignorance. Not only did the mainstream Christian tradition affirm the deity of Christ, it was affirmed (albeit in a distorted manner) by the very Gnostic community that Brown wants us to believe held the truth about Jesus, that he was a mortal prophet! Ironically (for Brown and his claims) the Gnostic documents found at Nag Hammadi if anything -- affirm the divinity of Christ, but not his true humanity. We find here what scholars refer to as a docetic view of Christ (from the Greek verb, dokeo, which means to seem or to appear ). Influenced by the Greek dualistic world view of the day which saw the spiritual as good and the physical and material world as evil, the Gnostics could not bring themselves to believe that the Son of God, who came from the realm of the spirit, could truly connect with the physical realm. He only appeared to be human, they contended. Although I could give you pages of evidence at this point which demonstrate a belief in the deity of Christ within the mainstream Christian tradition leading up to the council of Nicea, the evidence from the very Nag Hammadi Library upon which Brown bases much of his claim makes the case against him. We could add to this that even the most radical critics of the New Testament (including The Jesus Seminar) argue that within fifty years of Jesus death, his second generation followers had deified him, replacing a mortal prophet with a mythological Son of God. Around the turn of the first century, not at the council of Nicea in 325 A.D. Do you see the significance of this? Even if we based our understanding of pre-constantinian Christianity on the Church s opponents in antiquity, and its severest scholarly critics in our own day, Brown s claims fall far short of the mark. Let s conclude this review of the historical claims of The Da Vinci Code by looking at two allegations made about the council of Nicea itself. The first is that there was an extremely close vote on the divinity of Christ; the second is that the council chose which books should be in the New Testament, eliminating all of the books which had previously been accepted by the Church, and which affirmed only that Jesus was a great moral prophet. When Constantine became a Christian, he wanted to unite the Roman Empire around the Christian faith. Unfortunately, at the time, Christianity was divided. On the one side was the confessing Church which had always affirmed the deity and humanity of Christ. On the other side was an increasingly popular, but new, view advanced by an Alexandrian Christian by the name of Arius. Arius affirmed the deity of Christ, but in effect made him a lesser deity than the Father. He believed that the Son of God derived his deity from the Father, whose deity is the Original. He was willing to say that the deity of the Son was of a similar nature with the Father, but not of the same nature as the Father s. The difference between the Greek words describing these two positions was just one letter: an iota. (Hence the saying, An iota s worth of difference. ) The debate was not about whether Christ, as the Son of God, was divine, but how to understand his deity in relation to God the Father. Brown isn t even playing in the same ballpark with his spurious claims. Constantine needed a united Church to advance a united Empire, and so he called bishops together from both east and west to settle this theological dispute. They met in Nicea (in modern day southern Turkey) in 325 A.D. Brown has Sir Leigh Teabing, British Royal Historian, make these claims in a conversation with Sophie Neveu (p. 234):

8 At this gathering... many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and of course, the divinity of Jesus. My dear... until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet... a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal. Jesus establishment as the Son of God was officially proposed and voted on by the council of Nicaea. Hold on. You re saying Jesus divinity was the result of a vote? A relatively close vote at that.... Nonetheless, establishing Christ s divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman empire and to the new Vatican power base. By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, an entity whose power was unchallengeable. It was all about power.... Christ as Messiah was critical to the functioning of the Church and state. Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power. The one thing we can agree on is that, whatever his personal beliefs may have been, Constantine clearly saw the great benefit of a united Church for his vision of a Christian empire, and this was, beyond any doubt, a powerful motivation behind the convening of this ecumenical council. But the rest is pure fabrication on Brown s part. The Arian controversy, which was the heart of the council s deliberations, was not about one side holding to Jesus as a mortal prophet, and the other side claiming deity for him. As we have seen, it was a debate about how the deity of Christ should be understood in relationship to the deity of God the Father. Nor was it a close vote, as Brown has Teabing claim. While there is some variation in the evidence about how many bishops were in attendance (The most commonly held figure is some 300), in the end there were only two dissenters: Theonas of Marmarica and Secundus of Ptolemais, who were exiled and branded as heretics. Finally, having alleged that Constantine foisted a new view of Jesus upon Christianity, Brown claims that the Emperor then used the council of Nicea to create an official New Testament with books that supported his view, eliminating many others that did not. According to Teabing: Because Constantine upgraded Jesus status almost four centuries after Jesus death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man. To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke. From this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history.... 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. (p. 234) If this weren t so sad (because so many people will believe it), this would be laughable. We possess all of the rulings of the council, along with the written reports of some of the bishops who attended, and the issue of which books should be in the New Testament never arose. It was never discussed at all! Both sides of the debate in the Arian controversy used the same New Testament documents to argue their cases. It was the one thing that they had in common! Nor is it true that Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible as a result of this council. Talk about a hoax. Here it is!

9 It is true, as Teabing says, The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. (p. 231) There was a process of collection that took place over an extended period of time. And there was some debate about some books (such as Hebrews and the Book of Revelation). But there was never any disagreement about the four Gospels. Although the final collection and authoritative list of all twenty-seven books of the New Testament came much later (found for the first time in 367 A.D. in a pronouncement by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, and not in 325 A.D. under Constantine, as Brown claims!), the process began much earlier. The earliest collections were the letters of Paul, and the Fourfold Gospel (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). By the end of the first century these four Gospels began to circulate together in codex (book) form. While there were books that were popular among Christians that were not included in the New Testament (such as The Shepherd of Hermas and The Epistle of Barnabas), and early Christian writers knew and quoted from other Gospels (The Gospel of Hebrews and The Gospel of Peter), no others were given the normative status of the four Gospels. New Testament scholar, Paul Achtemeier of Union Theological Seminary (hardly a bastion of fundamentalism!) sums up this early consensus on the four Gospels: "From these writings it is evident that the four canonical Gospels not only pretty well exhausted the reliable traditions about the sayings of Jesus, but also that all four were already well known in widely scattered Christian communities. A consensus had therefore emerged by the end of the first century that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were primary sources for, and authoritative expressions of, the Christian faith." The first canon (authoritative list of books regarded as Scripture) was made not by mainstream Christians, but by the Gnostic teacher and leader, Marcion, in ca. 144 A.D. His Bible included only an edited version of Luke, and ten letters of the apostle Paul. There are two ironies to this. First, to Brown s chagrin, it was not mainstream Christians who were the first to make an authoritative list of Scriptures which excluded other books, it was the very Gnostic community championed by Brown. The second and more significant irony is that Marcion himself a teacher with strong Gnostic leanings did not include any of the Gnostic literature that Brown contends was excluded from the New Testament under Constantine! It was Marcion and his truncated Bible that forced mainstream Christianity to respond in kind. Thus, from the middle of the second century on, lists of books regarded as authoritative for Christian faith began to circulate. Although there were occasional differences of opinion on some books, the four Gospels are on every list, and no others are. Here are some of these lists and their approximate dates, all of which pre-date the council of Nicea: The Muratorian Fragment (ca. 170); Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200); Origen (beginning of third century) In conclusion, critiquing Dan Brown s historical claims in The Da Vinci Code is kind of like critiquing the claims of the Flat Earth Society or a Holocaust Conspiracy club. They are easy targets. There is no credible evidence to support them, and a mountain of evidence against them. Sadly, however, the vast majority of those who will read his book, and will believe its fictional claims to be true, will never know the truth of the matter. I don t flatter myself by thinking that a response like mine will ever get much attention or a very wide distribution, but I would like to encourage you to pass this critique on to others who might be interested. My confident hope is that the truth, ultimately, will prevail! For more information about Dayspring Center for Christian Studies, click or go to: