Saturday April 29 11:36 AM ET
A line from Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" tells you why it's
easily the most disputed religious novel of all time: "Almost
everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false."
With 46 million copies in print, "Da Vinci" has long been a
headache for Christian scholars and historians, who are worried
about the influence on the faith from a single source they regard
as wrong-headed.
Now the controversy seems headed for a crescendo with the release
of the movie version of "Da Vinci" May 17-19 around the world.
Believers have released an extraordinary flood of material
criticizing the story books, tracts, lectures and Internet sites
among them. The conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei,
portrayed as villainous in the story, is among those asking Sony
Corp. to issue a disclaimer with the film.
Bart Ehrman, religion chair at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, likens the phenomenon to the excitement in the 19th
century when deluded masses thought Jesus would return in
1844.
The novel's impact on religious ideas in popular culture, he says,
is "quite unlike anything we've experienced in our
lifetimes."
To give just one example, Ben Witherington III of Asbury
Theological Seminary is following up the criticisms of the novel in
"The Gospel Code" with lectures in Singapore, Turkey and 30 U.S.
cities. He's given 55 broadcast interviews.
Assaults on "Da Vinci" don't just come from evangelicals like
Witherington, or from Roman Catholic leaders such as Chicago's
Cardinal Francis George, who says Brown is waging "an attack on the
Catholic Church" through preposterous historical claims.
Among more liberal thinkers, Harold Attridge, dean of Yale's
Divinity School, says Brown has "wildly misinterpreted" early
Christianity. Ehrman details Brown's "numerous mistakes" in "Truth
and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code" and asks: "Why didn't he simply
get his facts straight?"
The problem is that "Da Vinci" is billed as more than mere
fiction.
Brown's opening page begins with the word "FACT" and asserts that
all descriptions of documents "are accurate."
"It's a book about big ideas, you can love them or you can hate
them," Brown said in a speech last week. "But we're all talking
about them, and that's really the point."
Brown told National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition" during a 2003
publicity tour he declines interviews now that his characters and
action are fictional but "the ancient history, the secret
documents, the rituals, all of this is factual." Around the same
time, on CNN he said that "the background is all true."
Christian scholars beg to differ. Among the key issues:
_Jesus' divinity.
Brown's version in "Da Vinci": Christians viewed Jesus as a mere
mortal until A.D. 325 when the Emperor Constantine "turned Jesus
into a deity" by getting the Council of Nicaea to endorse divine
status by "a relatively close vote."
His critics' version: Larry Hurtado of Scotland's University of
Edinburgh, whose "Lord Jesus Christ" examines first century belief
in Jesus' divinity, says that "on chronology, issues, developments,
and all the matters asserted, Brown strikes out; he doesn't even
get on base."
He and others cite the worship of Jesus in epistles that Paul wrote
in the 50s A.D. One passage teaches that Jesus, "though he was in
the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be
grasped" and became a man (Philippians 2:6).
Historians also say the bishops summoned to Nicaea by Constantine
never questioned the long-held belief in Jesus' divinity. Rather,
they debated technicalities of how he could be both divine and
human and approved a new formulation by a lopsided vote, not a
close one.
_The New Testament.
Brown's version: "More than 80 gospels were considered for the New
Testament" but Constantine chose only four. His new Bible "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." The Dead Sea Scrolls and
manuscripts from Nag Hammadi, Egypt, were "the earliest Christian
records," not the four Gospels.
Critics: Historians say Christians reached consensus on the
authority of the first century's four Gospels and letters of Paul
during the second century. But some of the 27 New Testament books
weren't universally accepted until after Constantine's day.
Constantine himself had nothing to do with these decisions.
Some rejected writings are called gospels, though they lack the
narrative histories that characterize the New Testament's four.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were earlier and won wide consensus as
memories and beliefs from Jesus' apostles and their
successors.
The rejected books often portrayed an ethereal Jesus lacking the
human qualities depicted in the New Testament Gospels the exact
opposite of Brown's scenario. Gnostic gospels purported to contain
secret spiritual knowledge from Jesus as the means by which an
elite could escape the material world, which they saw as corrupt.
They often spurned Judaism's creator God and the Old
Testament.
On the question of mass burning of texts deemed heretical, Ehrman
of North Carolina says there's little evidence to support that
claim. Rejected books simply disappeared because people stopped
using them, and nobody bothered to make new copies in an age long
before the printing press.
The Dead Sea Scrolls? These were Jewish documents, not Christian
ones. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts? With one possible exception,
these came considerably later than the New Testament Gospels.
_ Jesus as married.
Brown's version: Jesus must have wed because Jewish decorum would
"virtually forbid" an unmarried man. His spouse was Mary Magdalene
and their daughter inaugurated a royal bloodline in France.
Critics: First century Jewish historian Josephus said most Jews
married but Essene holy men did not. The Magdalene myth only
emerged in medieval times.
Brown cites the Nag Hammadi "Gospel of Philip" as evidence of a
marriage, but words are missing from a critical passage in the
tattered manuscript: "Mary Magdalene (missing) her more than
(missing) the disciples (missing) kiss her (missing) on her
(missing)."
Did Jesus kiss Mary on the lips, or cheek or forehead? Whatever,
Gnostics would have seen the relationship as platonic and
spiritual, scholars say.
James M. Robinson of Claremont (Calif.) Graduate School, a leading
specialist, thinks the current popularity of Mary Magdalene "says
more about the sex life (or lack of same) of those who participate
in this fantasy than it does about Mary Magdalene or Jesus."
The whole "Da Vinci" hubbub, Witherington says, shows "we are a
Jesus-haunted culture that's biblically illiterate" and harbors
general "disaffection from traditional answers."
But he and others also see a chance to inform people about the
beliefs of Christianity through the "Da Vinci" controversy.
"If people are intrigued by the historical questions, there are
plenty of materials out there," Yale's Attridge says.
British Justice Peter Smith, who recently backed Brown against
plagiarism charges, perhaps best summed up the situation in his
decision:
"Merely because an author describes matters as being factually
correct does not mean that they are factually correct. It is a way
of blending fact and fiction together to create that well known
model 'faction.' The lure of apparent genuineness makes the books
and the films more receptive to the readers/audiences. The danger
of course is that the faction is all that large parts of the
audience read, and they accept it as truth."
___
"Da Vinci" publicity: http://www.davincicode.com
Catholic site: http://www.jesusdecoded.com
Evangelical site:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/special/davincicode.html
