SUMMARY: The reader is meant to be swept along with the
belief that the Bible is a male plot against women,
and the real Jesus was a feminist before his time.
‘Real Christianity’ is not what William Wilberforce
thought it was — evangelicalism — but a mixture
of goddess worship with what Brown thinks is
gnosticism.
Animated by paranoia and armed with a
conspiratorial view of history, Dan Brown draws
his readers into the “real” facts — that Jesus had
sexual relations with Mary Magdalene, that the
Bible was decided upon in the days of the emperor
Constantine (who died in A.D. 337), and that in
325 the Council of Nicaea voted that Jesus was
divine, in a kind of ecclesiastical promotion, all
to serve the interests of the male bishops.
By PETER BARNES
DAN BROWN’S ‘historical’ novel The
Da Vinci Code was published in 2003,
and has been at the top of the bestseller
lists ever since.
A year after its
publication, it had sold almost six million hardback
copies. The Sydney Morning Herald on 25-27 March
2005 reported that 25 million copies had been sold
in 44 languages.
The movie is due for release in 2006 directed by
Ron Howard. The book is a gripping murder mystery,
with an extraordinary number of events compressed
into a period of little more than 24 hours. As a
thriller, it succeeds at one level, with each of the 105
chapters (followed by an epilogue) ending in such a
way that the reader feels compelled to read on.
With suspense, conspiracies, and a touch of
romance (albeit more gnostic than physical!), it is a
real page-turner. Having said that, the plot is clever
but contrived, the story line is far-fetched, and the
ending is particularly lame.
The message of the novel is that, in the words
of Sir Leigh Teabing, “almost everything our fathers
taught us about Christ is false”. Or, in the words of
Robert Langdon, “every faith in the world is based
on fabrication”. “Those who truly understand their
faith understand the stories are metaphorical”.
The reader is meant to be swept along with the
belief that the Bible is a male plot against women,
and the real Jesus was a feminist before his time.
‘Real Christianity’ is not what William Wilberforce
thought it was — evangelicalism — but a mixture
of goddess worship with what Brown thinks is
gnosticism.
Animated by paranoia and armed with a
conspiratorial view of history, Dan Brown draws
his readers into the “real” facts — that Jesus had
sexual relations with Mary Magdalene, that the
Bible was decided upon in the days of the emperor
Constantine (who died in A.D. 337), and that in
325 the Council of Nicaea voted that Jesus was
divine, in a kind of ecclesiastical promotion, all
to serve the interests of the male bishops. Mary
Magdalene herself is supposed to be the Holy
Grail — a secret guarded by the Priory of Sion.
One
can understand the sarcasm even of the extreme liberal, John Dominic Crossan, who has quoted the
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.
THE DEITY OF CHRIST AND THE
COUNCIL OF NICAEA
Sir Leigh Teabing, who appears initially as the
eccentric English historian of the Holy Grail, makes
the most unhistorical claim concerning the Council
of Nicaea in A.D. 325: “until that moment in history,
Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal
prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man
nevertheless. A mortal”.
Sophie Neveu’s breathless response is: “Hold
on. You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a
vote?” Undeterred, Teabing pontifi cates on without
batting an eyelid: “A relatively close vote at that”.
He even adds that the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag
Hammadi texts reveal a human Jesus.
The reader is meant to understand that Sophie
Neveu has just been initiated into what her name
implies — “new wisdom”.
How do we unpack all that? What is history
and what is fi ction? The short answer is that it is
almost entirely fi ction. It is true that there was a
Council of Nicaea in 325. After that, Teabing gets
nothing right.
The council was called because a presbyter
named Arius, who worked in Alexandria in Egypt,
came to the view that Christ is the fi rst created
being. About the year 318 Arius was busy preaching
that God created Christ, then the Holy Spirit, then
the world.
Like the modern day Jehovah’s Witnesses,
Arius viewed Christ as the highest of the angels,
not the divine Word made fl esh. Whatever Arius’
defi ciencies as a theologian, he certainly did not
teach that Jesus was simply a mortal prophet.
Neither side in the debate believed anything
remotely as low key as that.
Nor was the vote a relatively close one. We are
not sure how many bishops were at Nicaea as no
minutes have survived.
Eusebius thought that 250 bishops attended the council but Sozomen put the
fi gure at 300.
How many supported Arius?
Sozomen
writes that 17 supported Arius at the opening of the
council, but only fi ve bishops refused to sign the
creed and/or the attached anti-Arian anathemas.
So it seems that Teabing’s mathematical skills rival
his expertise in history.
What about the Dead Sea Scrolls, which
were discovered in 1947? They predate the New
Testament, and unless one suffers from the same
sort of hallucinations that have beleaguered the
career of Barbara Thiering, one must conclude
— not surprisingly — that they simply do not
mention Jesus. In Barbara Thiering’s absurd theory,
John the Baptist is the “Teacher of Righteousness”
mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Jesus is the
“Wicked Priest”.
The Nag Hammadi texts are different, however.
They come from the second century and later, and
are full of references to Christ. Gnosticism is a
dualistic view of life, where spirit is seen as divine,
and matter (fl esh) as evil. This means that the
gnostics rejected the incarnation, and in the gnostic
scheme of things Christ is a divine spirit, not God
made man. The gnostic Christ, like Leigh Teabing’s,
is a long way from the Christ of the gospels, but for
different reasons.
THE TRANSMISSION OF THE BIBLE
Teabing explains that the Bible is a work of
man: “The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven”.
His claim is that “it has evolved through countless
translations, additions and revisions”. Teabing
asserts that there were over 80 gospels, but
Constantine ordered a new Bible and had all the
earlier gospels burnt. He also refers to a “legendary
Q document”.
In reply, a number of points need to be made:
(a) The Bible has not evolved through translations.
Translations usually go back to the early Hebrew
and Greek texts. A worthwhile translation is not a
translation of a translation.
(b) There is some genuine debate over some
verses, but there is not one Christian doctrine
under threat in this debate.
All the major Christian doctrines — such as the resurrection of Christ
— are taught in many places in scripture.
(c) There are over 5,000 complete and about
8,000 or more incomplete Greek manuscripts, plus
quotations from the early Church Fathers, plus early
translations into other languages besides Greek.
That is a huge number of manuscripts. There is
no other piece of ancient literature which comes
anywhere near that. For Caesar’s Gallic War, for
example, there are 9 or 10 good manuscripts. That
is typical for ancient writers, but not for the New
Testament. The New Testament translator has more
manuscripts to deal with than he can reasonably
handle.
(d) There were only ever four gospels. In his
Against Heresies Irenaeus of Lyons — whose
writings fl ourished around A.D. 180 — contributed
to the emerging pattern of orthodoxy. He asserted
that there were only four gospels because there
were only four world zones, four winds, and four
faces on the cherubim. His reasoning may seem
less than incontrovertible, but the important thing
is that, speaking for the church, he was certain
that there were only ever four authentic and
authoritative gospels. They were accepted well
before Constantine was even born.
(e) Q is a hypothetical document referring to
material common to Matthew and Luke but not
in Mark. Its supposed existence is of almost no
consequence to biblical criticism. One may accept
or dismiss that Q exists, and still hold to the full
authority of scripture — and vice versa.
THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS
Brown is relying on the so-called Gnostic
Gospels, none of which can be dated in the fi rst
century and none of which can be regarded as
reliable, let alone authoritative. He specifi cally
mentions The Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of
Mary Magdalene. His assertion, through Teabing,
is that the gnostics remained faithful to the original
history of Christ. They also supposedly tell of
Christ kissing Mary on the lips often. In fact, the
text of the Gospel of Philip is quite broken and
dislocated, and reads: “And the companion of the
[…] Mary Magdalene. […loved] her more than
[all] the disciples [and used to] kiss her [often] on
her […].”
One may assume that it is Jesus who is kissing
Mary, but it does not say that it is on her mouth.
Greeting someone with a holy kiss was common
practice in the early church (e.g. Rom.16:16). If more
is meant, one needs to recall the gnostic practice
of allegorising scripture. The gnostics relied on
“hidden” meanings, and one of their practices
was the so-called “bridal chamber” where the
physical represents the spiritual. The text is meant
to be read allegorically. Nevertheless, the main
point must remain that, even if the Gospel of Philip
was trying to say something serious about literal
history — which is unlikely — its credibility rating
is not high.
Brown gives the wrong impression of the
gnostics. Because of their dualism, the gnostics
rejected the humanity of Christ. Christ appears
rather like the old Phantom — “the ghost who
walks”.
For example, in the Acts of John it is said of Jesus: “I will tell you another glory, brethren;
sometimes when I meant to touch him I encountered
a material, solid body; but at other times again
when I felt him, his substance was immaterial and
incorporeal, and as if it did not exist at all.” His
footprint never appeared on the ground.
To the dualistic gnostic, God could not be the
creator; the Word could not become fl esh and dwell
among us; Christ could not suffer on the cross; and
the body could not be redeemed. It was widely
believed in gnostic circles that Christ did not suffer
on the cross but escaped his body, and laughed at
the ignorance of those who thought that he had
been crucifi ed.
All the gnostic writings are to be dated far later
than the New Testament. The Gospel of Philip, for
example, dates from about AD 250.
Some modern scholars with agendas, such as
Elaine Pagels and Karen King, think that the gnostics
Footnotes:
About the Author...
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Appeared in Issue 21.1 CETF NR 35 April 2006
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Monday, October 09, 2006
