The JPMorgan ‘Technology06’ show for which I was webcast editor in San Francisco finally finished up Wednesday afternoon. After the loadout, or most of it, I and four of the other techs from the show caught the red eye flight back to New York. I dumped clothes into a drawer and crashed for several hours. Despite the work schedule of the last month, I only slept a few hours… the day was just too nice to miss. Call it New York City Spring. A lovely temperature, just a nice humidity, deep blue skies and a lot of smiling faces.
After a bite to eat, some catch up on my work log and a few business calls, I decided to take myself out to a movie in Times Square. Yes, I finally get around to the title line. It was the ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
The biggest question I have after watching the movie is: “What the hell is all the fuss about???” This is a decently enough done adventure/conspiracy story, typical summer fare, not intended to be great literature or win Oscars. It is just fun. Given the infantile sensitivities of our politically correct, ‘do not dare hurt anyone’s feelings lest they cry’ era, they stuck in a bit of unnecessary dialogue to make really, really sure no one would feel slighted. Perry has already spoken of what the real Opus Dei is; and in the movie they are not the bad guys either. The bad guys are a secret inner circle which just happens to have some members there. A sort of ‘Catholic Illuminati’ as it were. Yet it is a real ‘Opus Dei’ believer who in the end saves our heroes through his belief in truth and justice.
As to the premise Mary Magdalene had a child by Jesus and she was spirited off to France and secret organizations have warred in the shadows over this for some two thousand years… I ask, if people are so terribly upset about this story, then what of the various Indiana Jones movies? Or any of a hundred novels and movies I have read or seen which use biblical history as a kick-off point for a roaring good yarn?
My conclusion is the people making noise about this movie need to get themselves unwound a bit.
Now a question. Skip the Magdalene story. Prove to me through historical, documented facts of known and cross checked authenticity and provenance that Jesus Christ never knocked up any of his adoring fans. Prove to me that prophet never got himself laid. Not once. Given two thousand years and eighty to a hundred generations, virtually all of humanity could have a bit of JC’s bloodline.
You’re sort of missing the point. One could no more prove that Jesus Christ did not have progeny, than one could prove that He is the Son of God. The issue is that it’s a grossly offensive suggestion to orthodox Christians, and it’s being pushed as part of a general cultural milieu in a West that for centuries was synonymous with Christendom. Hostility to Christianity is omnipresent among the cultural and social elite of Europe and America, and is made even less palatable by the way that same elite cowtows to demands to respect the religious sensibilities of Muslims and other more “exotic” religions. About the only people who get less respect, as the religious go, are Jews; and the sort of vicious insults they recieve outside the West are still off-limits inside it.
Cultural products like The DaVinci Code are ultimately expressions of ideas, with the power to convince. This power is particularly compelling given the way that imagination has been systematically subordinated to the instant gratification of television and movies (and dare I suggest the web of late?) for decades. The utter lack of historical knowledge, empiricism, and concern for nuance imparted by flawed education systems, with a prevailing tone of cynicism and skepticism in the broader culture, has made everyone “half-educated”. Common sense is not questioned but dismissed out of hand by those who fancy themselves intellectuals, while the common person lacks the intellectual discipline to develop anything beyond a shallow acquaintance with the big issues of the day. People are lazy and like to think of themselves as clever, and the prevailing unreflective culture panders to it in the worst sort of way.
There’s just a measure of what I call “esotericist pseudo-history” masquerading behind The DaVinci Code. Dan Brown himself is rather coy about it being entirely fictional, saying that there are “elements” that he hints have a broader truth. To a public unfamiliar with the history of the religion they nominally profess, and conditioned to respond favorably to any questioning of traditional beliefs, that sort of hint, hint approach is hard to put into perspective. Certainly the public, snookered by the so-called Gospel of Judas, has any real idea of the age-old Gnostic heresies that started this idea, much less why they were rejected as heresies by the early Church. Nor has all the sensationalist media accounts done anything to lay out the history behind the fraud that took in the authors of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, which is (absent a murderous Albino fanatic) the entire plot for the novel in the first place.
Brown certainly has his reasons for this, of course; by most accounts he’s a New Age, neo-pagan sort of earth worshipper who hates monotheism. One can, of course, defend his right to publish whatever he wants while deploring the consequences of such writing, which is exploitation of the enforced ignorance of the masses of people. One can, without intending to circumscribe his rights in any way, despise him and his message and amatuerish writing. Much like many here might react to neo-Marxist academic writing and analysis. Certainly there is a part of the opposition to him that wants his rights abridged in a coercive manner, but that’s human nature, and it doesn’t really ennoble him and his message so much as point out that there are dangers on all sides. Especially since his partisans would probably, on the whole, be as quick to demand censorship or boycotts of cultural products that they believe does not favor their ideology.
At any rate, to simply ignore a book that sold 40 million copies and is still going, and which was made into a Hollywood blockbuster, would be infeasible from the perspective of any serious Christian leadership. Which is why the Anglicans seem to have been rather quiet on it… Ah, at any rate, I think everyone here should agree a voluntary boycott is within the rights of people to organize. Also that people who take bold and controversial stands should not be immune to criticism over them, even if they are protected from any coercion. As a cultural matter, and a matter of religious faith, many libertarians may not just get the percieved stakes involved, and so be it. Unless you have a dog in the fight, so to speak, in a war of influence to convince people to take up Christianity or to take up atheism, it probably shouldn’t matter to you either way, as long as no one starts bringing the government into the fray.
Because DVC author Dan Brown is saying that his historic backdrop is true.
Spielberg didn’t put a bunch of urban legends in Raiders and claim they’re true. He did get one fact wrong, when Brody claims the Ark was a WMD: “The Bible speaks of the Ark leveling mountains and laying waste in entire regions. An Army that carries the Ark before it… is invincible.” The Bible does speak of unauthorized personnel getting zapped for peering into the Ark (1 Samuel 6:19), which is pretty much what happens near the end of the film.
But then, Chris, I am a total atheist and see no difference between one unsubstantiated pseudo-history and another. The only interest they hold for me is entertainment value.
I am of the Robert Hienlien school:
“If you can’t say it in mathematics, it isn’t science; it’s opinion.”
Therefore, this article, and all about it are merely opinions. There are few, if any, facts in anyone’s corner here. Hell, we are barely certain that there was a real historical person named Jesus Christ. There is not much in the written historical record that is contempory with his life… in fact, I am not sure there is *ANYTHING* recorded from his lifetime. I will not play expert here… but is there anything surviving from the Roman records? We know Pilate was really there, but are there any memoirs, histories, documents from his office? Is there anything at all outside of a small circle of friends who could just as easily have made it all up? I am not saying that happened, only that I am unaware of any historical corroboration.
“You’re sort of missing the point. One could no more prove that Jesus Christ did not have progeny, than one could prove that He is the Son of God.”
Exactly. So if you are not a true believe (and I am not) then there is no point, it is all just story and one story is as good as another because none of them are based on fact.
Faith is a matter of faith, not proofs. Otherwise, in the full presence of facts, no faith would be necessary.
What Chris said…
…not much to add other than I found the book a welcome distraction on a long-houl flight, although occassionally exasperating as even the ‘historical facts’ were painfully misapplied.
Talking about Da Vinci Code…. Inayat Bunglawala of the MCB posting some stuff about that, but … he got busted! See all here:
http://nordish.net/blog/?p=96
An email sent by what we believe to be Inayat to LGF:
I was about to delete the Nordish comments as off-topic but in a convoluted way they actually do relate to the Da Vinci Code if you read the LGF article.
The popularity of the DVC is to a certain extent revenge for the portrayal of witches, pagans and other heretics in popular culture over the last 2000 years. People were slaughtered because of the ideas pushed by the Church and placed in popular culture until the last 100 years. And I would hasten to add no Christian will get killed by someone watching the DVC.
As I (along with very many other people) have pointed out there are all sorts of historical errors in the film (for example the Templars were all attacked on a single day all over France, not all over Europe, and the person behind the operation was King Philip the Fair of France not the weak Pope) – but the central point of the film is not a problem.
As Jesus (occording to mainstream Christian belief) was “fully man” as well as “full God” if he got married and there was a child it would in no way undermine the idea of the incarnation.
It might (as I pointed out in a comment on Perry’s article) have been a problem for Christians in the Greek speaking world (as the Greeks, at least in mainstream Greek cities like Athens, both regarded women as wildly inferior and made a big distinction between body and spirit) but it would pose no great theological problem for Christians at all.
By the way (as I, along with many others, have often pointed out) the Roman Catholic Church backed away from the claim that Mary M. was the prostitute about forty years ago (if I remember rightly the claim was made in 591 – and was not about attacking Mary M. nor was it made as an infalible statement of doctrine – the Pope of the time was actually trying to say that anyone could reform and live a good life).
The exact position of Mary M. in the early Church has been a matter of deep debate since the discovery of various documents (the so called “Gnostic Gospels”) in the desert just after World War II.
No claim that Mary M. married Jesus or had a child – but a lot of evidence that the lady had a big role in the early Church.
This might, at some time, influence the debate on whether women can be priests.
However, Dan Brown has rather messed things up with all his, fictional, claims.
So anyone who now raises the matter of Mary M. can get hit with “you have been reading Dan Brown” which kills serious discussion.
“fully God” not “full God” – that typo was rather too important to be allowed to go uncorrected.
The point, Dale, is that the people upset over the movie do not consider both stories to be equally false. One of them is the redemptive mission of the Son of God, which is necessary to maintain in clarity because it is the path to the salvation of the soul. The other is a deliberate attack on Christian orthodoxy, that stems from ancient and refuted (within the confines of Christian theology) Gnostic accounts, and is based on a known hoax. As an atheist you might consider the matter to be no big deal at all, and the movie to be enjoyed on its merits disconnected from any message. But I think you at least ought to be able to see why a believing Christian would feel differently about it.
Chris: You have cut to the heart of the matter. I am not lessened by the fact that others believe things I do not. The point for me is, they should also accept that to me, this is just an interesting work of fiction, somewhat enjoyable for a late spring evening, and a great source of even more enjoyable bar debate.
I do not despise Christians or Moslems or any others. I only get bent out of shape when they wish to tell me what to think.
I fully appreciate your inputs to the story and I hope you can accept that any discussion I take part in will be completely from historical record, not from theology.
But I think you at least ought to be able to see why a believing Christian would feel differently about it.
What amazes me is that Christians (or the one frothing about this) do not realise that the more they go on about this movie the higher level of interest in generated. I remember when the novel was really no where; I read it because it looked interesting. I got it when it first came out in paperback (the first time) in the US.
I have to admit I thought the novel was decent but the stuff therein was not the slightest bit original.
I certainly understand your viewpoint, and don’t have anything against it; rather I’m trying to explain why the people you feel need to be unwound got that way in the first place. The people who think the story is a big deal have reasons for thinking that beyond just emotional reaction. It probably has been overstressed, but I don’t think atheists or New Agers are the people that are being targeted by protests against the film. Rather, the churches have the not unreasonable fear that a great many Christians will take the idea seriously because of the way it has been presented. Which should display about the level of theological education that the average Christian has, akin to the level of historical knowledge that the average John Bull or Jerry or Yank or Francois has. The hype is more a reaction (probably counterproductive, I grant) to a percieved challenge to the religious beliefs of those people who already identify as Christian, rather than just outrage over some new secular blasphemy.
Indiana didn’t try to make the Holy Grail nor the Ark as having some dirty past that would kind of make the Savior a sinner, a flawed human (like the rest of us.) That is the big difference.
There is an old saying about never talking about politics or religion with others if you don’t want an argument. This holds true when a movie comes out with an implication that people’s God is faulty.
They must be glad Christians are not Muslims, or is Tom Hanks to scared to make such a movie about Mohammed? I bet he is. So is Lucas. It’s real easy to slime those you know won’t do some real bad deeds.
And yes, words do hurt. Many a war started over words. What is that old saying?? “The pen is mighter that the sword.”
Dale,
I do adore Heinlein as well…and I use his quotes often enough that I should start paying royalties to his estate.
However, on the consideration of religion, mathematics, etc. Religions are axiomatic systems, in a sense. And like all axiomatic systems, axioms are well…axioms. They cannot be proven or disproven, but they are given with respect to the objects under reason. (Consider the variations on Euclid’s geometry, which essentially come down to holding or dropping an axiom or two. )
(This is where, of course, science and math differ. Science holds that the Universe is the ultimate arbiter of logic and that all “axioms” can be verified by empirical evidence.)
Christianity is a rather well-knit axiomatic system, probably because it’s been developed over the last 2 millenia and had most of the bugs worked out in early beta releases.
Now, having said that…I’ll second (as I often do) Paul Marks’ (that would make it a *re-Mark* I think!) that even if JC was bumping uglies with M Magdelene, I don’t see a radical shift in the doctrine of Christianity. Perhaps I’m missing something, though.
Chris (and apparently a fair number of other Christians) clearly regard this movie as some kind of attack on Christianity, but I don’t really understand why. Can somebody explain just what it is that’s so awful about the idea that Jesus was married and had kids?
The problem with asserting that Jesus was married and had sex is not that there is anything sinful about either practice, nor that Jesus as God “in the flesh” could not have done either. It is rather that the historical record we do have, and a rather well-attested record at that — on which Christians depend for what we perceive to be the truth that led us to salvation — would seem to rule out that possibility. So our reaction to Brown’s book and the resultant movie.
Referring to the documents which now comprise the New Testament, along with a few references by other near-contemporaries both in and out of the church, is the closest anyone can come to proving “…through historical, documented facts of known and cross checked authenticity and provenance that Jesus Christ never knocked up any of his adoring fans.”
Well, Jesus having progeny would introduce all sorts of theological issues best left avoided. There’s no real support for such an idea in the Gospels, which are recognized by orthodox Christianity as the definitive and divinely inspired accounts of His life and mission. It contradicts two thousand years of Christian understanding of the life of Christ, and in some sense would make Him “too” human. The divine nature of Christ and His relationship to the Father and the Holy Spirit caused no end of theological chaos, and it was a very delicately settled issue. Suffice it to say that there is no room in the Christian understanding of Christ for Him to have “gotten it on”, nor is there any real evidence in sources accepted as authentic by Christians to support such a postulate.
The Gnostic gospels that alleged a more personal relationship with Mary Magdalene, one must keep in mind, were considered heretical for very good reasons. Though, no gnostic would suggest that they had sex or children, as procreation was an evil furthering the creation of the demi-urge masquerading as the God of the Jews. The Gnostic gospels presented a view of Christ incompatible with any continuity from the Old Testament, denied the trinitarian nature of God, and added in a contempt for the world that even the often ascetic and otherworldly early Church found impossible to reconcile with its idea of creation. And of course the very idea of Jesus presenting “esoteric”, hidden knowledge meant only for a select elite really is quite incompatible with the straightforward preaching and simple parables presented in the Gospel as the way Christ spread his message.
The idea that Christ had progeny really goes back no further than the Priory of Sion hoax perpetrated by Pierre Plantard from the 1960s onward, culminating in the duping of a BBC documentary team that later published “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”. I feel pretty comfortable asserting that book contained the entire plot to The DaVinci Code, save the “divine feminine” neopagan aesthetic that Brown brought on board. That includes the idea of a conspiracy to hide the bloodline of Christ, as well as an evil Catholic conspiracy to destroy the truth. DaVinci figures prominently in the faked documents of the Priory, as do such unlikely Grandmasters as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Victor Hugo, and Debussy. Ultimately Plantard was forced under oath due to the appropriation of the name of one of Mitterand’s cronies in his elaborate forgeries; the judge was legally obliged to investigate everything remotely connected to Roger Pelat, and so Plantard was questioned and had to admit he had made the entire thing up.
His victims, I believe, accepted that Plantard had been a hoaxer but then argued that the hoax was an effort to discredit them launched by the real Priory, which seeks to unite Europe under the rule of a dynasty of Merovingian descendents who share the bloodline of God.
Taking this rather dubious history, Dan Brown added another hoary old chestnut, namely that Saint Paul and the Church twisted the “real” message of Christ into intolerant monotheism. The divinity of Christ is denied in The DaVinci Code, the Church is presented as knowingly twisting a progressive, enlightened, and merely human philosopher into a God incarnate to further their own power. The original goddess-worship mystery cult that Brown’s “Christ” propogated became an intolerant, misoygnistic, homophobic, knowledge-destroying monster. The Church is presented as venal, power-mongering instrument of deception single-handedly responsible for pretty much everything wrong with humanity. It’s basically the fluffiest-bunny neopagan approach to history possible, and that is really what irritates me about the entire thing. And so the issues involved in The DaVinci Code really are bigger than just “Christ married”, but rather that “Christianity is a false religion, and suppressed wholesome, natural worship of the divine feminine, making Europe into an ignorant, ravening monster of oppression”.
I’m sure the movie toned that down a great deal, and of course all the implications weren’t presented even in the book. But it does amount to a recasting of Christianity and European History into the mold that neopagan pseudo-history would force it, and the cultural-political aspects follow as a matter of course within that milieu. I’m not being very subtle, while the aesthetic in The DaVinci Code is more so; at least in the movie. But ideas and their presentation are all the more powerful for being subtly presented, in the background, and avoiding making clear the full implications of your revisionism makes it easier to draw people into it further than they would go if it were all presented up-front.
I wonder if a few decades hence our technology will be up to sequencing the blood stains from relics. If they are what they are claimed, then we have a literal sample of the blood of Jesus available for genetic comparison.
Now that is something I would find interesting.
Now, as to the problems Chris points out… that is indeed the problem with a system of logic which rests on a set of assumptions which may or may not be true. I agree with others however, that if we did actually find that the holy blood flowed in the veins of most of us, that philosophy would simply adapt to the situation. A religion does not last 2000 years by being a brittle structure.
And Christianity had better be adaptable because you never know what other documents are hidden out there in the desert. I do not think it conspiracy theory to say that the idea of heresy was the way in which the church got rid of any inconvenient facts or documents. The past we see today is what is left after generations of re-writing. Only the tiniest amount of real documentary history survived that. What is important about writing like the Gospel of Judas is not that it sheds real light on what happened in Jerusalem in 30AD or thereabout. It instead illuminates that there were many strains of Christianity at the time and the politically stronger one used power politics to crush the competition so thoroughly that its ideas and very existence were nearly removed from history.
The very fact this happened really makes me wonder what else was destroyed and does indeed leave me with almost no trust in the written history of the early Christian period. What we read is exactly what they wanted us to read, less a few scraps hear and there they missed.
Think long and hard on this, because there is a new religion out there which is growing in wealth and power and also playing with the historical record, although only via litigation and threats at the moment.
Okay, everybody seems to be missing why the Vatican would see JC’s bumping uglies with MM as some sort of threat. I’ll try to explain it as I see it (I was raised catholic, was an altar boy, got chased by pedo priests, etc, so I got a fairly heaping helping of what the Church is about).
The political conflict among the apostles after JC goes to heaven is primarily between three figures: Peter, whose faction claimed he was “the rock” upon which the Church would be built, James, the brother of JC, who founded the Jewish-Christian Church of James (which the crusaders levelled and executed all the members of when they took Jerusalem), and Mary Magdalen, one of six female followers of JC who for the most part financed his ministry (Mary of Bethany, Martha – sister of Lazarus, Suzanna, among others).
Peter was a known misogynist, he is documented in the bible as being resentful of the attention Jesus paid to Mary M. Whether this was because he was a fisherman (hardly a place that allowed women) or a closet gay who had the crushies on JC, or what I don’t know.
If Mary M was wife to JC and bore his kid, and his kids descendants married into the Merovingian line, then Peter and his line of Popes are not the closest representativs of JC on Earth, JC’s descendants are, including all the royal families of Europe. This would mean that the Church of England, whose head is Queen Lizzie, is being run by a descendant of JC, while the Vatican is not, so which is the legitimate Church?
This might be why the CoE is being rather silent on the topic…..
AID:
Yes, there’s a significant market for Christianity-bashing films. Very little of this market gets worked up over portrayals of witches and pagans. Heretics are another story, since heretics make up a large portion of this market in addition to folks who aren’t even nominally Christian.
The beginning of the end of the slaughter was the Anglosphere-led dissolution of state religion, the building blocks for which were the checks and balances over secular affairs that were instituted over time through reforms that predated the Enlightenment. As Christianity gradually reverted back to being a private-sector cultural entity where governments allowed it to do so, Christian sects became increasingly secure in their continued existence. This threat diminished, competing sects could eventually coexist. This mutual toleration eventually extended to non-Christian sects over time.
Medieval superstitition linked all sorcery with a conscious allegiance with the Devil. (Such willful allegiance is not stated or implied in the Old Testament treatment of witchcraft.)People naturally react strongly to real or percieved threats to national security. The idea of terrorists summoning the power of ultimate evil to attack civilians scared the living daylights out of them.
While there were a few true sorcerers scattered about, witches, as defined by superstition, didn’t exist. (Or may not exist yet, if one counts the Antichrist as a witch.) I am not familiar with the history of European witch hunts, but I do know something about America’s first and last major witch hunt: it was ended on the grounds of due process and the nature of evidence, not on whether witches actually existed. I suspect that the demise of European witch hunts came about through a combination of dying superstition and increasing acceptance of objective evidence and the presumption of innocence, and that they ended more quickly in England than in the strong monarchies.
Nor will any Wiccans or Stevie Nicks get killed by someone watching The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. And Dan Brown will not get hunted down by Opus Dei – but they will fisk his behind. Ideology-based violence just ain’t that prevalent in the Anglosphere.
Starring as Pim Fortuyn could earn a fatwa from certain corners of the globe, however.
Oh, when I say “America’s first and last major witch hunt” I mean a literal witch hunt.
It is astounding to watch the idol worship of artists as if they’re Gods to be adored. No wonder artists like to legislate religiophobia, they need to knock down faith so as to take its place.
So many worshippers at the feet of Hollywood’s church of useful idots, the poet definately has its adoring fans by their balls.
I agree Alan. The rise of the modern secular state was one of the greatest gifts of European civilization to the world. Separation of church and state took away the direct authority of the church over everyone’s life, and in particular over those who had other or no religious beliefs. It allowed everyone to live in a relatively unthreatening environment, although not quite free of private coercion.
Law laid down by church’s can be quite arbitrary and spotty in application. A Bishop may have his way with young lads while everyone looks the other way, but a too individualistic young girl who likes cats may be burned at the stake… perhaps for refusing favors to the same said churchman.
As to witch craft… the whole modern idea of witchcraft was invented wholecloth by the Catholic church as a means of wiping out the remaining pockets of the old pre-Christian faiths. They tended to have women as herbalists and spirit doctors. This of course got out of hand in later years… such as the bread mold that is purported to have gotten everyone high in Salem and resulted in the murder-by-court deaths of young women.
The history of European Witch Hunts is long and bloody…after all there is infamous book which was used as a “guide” for hunting em’ down called the Malleus Mallificarum I would recomend Dr Leo Ruickbie’s book called Witchcraft Out of the Shadows if you are interested in their history in the Europe.
There are some who still those hate witches/witchcraft however.
For comprehensive Christian apologetics occasioned by the TDVC, see Mark D. Roberts (http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/davinciopportunity.htm). He does a good job of explaining, among other things, what it is that Christians might find troubling about the book/movie, so the link should be useful for believers and non-believers alike, who look for answers to the question “What is all the fuss about?”
On a personal note: I haven’t read the book, and may see the movie on DVD one day. If I do, I’ll probably like the thriller/conspiracy part, and wince at the religious content. What troubles me about it (though not to the level of “fuss”) is, that the “yarn” denies the divinity of Christ. As to it being harmless fiction, even the original poster can’t resist ending his post on a historical-theological taunt about proving the non-existence of any descendants of Christ. (There’s nothing wrong with that kind of taunt, it’s just because it illuminates the reasons for all the fuss that I bring it up.)
I only know one historian who mentions – Josephus, and the citation is controversial:
http://members.aol.com/FLJOSEPHUS/testimonium.htm
To answer your question, I don’t think it’s possible, after almost 2,000 years, to prove or disprove that a particular person did or didn’t have sex with someone.
Much documentary evidence was destroyed by the Roman war against the Jews, also documented by Josephus.
Roman sources are more clear on St. Paul’s travels, as he was accused of treason at one point, and appealed to the emperor (Nero), which was his right as a Roman citizen. The Gutenberg project has an interesting book regarding the late Roman empire which addresses some of this.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12875/12875.txt
Btw, just to avoid confusion between myself, Dale Amon, and yourself Dale XXXX, please use a surname. Otherwise it might start to sound like I am getting into conversations with myself.
I am finding those links very interesting and in particular:
http://members.aol.com/FLJOSEPHUS/LUKECH.htm
is worthy of a read.
This paragraph from Eisler makes it clear why I have so little faith in any early history of Christianity:
“Naturally, a party possessing the power to destroy obnoxious books will ipso facto be in a position to enforce minor omissions and alterations [8] in works in which only individual passages were felt to be objectionable. It is equally clear that owners of valuable manuscripts, whether private individuals, book-vendors, or officials in libraries and synagogues, should have preferred the excision of a few lines or certain alterations to the alternative of seeing their treasures devoured by the flames. Add to this the loss involved in the destruction of a whole Josephus in manuscript, and the laws imposing capital punishment on the concealed possession of writings hostile to Christianity [9], and the natural consequence will be obvious to every one. As a matter of fact, not a single Greek, Latin, Slavonic, or other Josephus text has come down to us which has not passed through the hands of Christian scribes and Christian owners. The numerous glosses and marginal notes, abounding in every single manuscript [10], fully bear out this statement.”
The ultimate problem with state religion is the underlying assumption that a religion’s right to exist comes from the State. An order that has Most Favored Religion status one day may be pronounced anathema the next. The Jesuits found that out the hard way.
Every group is hated by someone. There’s even a song about it.
As a mental exercise I looked at my own blogroll (ignoring actual blog content entirely) to see if I could have possibly survived the Reformation if blogs and I had existed back then. Hmmm…at least three uncloseted homosexuals, Catholics, Jews, a few atheists, a pagan or two, one Eastern Orthodox, non-Anglican protestants galore…yup, Henry VIII would have beheaded me for sure.
Actually, the sidebar link to Agence France-Presse might have been enough to attract Tudor wrath.
Just to throw in some interesting numbers. If we assume a generation has averaged 25 years over the last 2000 (this is on the high side almost certainly), we have passed through 80 generations since then. We can do some rough bracketing. if on the average, His descendants each have 1.1 surviving children, then after 80 generations there are about 2 million descendents. But this number is exceedlngly sensitive. If if climbs to as little as 1.31, nearly everyone on Earth is a related to Him.
The idea of a small number of surviving descendants is thus pretty absurd. The number is likely to be either zero or a very large number.
Oops, I wrote in the wrong number. For 1.1 it is 2048; for 1.2 it is the 2.1 million. For the curious, I am using a very simple exponential model of n^g, where is n is the average surviving offspring and g is the number of generations. Trivial and simplistic, but good enough to express a point.
Jaakko sez, “What troubles me about it (though not to the level of “fuss”) is, that the “yarn” denies the divinity of Christ.”
I don’t see that at all. TDVC doesn’t deny the divinity of Jesus at all. In fact, it makes him both holy and approachable. It is a fact that two gospels attempt to establish Jesus’ authority strictly from the fact that his parents descend from the House of David, which was a condition of prior Hebrew prophesies of the messiah (in addition to being born in Bethlehem). Therefore, by the official bible, Jesus was of royal blood, in addition to being Son of God. His royal blood was at least as important as the fact his mother had the so-called ‘virgin birth’ to establish his bona fides as ‘messiah’ to the apostles and other followers, especially given how important the House of David is to the relationship of Israel to God. Also given his royal blood, it is to be assumed that as eldest child of his family, that he would be expected to marry and have children of his own.
No, the only divinity being challenged by TDVC is that of the Vaticans right to rule the church.
TDVC does challenge the Biblical claim that the Christian church is the bride of Christ. To Christians, temporal marriage, is symbolic of the eternal relationship between Jesus and all believers. A Catholic source draws the appropriate conclusion:
I might also add that after 80 generations, the concept of descendant is pretty much meaningless unless you use Dawkin’s approach and look at the gene as the thing which is reproducing. The genes of JC would be thoroughly mixed back into the human gene pool by this time. It is more like talking about how many molecules of air you just breathed in which Julius Caesar also breathed in.
Interesting thread . . .
A pity Chesterton could not be present himself to comment on TDVC, but I believe a good read of his “Orthodoxy” would suffice in that regard. In the book, he takes up virtually all of the points discussed above, and comfortably remains “faithful,” as do I.
In fact, I more than suspect were GK around in person, he might sum the matter up in a few words:
“Who is the central character, without Whom there would be no story?”
If the Church (two or three–or together with the many generations of the faithfully departed) has the promise it will prevail against the gates of hell, then TDVC is hardly a concern. Far more crucial is the opportunity it presents in the positive.
That should be our response–use the opportunity TDVC presents us, rather than try to negate it.
🙂
I should add . . .
Heinlein’s “Job: A Comedy of Justice” was positively hilarious. I suppose saying that will bring some flack, but look at the collection of misfits Jesus collected and called to Himself. A healthy sense of humor has to be among the divine attributes!
🙂
Why can we rely on the Bible? Because it is as reliable as all the other documents out there we base our history on. The earliest records of Jesus’ life were written about a hundred years after His life (not hundreds of years later, as DVC claims), unlike many records of Roman rulers and ancient wars that were written at least two hundred years after it happened. We rely on these histories, why isn’t the Bible reliable? Gallic Wars was written much later after the events it records than the Bible was of its.
And it would have been extremely hard to corrupt the Bible. Thousands of copies of it existed all over the Roman Empire. To change one part you’d have to gather all these manuscripts up and switch it on every one.
Few of those documents are relied on historically beyond the point at which the archaeological record and other evidence supports them.
For example, Josephus’ accounts of Messada have been fairly well proven by the physical evidence at the site.
The historical record about the early Christian era is known to have been systematically tampered with in just such a way as you suggest, with the full power of the state and a death penalty for non-compliance. See the quote from the historian I posted earlier.
The most trustworthy sources of the past tend to be the lowly records and personal communications, where they survive.
Dale-
You should be *VERY* concerned if it becomes some accepted urban legend that JC had a family. This would surely give rise to a faction that would then work and bribe tirelessly to establish a hereditary church hierarchy. You have first hand experience with a hereditary monarchy. Can you imagine how much worse it would be when religion was added to the mix?
“The day will come when men will not tolerate sound doctrine. Instead they will surround themselves with teachers who will tell them anything their itching ears want to hear….” Apostle Paul
After 80 generations what constitutes being the lineal descendant? The genes are so mixed that everyone and noone is a descendant. There is no ‘bloodline’ per-se, just a few scattered genes randomly sprinkled through the human race.
As I said, about like counting the O2 molecules in your last breath which were also breathed by Julius Caesar at some point and about as significant.
I wish I could be as sanguine as you. Sunni and Shia have been killing each other for centuries over which descendent of Mohammed was the right one. If there were a progeny, and it was as dilute as one could imagine, then it would create even more opportunity for er, well opportunism and mischief. The Pope can only absolve sin. Imagine some one whose boosters claimed he/ she could grant salvation? Just look at the hystrionics of the kook political left which as now become the mainstream of the western left, and imagine some religious extremist gasoline to throwe on their fires of political extremism.
As to sharing DNA with JC, I suppose that would make Osama and Jerry Falwell brothers under the skin. Somehow this feels quite appropriate.
Can you really be that ill informed?
Let’s see….. Jerry Falwell and his followers have a program to ‘save’ homosexuals by accepting them into a Bible study program, with the intent to get them to become Christians. OBL and his followers tell them that unless they become suicide bombers, they must part with their heads. Read the Bible some time, you would be amazed what you could learn…. many of the first Christians were former prostitutes, both female and *male*….. ” and those that believe on Him become sons and daughters of the Most High God”.
Don’t know about you, but I would rather associate with Jerry and his followers than OBL.