Current System Configuration: Still sick >_< BGM: Brother in the Faith by JAM Project, SRW Alpha 3's ending theme. A mournful rock ballad that speaks of courage going on forever. A fitting end to the last game in SRW's Alpha saga.
Breakfast: Breadtalk's Cheese Floss bun.
Lunch: Breadtalk's HotChic spicy floss bun.
Dinner: Breadtalk's Earthquake Toast. Man, Breadtalk stuff is GOOD.
I'm sure most of my readers have read The Da Vinci Code. I have read it myself and enjoyed reading it. In fact, I couldn't put it down until I finished it at 2 AM. I plan on watching the movie when it comes out on Thursday, partly just so that I can say I watched it and partly because I want to see Audrey Tautou.
However, there are a few things I have to make clear, and in this I align myself with most Christian authorities that are speaking out against the book. However, the burden of proof rests upon us because Dan Brown and his predecessors seem to have compiled quite a lot of important historical facts that are used to support the arguments presented in the book. Thus, it's not enough to just pull rank and say that because the Church is the authority, it should be believed. Since the guns of history were pulled out and pointed at us, it is best to present true historical facts that will show everyone that Dan Brown's guns are not even loaded.
But wait, isn't The Da Vinci Code only a work of fiction? We shouldn't believe it in the first place! At first I was convinced of that. But after seeing two Dan Brown interviews, he says that he was at first skeptical of the whole conspiracy theory and sought to disprove it with his book, but after three trips to Paris, he "became a believer." The mere fact that he said the exact same thing in both interviews means this guy is serious. The intent of the book is not to just be a bestseller. He intends to make us all believe.
Now, I'm not saying he's an evil evil man and that his work sucks. I enjoyed reading his novels (I've read Da Vinci, and I've also read Angels and Demons, my favorite; Digital Fortress and Deception Point). Neither am I saying that the movie should be boycotted. That's just immature. If someone pulls logical-looking arguments against you, it's best if you counter them with your own.
Dan Brown raised quite a few points that Christians see as attacks:
-That Jesus was completely human, and not God at all, as portrayed in the Gnostic Gospels, so-called secret Gospels that were either excluded from Church canon or destroyed altogether.
-He was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a bloodline that is still alive to this day, also in the Gnostic Gospels.
-The original teachings of Christ supported the "Sacred Feminine" and exalted women, as seen in the Gnostic Gospels.
-That Christianity as we know it is a cleverly engineered cover-up that was sanctioned by the Roman Emperor Constantine: important secret Gospels were destroyed and the four canonical Gospels were embellished by him.
-The Church continues to cover up these "facts" and lives in a lie in order to retain power.
Before I begin I do have to admit that some of these arguments will not stand in a formal debate with solid rules of logic. The logic I am appealing to is not the logic of debate, but the logic of common sense. This is about history and about recorded writings, not concepts that are obscure and must be defined by parties concerned. You can feel free to debate with me if you wish, but I think it's best that you take that up with the actual historians whose work this article is based on.
Jesus Was Not Believed to be God, and Christianity as we know it was made up by Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
“My dear,” Teabing declared, “until [the Council of Nicaea],
Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet ...
a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.
A mortal.”
Upon this premise alone, the Da Vinci Code falls flat. Jesus Himself said that He was God, and this is precisely the claim that got Him executed.
""Again the high priest asked him, "Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?"
"I am," said Jesus.
"And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."
The high priest tore his clothes. "Why do we need any more witnesses?" he asked.
"You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?"
They all condemned him as worthy of death."
---Mark 14: 61-64
Biblical scholars may disagree on many different things, but they will all agree that the Gospel of Mark dates back to 80 AD at latest, and that it is the earliest of the Gospels. This far predated the reign of Constantine (who Dan Brown says made up the four Gospels and threw his influence around at the Council of Nicea to further his own agendas). And to a Jew, Jesus's statement, "I am," is chillingly similar to God's forbidden name, YHWH. (YHWH is also referenced in DVC, this is discussed in detail later.) This is outright blasphemy to them, and was the basis for Jesus's execution. Disclaimer: Do NOT accuse me of anti-Semitism, because I have a deep respect for the Jews. I do not blame them for the death of Christ, because it was necessary in the first place, for the forgiveness of our sins. I pray for the Jews, respect them as God's chosen people and I wish to visit the Holy Land someday.)
Several extra-Biblical, non-Christian authors also wrote about Christ, Christians and their practices:
Tacitus (A.D. c.55-A.D. c.117, Roman historian) has a rather nasty but accurate view of Christianity:
"Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular."
This means Jesus was executed and His followers did claim that He was God. It's consistent with the view that most authorities during that time had toward Christianity: It was a nuisance based on superstition.
Pliny the Younger paints a better picture, though he is still a non-Biblical, non-Christian source of proof that Jesus had been worshipped as God ever since:
"They (the Christians) were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food—but food of an ordinary and innocent kind."
In 180 AD, Irenaeus of Lyons declared in his text, Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies), that there are only four canonical Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, each bearing the name of the man who wrote them.
Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome, and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.
--Adversus Haereses III, 1:1
Matthew and John were both eyewitness accounts, while Mark's account was taken from Peter's experiences, Luke's was based on Paul's. If you watched National Geographic's Gospel of Judas documentary, you'll hear that Irenaeus's reasons for choosing only four gospels was quite arbitrary and illogical: There were four winds, four compass points, etc. The documentary, however, fails to mention that Irenaeus was no person far-removed from the eyewitness accounts of the Gospel. He was the disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John himself. He was around early enough to know whether the gospels were true or not. Upon seeing the Gnostic gospels, he dismissed them with good reason: They did not agree with the things he knew to be true about Jesus.
Both Tacitus and Pliny predated Constantine by approximately two centuries. Christianity's belief system---as far as the divinity of Christ is concerned---was solid.
...Teabing said. “Jesus’s establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”
“Hold on. You’re saying Jesus’s divinity was the result of a vote?”
“A relatively close vote at that,” Teabing added.
The Council of Nicaea was indeed convened by Constantine to clarify the stand of Christianity with regard to the equality of Jesus to the Father, but not the Divinity of the Son per se. It was a move to unify the Church, (and thus, Constantine's Empire) which was being fragmented by the Arian heresy. All of them already agreed that Jesus was the Son of God, they just had to agree on whether He was of the same essence as the Father or not. Eventually the Council produced the Nicene Creed, from which the Apostles' Creed, recited in Masses and worship services in all Christendom, was derived. The Creed was the object of the vote, and not merely Christ's nature.
And the "relatively close vote" part is completely bogus. Only two out of the 370 bishops present voted against the Nicene Creed---and only because there were other parts of the creed that they did not agree with.
It's settled: Jesus claimed to be God and was believed to be so by His followers as early as the Gospel times. The four canonical Gospels predated the Council of Nicaea by nearly two centuries, as opposed to the Da Vinci Code's claim of the canon being decided upon four centuries after Christ.
Christianity: 2, Dan Brown: 0.
More on Scripture:
“Fortunately for historians,” Teabing said, “some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. And, of course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. In addition to telling the true Grail story, these documents speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms. Of course, the Vatican, in keeping with their tradition of misinformation, tried very hard to suppress the release of these scrolls. And why wouldn’t they? The scrolls highlight glaring historical discrepancies and fabrications,
clearly confirming that the modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda — to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.”
Bra-vo. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not Christian writings. They were Jewish writings attributed to the apocalyptic Essene sect, dated to at least 200 years before Constantine, were found in 1947, and had nothing to do with Jesus other than that they contained Old Testament prophecies regarding Him, in the form of the Book of Isaiah. In fact, the Book of Isaiah found in the Dead Sea Scrolls is almost exactly (around 95%) the same as the current Book of Isaiah found in the Old Testament today. If anything, it confirmed the accuracy of our modern translations. It did not throw any doubt on Jesus's divine nature at all.
The Nag Hammadi Codices contain the Gnostic Gospels, which are discussed in more detail later. Simply put, they were not even clear narratives of Jesus's ministry. The Gospel of Thomas was a set of "secret sayings" of Jesus, while neither of the other two Gospels truly portrays Jesus in a specifically human way. Furthermore, the Gnostics believed that the flesh was inherently evil. Why would they write about a Messiah who was merely human? In the separate but related (Gnostic) Gospel of Judas, Jesus tells Judas that he will be the greatest among the Apostles because he will be the one who "sacrifices the man that clothes [Jesus]." Yeah, that's pretty pro-human. It portrays Jesus as itching to get out of the sack of flesh and blood. In general, the Nag Hammadi Codices paint a Jesus who spouts obscure and uninterpretable pronouncements. For example:
Jesus said, "Lucky is the lion that the human will eat, so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion still will become human." --The Gospel of Thomas, Saying #7
Really, this sounds like what you'd hear on Bubble Gang's Ang Dating Doon. And people say the canonical Bible is hard to understand. Closing remarks on Jesus's divinity, care of one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis:
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us." --C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Jesus Was Married to Mary Magdalene
Dan Brown states that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, a prominent female figure in the canonical Gospel stories. He claims that the Church invented the lie that she was a prostitute in order to slander her and take away her credibility. Dan Brown also states that a bloodline was born of this union and persists today, hidden in some secret location in France.
Proof:
-Da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper shows a very feminine person seated beside Christ, who according to popular belief is not John but Mary Magdalene. Their clothing is similarly colored, with Jesus in a red robe with a blue cloak, and "Mary" in a blue robe and red cloak.
At first glance, the person seated beside Jesus does look like a woman. The figure is the only beardless figure in the entire room (This is not actually true, as Philip is also depicted as beardless---he's the one standing two people away from Jesus on the right half of the painting with his hands to his chest), and the face is decidedly feminine. In fact, she's quite a hottie.
But what Dan Brown doesn't tell you is that the painting has been restored several times. The original paint has badly decayed and what Robert Langdon sees in the novel is the restored image. So what did "Mary" look like back then?
The figure in question has such a badly-smudged face that there is no way of telling it is indeed bearded or not. However, we don't even need to question the beardedness of the painting. It was (and still is) common to portray John as bare-faced as he is traditionally believed to be the youngest of the 12.
Last Supper by Jacopo Bassano
Last Supper by Valentin de Boulonge
Last Supper by Duccio di Bouninsegna
Last Supper by Andrea del Castagno
No prizes as to who John is in each painting. John and Judas are, apart from Jesus, the most easily recognizable figures in almost all Last Supper paintings. John is almost always beside Jesus, is beardless, and sleeping either on the table or leaning against Jesus. Judas, on the other hand, is either dark-featured, seated separately (as in del Castagno's--note also the eerie vision of wolves in the panel above his head) or holding a purse (as in Da Vinci's and Bassano's).
Now, let's look at another of Da Vinci's paintings---this time, of John the Baptist.
See, it is his style to draw young men with features that we would find feminine today. Ready for the deathblow? 覚悟！
Da Vinci's study of the Last Supper labels the person as John. No doubt about that, art critics universally agree that the person seated to Jesus's right is John. In the study, John is on Jesus's left and is alseep, as he is commonly depicted in Last Supper paintings. Da Vinci decided to go with a less traditional pose and instead portrayed him as sleepy. There is no one labeled Mary Magdalene in Da Vinci's study.
On a related note, regarding the "disembodied hand with the dagger":
The novel says that there is an extraneous arm with a dagger in its hand.
Sophie squinted and saw a hand emerging from the crowd of disciples. “Is that hand wielding a dagger?”
“Yes. Stranger still, if you count the arms, you’ll see that this hand belongs to ... no one at all. It’s disembodied. Anonymous.”
If you look closely at the painting, you'll see that while there is a hand that emerges at an odd angle from behind Judas, and cannot possibly belong to Peter, Judas or anyone in that immediate area. But if you continue looking at the painting, you'll see that it isn't even pointing at "Mary Magdalene", and that you can't really count the arms because not all of them are even shown. Now, why is it at an odd angle, emerging out of Judas's back?
Okay, while I'm a Fine Arts graduate, we didn't really take up symbolism in class. But anybody familiar with the Apostles and their epithets will tell you that Judas was known as "Iscariot"--"Man of Daggers." (Take note that this is only one reading of Judas's street name, it isn't the only way) One explanation for the dagger may be his betrayal, and that can be supported by John 13:27: After the piece of bread, then Satan entered into him. Then Jesus said to him, "What you do, do quickly." The dagger and the extra hand can be symbolic of Satan's entering into Judas, the presence of another malevolent will in the room.
A simpler (and more likely) explanation can be that the hand belongs to Peter in the first place, and that Da Vinci messed it up, as seen in this article. It goes on to say that Da Vinci did write in his notes that this implement was a knife (tableware) as opposed to a dagger (a murder weapon). Furthermore, Peter is sometimes shown holding a knife, symbolic of his attack of the high priest's servant Malchus. (John 18:10). See the above Last Supper by Jacopo Bassano to see what I mean: Peter is clearly threatening the sleeping John with a sharp knife. :P I kid, of course. Among the Apostles, Peter is depicted as a hothead who acts on impulse, which eventually culminated at his denial of Christ. In his anger he lashed out and cut off the high priest's servant's ear in Gethsemane, an attempt to defend Christ during His arrest.
Simply enough, this "disembodied hand" is not symbolic of any attempt to attack "Mary Magdalene," who is actually John anyway.
-The passages in Gnostic Gospels about Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene.
What Dan Brown has you believe is that according to viciously suppressed writings, Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The cited work in the novel is The Gospel of Philip, which is a part of the Nag Hammadi Library, a set of writings that was found in Egypt. These writings are attributed to the Gnostics, a sect of Christians who were deemed heretical as they believed the flesh was evil and that everyone had the ability to become a god or like God through special knowledge (Gnosis). More on them here.
The Nag Hammadi codices are damaged, highly fragmented writings that are dated to 150-250 AD, a long time after the four canonical Gospels were written (60-100 AD) let alone the earliest New Testament writings: Paul's epistles, written circa 50 AD.
The Gospel of Philip is translated from a badly damaged manuscript and contains two passages that hint at Jesus's supposed marriage:
"There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary, his mother, and her sister, and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary."
Dan Brown says, through Leigh Teabing:
"As any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion, in those days, literally meant spouse."
What Teabing doesn't tell you is that the Gnostic Gospels were written in Coptic, a variant of Greek, rather than Aramaic, a variant of Hebrew. The word used is koinonos, which just means companion. The Greek word for wife is gyne. Off the bat, it seems Dan Brown didn't really do his research very well.
Let's look at another passage from the Gospel of Philip.
And the companion of the [...] Mary Magdalene. [...] more than [...] the disciples, [...] kiss her [...] on her [...]. The rest of the disciples [...]. They said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.
Each of the brackets with ellipses indicates a hole in the original text, or a part that's so damaged it's illegible. The missing words can be guessed through context, but a common translation of "kiss her [...] on her [...]." has the first hole as "often" and the latter hole as "mouth." Wow, that's something to put into your gossip column. If a pastor or priest kissed a woman now, it would definitely be seen as a scandal. In OUR cultural context. In Jesus's time, even men kissed each other and it was not seen as taboo. In using this passage to prove Jesus's marriage, we are applying our cultural norms to an event that happened 2000 years ago, in a completely different culture and environment. Furthermore, the Greek word for mouth (stouma) can also be interchangeably used to refer to the word "face."
From these few passages, we cannot conclude that Jesus was married. Teabing claims that there are "countless references to Jesus and Mary Magdalene's union." This is an outright exaggeration: There were only two references in all the Gnostic gospels, and they were not even conclusive.
I have more arguments against this conspiracy theory, but I'll leave them out for now as I still have a lot of ground to cover. To close this section: Why is Jesus being married so bad?
The simple answer? There is absolutely nothing wrong about Jesus being married or performing the sexual act in marriage. Marriage and proper use of sexuality are both creations of God, and as such, had Jesus been married, he would have shown us the perfect example of marriage. The problem arises in Jesus actually having children. Since Jesus is fully man and fully God, while his supposed wife is fully human, what would the nature of the children be? This would result in a cataclysmic and endless debate about the nature of these people. (Maier,88)
Another claim of Dan Brown is that Christianity was engineered and edited into a patriarchal, anti-female army that demonized the ancient, matriarchal pagan religion.
He claims that Christ was "...the original feminist. He intended for the future of His church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene..."
I have no doubt that Jesus was the original feminist. He associated with women a lot during a time that they were deemed untrustworthy.
-He defended the woman caught in adultery (who the Scriptures never, ever name as Mary Magdalene)
-He talked with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well, who was not only a despicable outsider to the Jews, she was also an adulteress
-The person Jesus cited for great charity in tithing was a poor widow. If women had bad social standing in ancient Palestine, widows had it even worse. Jesus broke this trend.
-It was the women who stuck close to Him while He was on the way to Golgotha. Only John appeared later on at the crucifixion site.
-He first appeared to Mary Magdalene after His resurrection
-It was the women He first asked to tell the men of His resurrection.
In fact, the New Testament portrays a significant number of women in a positive light, and holding a very important position in the group that followed Jesus: (Taken from Wikipedia)
- Tabitha/Dorcas - Acts 9:36
- Priscilla - Romans 16:3
- sisters Mary and Martha - Luke 10:38
- Jesus' mother Mary
- Mary Magdalene - Mark 16:1
- Salome - Mark 16:1
- A woman with an issue of blood - Matthew 10:20
- Mary, the mother of James and Joses - Matthew 27:55-56
- The mother of Zebedee's sons - Matthew 27:55-56
This also does not include Eunice and Lois, the mother and grandmother of Timothy (Paul's young disciple), respectively, who were noted for being righteous. (2 Timothy 1:5)
Contrast this with the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which is more of a set of "Secret Sayings of Jesus" than a narrative of Christ's life.
(114) Simon Peter said to them, "Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "See, I am going to attract her to make her male so that she too might become a living spirit that resembles you males. For every female (element) that makes itself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."
Even though this does not refer to an actual sex change, the author of this gospel uses the word "male" to refer to higher, spiritual things and "female" to refer to lower, earthly things. I don't think it takes much to decide which text is more favorable toward women.
The Jewish tetragrammaton YHWH--the sacred name of God--is in fact derived from the "Jehovah," an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic word for Eve, Havvah. (The Da Vinci Code, page 390)
Bzzzzt. Wrong. YHWH is based on the Hebrew word for "To be", and is best described as meaning "I AM WHO I AM," God's resounding declaration in the Old Testament to Moses. (It stands for God's total self-sufficiency, existing in and of Himself without being created. It also refers to His eternal nature.) Jews were forbidden to say this name, so the word "Adonai" (Lord) was often used in its place. Eventually, rabbis pronounced this sacred name with the vowel sounds from "Adonai," resulting in "Jehovah." This only happened in the 16th century and did not predate YHWH. (Maier, 88)
I'm running out of space, and I've been tapping and clicking at my computer for almost eight hours writing this. I've gone through one and a half pots of tea, consumed a rather large amount of bread, and have been juggling resource websites, a PDF of the Da Vinci Code, a critique, pages of notes, the Bible, and Yahoo Messenger windows all afternoon. But given the glaring amount of discrepancies the DVC has with historical fact, I think I can rest my case. It sure is an entertaining read (I don't even think it's well-written, as Sophie is more of a bobbing-head damsel in distress than the sacred feminine that the book claims to support), but I can definitely, conclusively say that the conspiracy theories therein are complete, utter nonsense. I am not saying that Christianity has not had its own share of grievous errors. The Crusades; the Inquisition; several, very wicked popes; false televangelists who extort followers for profit; sex and molestation scandals; oh, the list goes on. There is no excuse for those atrocities. However, the much-regretted and apologized-for actions of a few men should not supercede the loving, righteous actions of many, many more men and women.
The catholic Church (I'm using catholic here in what it means: Universal, meaning all true believers in Christ, not just Roman Catholics, not just Orthodox, not just Protestant---EVERYONE) has been under attack ever since it began. She was oppressed by a world power, the Roman Empire, but she only grew and spread, outliving the most brutal empire of that time. She was deemed to be obsolete by Voltaire, but she persisted. The Church, the Bride of Christ, will live to the end of the age. Her life is not based on this world, the bastion of the Enemy. Her life is in Christ, who lives forever and ever.
"We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed." ---Paul, 2 Corinthians 4:8
"In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." ---Jesus, John 16:33
Resources:
-The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
-The Da Vinci Code: Fact or Fiction? by Hank Hanergraaff and Paul L. Maier
-The Bible, New International Version
-Unlocking the Da Vinci Code (Seminar) by Randy Gleason
-Adversus Haereses by Irenaeus
-The Gospel of Philip
-The Gospel of Thomas
-Wikipedia (links to specific articles above)
-What about the Disembodied Hand?
-Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
