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Cracking the DaVinci Code

Also see: Gnosticism 101 and Gnosticism in 2004

Talking points for the DaVinci Code, a work of TOTAL FICTION by Dan Brown, 0ver 40 weeks at number one on the NY Times best seller list, and number one Amazon.com top seller list. Thrilling cloak and dagger story that incorporates aspects of spurious anti-Christian theories and represents them as facts. Basically alleges that a calculated conspiracy of church leaders in the early Fourth Century AD suppressed the real truth about the life and ministry of Jesus and replaced it with a set of dogmatic, legalistic, patriarchal, misogynistic doctrines. Here are the key places where Dan Brown got history wrong. (Source: a review of the book by Ben Witherington III, BAR, May-June, 2004)

Error 1: The NT Gospels are not the earliest Gospels. Instead, suppressed Gnostic writings such as the Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Mary, etc. were the true and accurate accounts of the life of Jesus.

Fact: The so-called Gnostic Gospels can be dated to no earlier than approx. 175 AD, and probably into the 200s in most cases. Solid historical evidence indicates that all of the NT documents were in circulation among believers and well-known before 100 AD. We have an actual fragment of the Gospel of John that can be dated to approx. 125 AD.

Brown also gets the story wrong on Gnosticism, a philosophy combining some aspects of Christian theology with Greek metaphysical practices. Gnosticism came on the scene in the middle of the second century. Many church leaders wrote to oppose its claims. And – contrary to the book – Gnosticism was anti-materialism and especially anti-sensual, advocating abstinence from any type of sexual practice.

Error 2: Jesus was simply a good man who was never considered to be divine until the Council of Nicea arbitrarily declared him to be so in 325 AD.

Fact: In the NT, of which we have numerous partial copies created in the centuries before 325 AD, refer to Jesus as GOD 7 times, and He is referred to as LORD in the divine sense literally hundreds of times.

Error 3: It was the Emperor Constantine who, in 314 AD, began to actively suppress the true Gnostic Gospel and began to impose the “altered” NT doctrines, including the divinity of Jesus.

Fact: Just to reemphasize what was stated above, there is no doubt that ALL of the New Testament documents found in today’s Bibles were complete and circulating before 100 AD. While we do not possess the original manuscripts, and therefore we can’t point to the exact date each was written, there is plenty of secondary evidence to confirm that these were the documents accepted by the Church for 200 hundred years before the reign of Constantine.

Error 4: Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.

Fact: Of course, the NT makes absolutely NO mention of this notion. The idea can be traced to a couple of obscure comments made in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, written in the late 200s. These comment, found in fragments, don’t even contain complete sentences and important key words are missing – just some vague references to Mary.

Magdalene being someone’s companion and something about a kiss. THAT’S IT. Scholars – even very liberal ones – doubt that this kiss has any romantic context at all, no matter whom she was kissing. More likely a kiss on the cheek to say hello. But in the book, Brown has a character say that in “Aramaic” the word for companion can mean spouse. Maybe so, but the Gospel of Philip was written in COPTIC, and borrows a Greek word here that can refer to any close friendship. There is a word for spouse, but it was NOT used here.

Error 5: Jesus must have been married because he was a Jew.

Fact:  There is substantial historical and archaeological evidence indicating that plenty of Jews, especially those practicing some form of religious duties, i.e., the Essenes at Qumran or John the Baptist, were celibate. It wasn’t the norm, but it was not prohibited. There is plenty to indicate that Paul remained single.

Error 6: The Dead Sea Scrolls, along with the Gnostic texts, are actually the earliest Christian documents on record.

Fact: THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH CHRISTIANITY IN ANY FORM WHATSOEVER! They are strictly Jewish writings, describing the beliefs and practices of a group of Jewish hermits and mystics that lived in the desert for decades – maybe centuries – before and after the time of Jesus. And, don’t forget, the earliest Gnostic writings are all dated almost 150 years after the NT was completed.

Error 7: The Church suppressed the idea that Jesus was married and had children because it wanted to convince priests to practice celibacy, because they believed a truly holy person, not to mention a divine being, would never practice such things.

Fact: First of all, in a strange twist of irony, it was actually the GNOSTICS who were dead set against sex, along with all forms of sensual pleasure. They believed that the flesh was corrupted and therefore to be avoided at all costs. But a main thrust of Brown’s book is to advance a cockamamie theory that the Church wanted to suppress women, especially the Sacred Feminine – a female consort to the OLD Testament God, or maybe a female aspect of God that he claims was represented by the shekinah glory – God appearing as a glowing cloud. Folks in Brown’s camp hold to a conviction that the church actually hates women and wants to repress them. They declare that the earliest form of worship in Bible times was the worship of Goddesses and fertility symbols, but the Church came along and stamped all of that out in order to justify keeping women down and ruining the world by suppressing the superior, feminine perspective.

The OT, of which we have plenty of copies that date hundreds of years BEFORE Gnosticism, indicates that God is neither male nor female, but rather He is Spirit, manifesting Himself however He wants, whenever He wants.

And a final point: Most of the “facts” presented by Brown are actually borrowed from another book -- Holy Blood, Holy Grail – published in 1987. This book tries to connect the dots between all world religions, concluding that “spirituality” was first brought to this planet several thousand years ago by aliens from outer space.

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Gnosticism 101 by Jackie English

The basic spiritual underpinning of the DaVinci Code derives from a resurgence of interest in classical Gnosticism as explained in a late Second Century Gnostic texts  such as the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Thomas. While proponents of neo-Gnosticism assert that Gnostic theology was the original mystery that Jesus came to reveal, a study of the historical texts and time lines would seem to indicate other wise.

Defining Gnosticism is kind of like nailing Jello to the wall. Essentially, it was a set of general assumptions based in certain aspects of Greek -- Platonist -- philosophy. These assumptions simply radiated out through that part of the world and infiltrated or influenced many different religious perspectives. The basic premise of these assumptions was that only the spiritual plane was pure and good; anything that was common, human, earthly or fleshly was corrupt and therefore evil.

As these assumptions impacted the rise of Christianity, two separate battle fields developed. First of all, Gnostic sensibilities were offended by the God of the Old Testament, because he was credited with creating the physical world -- yuk! Gnostics were repelled by the earthy realism of the OT stories and God's preoccupation with imperfect people. They considered the God of the OT to be more of a demi-god not worthy to worshipped because of his direct connection with things physical, not to mention his seemingly violent and unpeaceable nature. Consequently, those on the fringes of Christianity who came under the influence of Gnostic thought rejected the Old Testament entirely. This inspired early Church leaders to develop an apologetic making a valid connection between the OT and the emerging Christian perspective.

The other battle field is the better known of the two. Even though Gnostics viewed the material world as evil, they believed that certain individuals -- the only ones actually eligible for salvation -- contained within their bodies a spark of something divine, a special spiritual energy. However, in order to recognize and act on this divine spark, special secret knowledge needed to be imparted by one already enlightened to another who was worthy to be enlightened. This led to lots of secret meetings and secret ceremonies, most of which were rooted in asceticism -- especially the denial of sex and marriage because it was so sensual. However, the effort to connect with and "unleash" this special spiritual spark inspired certain Gnostic sects to experiment with every conceivable form of sensual stimulation and sexual promiscuity. Carpocrates and his son, Epiphanes, enthusiastically proclaimed that promiscuous behavior was actually part of God's law.

Christianity presented the perfect vehicle for legitimizing their philosophy and giving it "legs." In their theology, Jesus was the spirit sent from the spiritual plane to accomplish whatever work of redemption that was necessary to liberate these enlightened ones from the consequences and the defilement of having come in contact with the corrupt physical world. In order to harmonize this concept with the rest of their philosophy, they rejected Jesus' divine relationship with God, along with his birth or any other aspects of his humanity, not to mention his physical death and resurrection. In short, Jesus was for them, simply an ephemeral spirit who provided a context for the secret knowledge that was already sewn like seeds into a few selected hearts. He only appeared to be human, he only appeared to suffer, he only appeared to leave tracks in the dirt when he walked by -- an apparition from the next world sent to find a few missing spiritual novices. For Gnostics, the rise of Christianity was like finding a bird's nest on the ground.

In contrast with the Essenes, who preferred to remain isolated and were, therefore, hardly on the radar screen of the early church (especially after 100 AD), Gnosticism posed a present and aggressive threat to the doctrinal integrity of the church as it was developing on parallel tracks in Egypt and Turkey. Leaders in both places mounted regular and specific polemics against Gnostic theories. As a matter of fact, up until the late 19th century, most of the information that was known about the principles of Gnosticism existed in the form of the polemical writings of leaders like Iraenus, Hippolytus, Origen and Tertullian who wrote and lectured long and often against the whole idea. (Now, these guys didn't exactly agree with each other on all of the core doctrines of the Christian faith, but they all agreed that the Gnostic theories beginning to infiltrate the fringes of the mainstream church were nuts and presented a threat that had to be stopped.) These guys would quote from Gnostic writers from time to time, but they mostly just pounded out their own arguments for what they considered to be orthodoxy. Perhaps as a consequence of this widespread and unified battle which endured for over 100 years, Gnosticism never gained any real traction in the mainstream church, though groups were siphoned away from time to time. For over 1000 years, Christian academics accepted the church fathers' arguments that Gnosticism was bad, but they really couldn't study it for themselves.

That all began to change in the 19th century with the publication of a handful of late Gnostic texts. They contained a Gospel of Mary, a Wisdom of Jesus, an acts of Peter and an Apocryphon of John (referenced by Iraenus in 180 AD). But the real treasure trove was discovered in 1946,  when a cache of 12 Gnostic codices written in Coptic were discovered in an ancient garbage dump near Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt. The cache has been dated to around 400 AD. Many, if not all, of the works are attributed to Valentinus, (or his students) an early champion of a Gnostic version of Christianity whose influence lasted from 136-165 AD. Most of these documents discuss the Gnostic theories of the true origin of the universe, the role of particular sacraments in the Gnostic order of things, the denial of a physical resurrection, etc. There is actually a small group of communities, the Mandaeans, still living in Iran and Iraq that uses Gnostic documents as the basis of their religious practices. Most of these texts date back no later than the 16th century, but they include Gnostic accounts of creation, and traditions about John the Baptist. They also have some texts relating to magic that may date as far back as the 6th century and some artifacts that are even older.

Basically, mainstream scholars point out that Gnosticism existed independently from the early church, attaching itself kind of like a parasite looking for a host hoping to retrofit (or, in some cases, influence the development of) the original doctrines to fit its pre-existing biases. Conservative, traditional dating of the canonical texts indicates that the all of the documents now gathered into the New Testament were in circulation before the end of the first century; the letters of Paul as early as the mid 50's, the synoptic Gospels before 70 AD and the Gospel of John and the Revelation by 90 AD. In contrast, the public controversy over Gnosticism does not become evident until well into the next century, though it seems certain that the letters of John contain references intended to refute the earliest rumblings from that corner. Therefore, rather than understanding Gnosticism as the higher truth of Jesus that was stamped out by a Papist mob, history seems to indicate that Gnosticism was the most robust of the first heresies that threatened to hijack the Gospel and recycle it for other purposes.

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Gnosticism in 2004

Two major points cause neo-Gnosticism to appeal to our generation in a powerful way. First of all is the premise that core Gnostic traditions represent the “true faith” which was stamped out by a political and corrupt church machine and replaced with a restrictive and misogynist legal code. The perception that neo-Gnosticism represents an underground conspiracy fighting for the truth is very attractive to the generally libertarian sensibilities of Gen X-ers and those even younger.

In addition, and most compelling, neo-Gnosticism purports to offer something that is lacking in traditional, orthodox Christianity, namely an intimate and very personal encounter with that which is Immanent and Transcendent. Gaining access to this secret, “hidden” knowledge represents access to spiritual power in almost exactly the same way that it was originally marketed in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries.

Unfortunately, the basic premises behind Gnosticism do violence to the basic, powerful, life-changing truths of the authentic Gospel. What makes it all the more sad is the fact that the very intimacy with the Divine that current proponents of neo-Gnosticism claim to have discovered, is already available and accessible by the boat-loads from the same source where countless generations have always found it: in a personal encounter with Jesus Christ energized by the participating presence of the Holy Spirit, just as the Scriptures faithfully describe. The real problem is the MODERN Church (not the original or ancient Church) long ago abandoned these wonderful, life-nurturing basic truths in favor of Rationalism and Post-Modernism reductions and distortions of the robust and exciting faith Jesus came to share with us. The net result is that several generations, having tasted the rather dry, sentimental and impotent product being turned out by most churches in the name of theological sophistication and pluralism, assume that a vital, powerful and intimate pathway to God never existed in the confines of the Christian model. This is the real tragedy.

For those seeking answers in the Da Vinci Code or the Gospel of Thomas, I would encourage them to spend at least as much time talking with Christians who have experienced real intimacy with God, and attending churches where the presence and power of God is alive and active, before settling for a Johnny-come-lately smorgasbord of pseudo-spiritual positivism that is more focused on self than on the Savior.

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