The Da Vinci Code

Recently, some fellow book-lovers kept after me to finish reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. I'm grateful to them, because I found the book just as spell-binding as they did. And with them, I found in it some important questions about faith worth thinking and talking about together.

I suppose I should acknowledge straightaway that the plot-line wrapped around the faith-questions isn't for the squeamish or for the intellectually lazy. It begins with a murder, quickly opens out on several more, shows us corruption at the highest levels of the church, baits us with almost impossibly difficult puzzles, sweeps us up in frenzied chases and escapes, and teases us with lurid images of sex rituals while it instructs us on pedantic fine points of mythology, geography, and cryptography. I haven't had so much fun since the last time I taught The Book of Revelation!

The Da Vinci Code revolves around the desperate efforts of despicable churchmen to keep hidden what they take as a shocking truth about Jesus and his earliest followers which, if revealed, would undermine the credibility of the Christian faith. This allegedly long-suppressed truth is that the Jesus of history, in contrast with the Christ of later dogma, was an admired, inspired, but altogether human leader, who devoutly hoped that the leader of those who were to come after him would be Mary of Magdala, who was actually his wife and the mother of his children. Beside themselves with jealousy and rage, Jesus' male disciples seized control of the Christian movement early on, and created a church that would forevermore denigrate everything feminine about the human spirit.

There are two questions that nervous church folks have been asking ever since this novel (more about the italicizing later) first hit the bookstores and best-seller lists. One is: could there be any truth to the notion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene might have had more than just a casual relationship? The other is: if it ever came out that they did, would it be all over for the church as we know it?

With respect to the first question, from at least the early second century there has been widespread and well documented speculation about Jesus' relationship with women in general and Mary Magdalene in particular. And there is little to suggest that the church ever got upset enough about the speculation to censor it. With regard to Jesus and Mary, there is one especially strong argument against paying the rumors about them any heed. It is this: had there been any factual basis whatever for believing Jesus and Mary to be man and wife, the earliest Christians almost certainly would have included, and not excluded, recognition of the relationship in their preaching and teaching. It would have helped them immensely to make the point that became increasingly difficult to make in the late first century, that whatever his relationship was with God, Jesus was also very much a human being, the Word made flesh. (John 1:14)

The second question is a little harder to answer. People abandon the faith for all sorts of reasons, and none of us can say in advance what in specific would have to happen to make us doubt either own beliefs or anybody else's. Speculating about what might bring the whole church down is just that much harder. My guess it that it would be pretty hard to get a lot of people to give up on the church, all at once anyway. If priestly pedophilia, making women second-class members, and consigning conscientious non-adherents to hell haven't already provoked them to do it, then a few questions about Jesus' unique identity with God probably won't either.

Ever since Elaine Pagels' very fine book, The Gnostic Gospels, came out a quarter century ago, many thoughtful Christians have wrestled with the possibility that, hidden underneath all of the official pronouncements of church doctrine, there lies a long-suppressed tradition based on real rather than imagined historical data, and that in that tradition there is a very human Jesus to be re-discovered, whom the church has never been willing fully to acknowledge. (Pagels' more recent book, Beyond Belief, reacquaints us with this possibility.) What a great idea for some really good yarns! Second-century Christians got caught up in them with great delight. Just as many of us have gotten caught up in The Da Vinci Code. But there is a big difference between tall tales and God's own truth. Knowing the difference is what makes it possible to enjoy the former as much as we revere the latter.