In the above we have the bulk of Brown’s Biblical material. Hereafter we find only a few points of consideration. In Chapter 74 there is a claim that “early Jewish tradition involved ritualistic sex” in the Jewish Temple, and that YHWH was worshipped along with a female consort named Shekinah.
Where Brown derives this “information” is difficult to say. It is found in no scholarly source to my awareness; it is not certified by any leading archaeologist or Biblical commentator. In Chapter 77 Brown offers a comment about a proper name, Sheshach, which he says is “mentioned repeatedly in the Book of Jeremiah.” This name is a codeword for Babylon. While this latter point is true, it seems excessive to say that something mentioned but twice (Jer. 25:26, Jer. 51:41) is mentioned “repeatedly.”
It is suitable in closing to consider some comments from Chapter 82. Brown’s hero remarks that “every faith in the word is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith—acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.”
It is no mystery that a contextual study of the word “faith” (pistis) in the New Testament and its contemporary literature does not bear this definition out. The word is used as a noun to refer to the Christian "faith" as a set of convictions, but in far many more cases the meaning intended is in the sense of faithfulness, or loyalty as owed to one in whom one is embedded for service. The relationship between the believer and God is framed in the New Testament terms of an ancient client-patron relationship.
As God's "clients" to whom he has shown unmerited favor (grace), our response should be an awareness of prescribed duties toward those in whom we are indebted (God) and the group in which we are embedded (God's kin group, the body of Christ). This awareness is the expression of our faithfulness of loyalty
-- in other words, this is our pistis, or faith. "Faith" is not acceptance of what we cannot prove, but trust in one who has proven himself, our pledge to trust, and be reliable servants to, our patron (God), who has provided us with tangible gifts (Christ) and proof thereby of His own reliability.
Faith is not imagination, but the reaction we provide to evidence. The missionaries of the New Testament did not appeal to feelings, but to facts: the resurrection and empty tomb; Jesus’ miracles; his fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.
In other words, evidence!!
Those who adhere to Brown’s idealized caricature, however, would for obvious reasons prefer the more nebulous sort of “faith.” It is clear why: All of their documents are dated far too late; all of their evidence is “destroyed;” all of their ideas are gross decontexualizations.
It is not surprising that The DaVinci Code ends with Mary’s tomb unopened and the secrets left unsaid.
If Brown’s ideologues are indeed in possession of ancient and secret documents that turn the world upside down, why are they not now in the hands of paleographers, linguistic experts, or other scholars to be dated?
Christian missionaries risked their lives in preaching the Gospel – what is it the revisionists fear?
Brown is not the first to propose that Christianity is a vast conspiracy by the Vatican and/or others to hoodwink the world about the true Jesus. He will not be the last.
What is surprising is not that he would boldly label “FACT” what has been so totally refuted by the evidence. What is surprising is that our culture is so misinformed about Christianity, woefully ignorant of history, and clueless about the Bible – its origin, composition, preservation, and translation.
This novel is based on such flimsy fabrication that if it used any other setting – an ethnic neighborhood, a police investigation, an environmental conservation movement, for example – no one would be able to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy the story.
That millions of people are not turned off by the lack of authenticity in The DaVinci Code is more than surprising, it is sad. That critics and even news media are so gullible is tragic.
Stay tuned for Part 10 coming soon........
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
But It's Just Fiction...(Part 8)
Thus we find (even in Brown) necessary “excuses” to explain why the evidence is all in the church’s favor, thus assuming the blindness of scholars like Jenkins with no axe to grind for either party: “The history is written by the winners,” it is said, and all the evidence for a Christianity with an idealized feminism was destroyed.
Yet this begs the very question of how, and why, the winners won. It assumes that the fight was not honest, that the Church hit below the belt. Evidence such as the Gospel of Mary is taken as evidence; and non-evidence like lack of copies of it any earlier than the third century is also taken as evidence. There is simply no way the Church is allowed to win – there can be no evidence in its favor at all, so that Brown and his cohorts have stacked the deck.
In all of this it is assumed that the early Church was patriarchal and bigoted, but that is simply not the case. As Jenkins observes, the New Testament notes a number of prominent women even as it stands (before being “edited, altered,” to whatever convenient extent conspiracy theorists require). Several commentators on the prime time television program hinted that Mary, while perhaps not Jesus’ wife, was in some sense close to Jesus.
This is true, but not in the way that Brown or these commentators think. Women like Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna “ministered unto [Jesus] of their substance.” (Luke 8-2:3).
The impact of this passage is not appreciated because we have lost track of the contextual meaning: It means that these two women were Jesus’ well-off patrons, and that they financed his ministry – such that, in that day and age, he would have been a “client” who was in some sense obligated to them.
Later in the New Testament, figures like Lydia, Junia, Priscilla, and Phoebe figure prominently. This is not to say that the Church was entirely egalitarian, but it would be a mistake to assume that it was in any sense misogynistic – and when the authority structures did become less favorable to women, Jenkins adds, it was because the Church started following Roman models of administration.
The use of Mary Magdalene reflects a Gnostic tactical measure in every way. As Jenkins observes, the Gnostics, needing to overthrow apostolic authority (note that their doing so presupposes that the apostolic tradition had the upper hand to begin with!), had to choose a person close to Jesus, yet not part of the apostolic band.
The Gnostics also had a worldview that “demanded that spiritual beings exist in male and female pairs,” so that choosing a woman as Jesus’ counterpart was inevitable. In Jenkins’ words, the resort to these late texts “represent a triumph of hope over judgment.”Brown earns no credibility putting an endorsement of these texts into his characters’ mouths.
Chapter 60 offers us what is as close to a research bibliography as Brown intends to provide. His historian character says that “the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ has been chronicled in exhaustive detail by scores of historians.” That score is reduced to but four (for our convenience, or because there are no more?) but a closer look at these “historians” reveals some anomalies.
The persons who authored these texts are certainly not “historians” in any academic sense, that is, of possessing known academic degrees in these subjects or publishing material in peer-reviewed journals. Nor are the books published by academic presses.
Let’s have a look at Brown’s recommended titles:
The Templar Revelation by Picknett and Prince. Historians they are not; the credits on their book list them as “writers, researchers, and lecturers on the paranormal, the occult, and historical and religious mysteries.” Their other authorial credits include such masterpieces of critical history as The Stargate Conspiracy: The Truth About Extraterrestrial Life and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt and The Mammoth Book of UFOs. Harvard University Press is practically beating their door down.
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar by Starbird and Sweeney. Printed by that fine academic press “Bear and Company,” this book is authored by one who claims to have a Masters degree (in what is not specified) and to have studied at Vanderbilt Divinity School, though whether she finished, and whether any of her material in this book was offered in any papers, is not said. Starbird is also the author of the third book Brown highlights, The Goddess in the Gospels. It is noted that this book was a primary influence on her.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent and Leigh. This book, a bestseller that is the motherlode for Brown’s sort of theorizing, is not entirely endorsed by Brown’s historian character, who pins it for “dubious leaps of faith” but allows that its “fundamental premise [is] sound.” It’s nice to know something is, because the authors’ qualifications are not. The lead author Baigent’s sole credential is a degree in psychology. Leigh is described in one location (a website promoting his virtues as a speaker) as a “a writer and university lecturer with a thorough knowledge of history, philosophy, psychology and esoterica,” which seems a roundabout way of saying he has no relevant credentials in the subject.
None of these “scholars” are scholars at all; and no genuine New Testament scholars, liberal or conservative, are cited at all. A good lay introduction to New Testament scholarship is available in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (Zondervan, 1998) and The Case for Faith (Zondervan, 2000).
I apologize for not having updated this blog in a while as I have had unforeseen circumstances happen to me. It's funny how the evil one operates. With the Power Of The Holy Spirit I will not be deterred from this mission.
Please stay tuned for Part 9 ....Coming Soon
Yet this begs the very question of how, and why, the winners won. It assumes that the fight was not honest, that the Church hit below the belt. Evidence such as the Gospel of Mary is taken as evidence; and non-evidence like lack of copies of it any earlier than the third century is also taken as evidence. There is simply no way the Church is allowed to win – there can be no evidence in its favor at all, so that Brown and his cohorts have stacked the deck.
In all of this it is assumed that the early Church was patriarchal and bigoted, but that is simply not the case. As Jenkins observes, the New Testament notes a number of prominent women even as it stands (before being “edited, altered,” to whatever convenient extent conspiracy theorists require). Several commentators on the prime time television program hinted that Mary, while perhaps not Jesus’ wife, was in some sense close to Jesus.
This is true, but not in the way that Brown or these commentators think. Women like Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna “ministered unto [Jesus] of their substance.” (Luke 8-2:3).
The impact of this passage is not appreciated because we have lost track of the contextual meaning: It means that these two women were Jesus’ well-off patrons, and that they financed his ministry – such that, in that day and age, he would have been a “client” who was in some sense obligated to them.
Later in the New Testament, figures like Lydia, Junia, Priscilla, and Phoebe figure prominently. This is not to say that the Church was entirely egalitarian, but it would be a mistake to assume that it was in any sense misogynistic – and when the authority structures did become less favorable to women, Jenkins adds, it was because the Church started following Roman models of administration.
The use of Mary Magdalene reflects a Gnostic tactical measure in every way. As Jenkins observes, the Gnostics, needing to overthrow apostolic authority (note that their doing so presupposes that the apostolic tradition had the upper hand to begin with!), had to choose a person close to Jesus, yet not part of the apostolic band.
The Gnostics also had a worldview that “demanded that spiritual beings exist in male and female pairs,” so that choosing a woman as Jesus’ counterpart was inevitable. In Jenkins’ words, the resort to these late texts “represent a triumph of hope over judgment.”Brown earns no credibility putting an endorsement of these texts into his characters’ mouths.
Chapter 60 offers us what is as close to a research bibliography as Brown intends to provide. His historian character says that “the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ has been chronicled in exhaustive detail by scores of historians.” That score is reduced to but four (for our convenience, or because there are no more?) but a closer look at these “historians” reveals some anomalies.
The persons who authored these texts are certainly not “historians” in any academic sense, that is, of possessing known academic degrees in these subjects or publishing material in peer-reviewed journals. Nor are the books published by academic presses.
Let’s have a look at Brown’s recommended titles:
The Templar Revelation by Picknett and Prince. Historians they are not; the credits on their book list them as “writers, researchers, and lecturers on the paranormal, the occult, and historical and religious mysteries.” Their other authorial credits include such masterpieces of critical history as The Stargate Conspiracy: The Truth About Extraterrestrial Life and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt and The Mammoth Book of UFOs. Harvard University Press is practically beating their door down.
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar by Starbird and Sweeney. Printed by that fine academic press “Bear and Company,” this book is authored by one who claims to have a Masters degree (in what is not specified) and to have studied at Vanderbilt Divinity School, though whether she finished, and whether any of her material in this book was offered in any papers, is not said. Starbird is also the author of the third book Brown highlights, The Goddess in the Gospels. It is noted that this book was a primary influence on her.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Baigent and Leigh. This book, a bestseller that is the motherlode for Brown’s sort of theorizing, is not entirely endorsed by Brown’s historian character, who pins it for “dubious leaps of faith” but allows that its “fundamental premise [is] sound.” It’s nice to know something is, because the authors’ qualifications are not. The lead author Baigent’s sole credential is a degree in psychology. Leigh is described in one location (a website promoting his virtues as a speaker) as a “a writer and university lecturer with a thorough knowledge of history, philosophy, psychology and esoterica,” which seems a roundabout way of saying he has no relevant credentials in the subject.
None of these “scholars” are scholars at all; and no genuine New Testament scholars, liberal or conservative, are cited at all. A good lay introduction to New Testament scholarship is available in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (Zondervan, 1998) and The Case for Faith (Zondervan, 2000).
I apologize for not having updated this blog in a while as I have had unforeseen circumstances happen to me. It's funny how the evil one operates. With the Power Of The Holy Spirit I will not be deterred from this mission.
Please stay tuned for Part 9 ....Coming Soon
Sunday, July 16, 2006
But It's Just Fiction... (Part 7)
Miller adds that it is a mistake to misuse Rabbinical literature (as Teabing is likely doing by Brown’s account) to assume that a rabbinic opinion was somehow a law. As the historian E.P. Sanders notes, according to Miller:
“There is also a more general point with regard to calling an opinion a law: once one starts quoting rabbinic statements as laws governing Palestine, one may draw absolutely any portrait of first-century Palestine that one wants. There are thousands and thousands of pages, filled with opinions."
These “laws” may not be laws, but anything from “a simple description of common practice, which someone finally decided to write down” to a prohibition offered precisely because so many people were doing the opposite.
It may be something intended only for the Pharisees, or may be an expression of an ideal that was never followed. As Miller notes, quoting Jewish scholar Ze'ev Safrai: "The public at large did not obey the rabbis. Among the Jews, only a minority followed the rabbis, obeyed their decisions and was influenced by their sermons and moral teachings….The scholar or reader who wishes to do real history must take into account all sorts of possibilities when he or she faces a rabbinic passage; the response, 'everybody did it because the rabbis laid it down' is seldom the correct one."
Therefore, it is false to say that Jesus as a married man “makes infinitely more sense;” it is simply false to claim that the “social decorum” (or anything else) “virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried;” it is false that “celibacy was condemned,” and the silence on the subject in the Gospels is not room for a positive proof whatsoever. (Let it finally be added, as many have noted, that Jesus does have a "bride" -- the church!
This is how the body of believers is identified in Revelation, which clearly points to Jesus being single on earth.)
In a section following, Brown’s “historian” repeats his error about Gospels being found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He also appeals to a collection of texts found at a location called Nag Hammadi in 1945. Surprisingly, Teabing makes no mention of the most famous alternative gospel found in this collection, the Gospel of Thomas. Why this is so is quite clear: The Gospel of Thomas ends with an admonition by Jesus that women must “become male” in order to find salvation!
Needless to say, this would not fit in with Brown’s tale of seekers after a feminine divine! Instead, Brown cherry-picks two other documents:
The Gospel of Philip. Recommended as a “good place to start” by Teabing, Brown quotes a portion of the text in which Jesus is said to often “kiss” Mary Magdalene “on the mouth” and thereby invoke the jealousy of Peter.
Teabing goes on to point out that Mary is described as Jesus’s “companion,” and this is supposedly troubling for the canonical Gospel view. Is it? Brown has Teabing say little about this gospel of Philip, and for good reason.
Scholarship has utterly rejected this work as having any authentic historical recollections not derived from the canonical Gospels. Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, is our Philip who debunks Teabing’s Philip.
In his book Hidden Gospels, Jenkins explodes the myth of the Gospel of Philip as a reliable or contemporary source for the life of Jesus:
Not a first century document at all, scholars date the Gospel of Philip to the third century, about 200 years after Jesus lived, and therefore no product of the disciple named Philip in Acts, unless he lived to be at least 310! This would be as far removed from us as the American Revolution, and certainly not to be preferred over the canonical Gospels, which even by later dates assigned by some scholars (80-100 AD) are far closer to their source.
The Nag Hammadi document was penned no earlier than 350 AD.
The Gospel of Philip is a Gnostic text, and Gnostic thought would have no place in first century Palestinian Judaism. A Jesus teaching Gnosticism in this setting would not have been Teabing’s influential person – he would have been ignored and shunned.
Teabing also appeals briefly to a second document titled The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
Claiming that “modern historians” have already explored the issue (and implying a positive finding), this gospel also shows Jesus treating Mary as a companion, and depicts Peter’s jealousy after Jesus gives Mary special instructions to carry out to run the Church after his crucifixion. Leading up to the idea of Mary Magdalene as the “female womb that carried Jesus’ royal bloodline,” Teabing comments:
Jesus was the original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene.
This gospel, however, fares no better than Philip under critical analysis. It, too, is a Gnostic document that reflects no reality found among Palestinian Jews of the first century; the earliest fragments, Jenkins notes, are dated to the third century, and most scholars date it no earlier than 180-200 AD, as far from Jesus are we are from the Civil War.
What Brown has actually done here is uncritically accept as valid specific fringe views that sober scholars like Jenkins reject. Brown sits with those who claim that goddess worship and Mary Magdalene’s prominence was the original, which the early, evil, male-dominated church erased; but as Jenkins observes, “…the Gnostic world should rather be seen as the first of many popular reactions against the institutional structures of the existing church, of the sort that would be commonplace through the middle ages and beyond."
Put simply, the church has a better claim to have “been there first.” Their documents have the evidence of earlier composition -- in terms of manuscript evidence, internal linguistic evidence, and external attestation – and the evidence of context, for the “male dominated” society that is so despised by ideologues like Brown is better matched in the Jewish culture in which Christianity formed, while the “divinized female” ideal that they prefer is found only in much later Gnostic materials.
Stay tuned for Part 8...coming soon
“There is also a more general point with regard to calling an opinion a law: once one starts quoting rabbinic statements as laws governing Palestine, one may draw absolutely any portrait of first-century Palestine that one wants. There are thousands and thousands of pages, filled with opinions."
These “laws” may not be laws, but anything from “a simple description of common practice, which someone finally decided to write down” to a prohibition offered precisely because so many people were doing the opposite.
It may be something intended only for the Pharisees, or may be an expression of an ideal that was never followed. As Miller notes, quoting Jewish scholar Ze'ev Safrai: "The public at large did not obey the rabbis. Among the Jews, only a minority followed the rabbis, obeyed their decisions and was influenced by their sermons and moral teachings….The scholar or reader who wishes to do real history must take into account all sorts of possibilities when he or she faces a rabbinic passage; the response, 'everybody did it because the rabbis laid it down' is seldom the correct one."
Therefore, it is false to say that Jesus as a married man “makes infinitely more sense;” it is simply false to claim that the “social decorum” (or anything else) “virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried;” it is false that “celibacy was condemned,” and the silence on the subject in the Gospels is not room for a positive proof whatsoever. (Let it finally be added, as many have noted, that Jesus does have a "bride" -- the church!
This is how the body of believers is identified in Revelation, which clearly points to Jesus being single on earth.)
In a section following, Brown’s “historian” repeats his error about Gospels being found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He also appeals to a collection of texts found at a location called Nag Hammadi in 1945. Surprisingly, Teabing makes no mention of the most famous alternative gospel found in this collection, the Gospel of Thomas. Why this is so is quite clear: The Gospel of Thomas ends with an admonition by Jesus that women must “become male” in order to find salvation!
Needless to say, this would not fit in with Brown’s tale of seekers after a feminine divine! Instead, Brown cherry-picks two other documents:
The Gospel of Philip. Recommended as a “good place to start” by Teabing, Brown quotes a portion of the text in which Jesus is said to often “kiss” Mary Magdalene “on the mouth” and thereby invoke the jealousy of Peter.
Teabing goes on to point out that Mary is described as Jesus’s “companion,” and this is supposedly troubling for the canonical Gospel view. Is it? Brown has Teabing say little about this gospel of Philip, and for good reason.
Scholarship has utterly rejected this work as having any authentic historical recollections not derived from the canonical Gospels. Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, is our Philip who debunks Teabing’s Philip.
In his book Hidden Gospels, Jenkins explodes the myth of the Gospel of Philip as a reliable or contemporary source for the life of Jesus:
Not a first century document at all, scholars date the Gospel of Philip to the third century, about 200 years after Jesus lived, and therefore no product of the disciple named Philip in Acts, unless he lived to be at least 310! This would be as far removed from us as the American Revolution, and certainly not to be preferred over the canonical Gospels, which even by later dates assigned by some scholars (80-100 AD) are far closer to their source.
The Nag Hammadi document was penned no earlier than 350 AD.
The Gospel of Philip is a Gnostic text, and Gnostic thought would have no place in first century Palestinian Judaism. A Jesus teaching Gnosticism in this setting would not have been Teabing’s influential person – he would have been ignored and shunned.
Teabing also appeals briefly to a second document titled The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
Claiming that “modern historians” have already explored the issue (and implying a positive finding), this gospel also shows Jesus treating Mary as a companion, and depicts Peter’s jealousy after Jesus gives Mary special instructions to carry out to run the Church after his crucifixion. Leading up to the idea of Mary Magdalene as the “female womb that carried Jesus’ royal bloodline,” Teabing comments:
Jesus was the original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene.
This gospel, however, fares no better than Philip under critical analysis. It, too, is a Gnostic document that reflects no reality found among Palestinian Jews of the first century; the earliest fragments, Jenkins notes, are dated to the third century, and most scholars date it no earlier than 180-200 AD, as far from Jesus are we are from the Civil War.
What Brown has actually done here is uncritically accept as valid specific fringe views that sober scholars like Jenkins reject. Brown sits with those who claim that goddess worship and Mary Magdalene’s prominence was the original, which the early, evil, male-dominated church erased; but as Jenkins observes, “…the Gnostic world should rather be seen as the first of many popular reactions against the institutional structures of the existing church, of the sort that would be commonplace through the middle ages and beyond."
Put simply, the church has a better claim to have “been there first.” Their documents have the evidence of earlier composition -- in terms of manuscript evidence, internal linguistic evidence, and external attestation – and the evidence of context, for the “male dominated” society that is so despised by ideologues like Brown is better matched in the Jewish culture in which Christianity formed, while the “divinized female” ideal that they prefer is found only in much later Gnostic materials.
Stay tuned for Part 8...coming soon
Sunday, June 18, 2006
But It's Just Fiction.. .(Part 6)
We pick up with more such errors in Chapter 58. As before, Teabing and his implied authority as a historian are responsible for the relevant statements:
“…Jesus as a married man makes infinitely more sense than our standard biblical view of Jesus as a bachelor…Because Jesus was a Jew…the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned, and the obligation for a Jewish father was to find a suitable wife for his son. If Jesus were not married, at least one of the Bible’s gospels would have mentioned it and offered some explanation for His unnatural state of bachelorhood.”
All of this is in service of an explanation that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and is taken not from any reputable source on Jewish customs, but from Baigent and Leigh’s material (see below). And is it correct? Once again Teabing would be pulled over by the History Police for this sort of bungle. First, he is committing the classic fallacy of argument from silence – you cannot affirm whatever you want simply because the text doesn’t deny it. Second, the following data from Glenn Miller’s Christian ThinkTank overturns his speculations altogether:
It would have been “normal” for [Jesus] to have been married, but not obligatory for that time (or any other time, for that matter).
1. The rabbinic literature--which is what people sometimes use to argue that celibacy was a capital offense(!)--notes and gives rules for exceptions to rules which were themselves non-binding:
"Celibacy was, in fact, not common, and was disapproved by the rabbis, who taught that a man should marry at eighteen, and that if he passed the age of twenty without taking a wife he transgressed a divine command and incurred God's displeasure. Postponement of marriage was permitted students of the Law that they might concentrate their attention on their studies, free from the cares of support a wife. Cases like that of Simeon be 'Azzai, who never married, were evidently infrequent.
He had himself said that a man who did not marry was like one who shed blood, and diminished the likeness of God. One of his colleagues threw up to him that he was better at preaching that at practicing, to which he replied, What shall I do? My soul is enamored of the Law; the population of the world can be kept up by others...It is not to be imagined that pronouncements about the duty of marrying and the age at which people should marry actually regulated practice."
2. Judaism at the time of Jesus, of course, was a "many splintered thing", with the forerunners of the rabbinics being only one sect among many, one viewpoint (actually, multiple viewpoints!) on a spectrum of viewpoints. Accordingly, there were other groups at the time that either (a) required celibacy; or (b) allowed it.
The Essenes (and the somehow-related Qumran folks) were described by Josephus, Philo, and Pliny as being celibate, but the data is inconclusive as to whether they REQUIRED it or merely ENCOURAGED it.
Philo describes another Jewish sect of both men and women--the Therapeutae --who were celibate in their studies and pursuit of wisdom and the holy life (De Vita Contemplativa 68f).
3. But the dominant class of individuals who were “allowed” or “expected” to be celibate were prophetic figures, throughout Jewish history:
The prophet Jeremiah…
The wilderness prophet Banus:
"More well-known, though still exceptional, would have been the undoubted celibacy of wilderness prophets like Banus (Josephus Life 2.11) and John the Baptist."
John the Baptist (and possibly his prototype Elijah]…
Even the 2nd century AD Hasidic miracle-worker, the Galilean rabbi Pinhas ben Yair taught that abstinence was essential to reception of prophetic wisdom and the Holy Spirit.
4. Although the Rabbinic writers stressed the importance of marriage for procreation, it is noteworthy that this prophetic ideal of celibacy still showed up in the rabbinics:
"Judaism saw nothing wrong in portraying as celibate the great primordial prophet, seer, and lawgiver Moses (though only after the Lord had begun to speak to him). We see this interpretation already beginning to develop in Philo in the 1st century A.D. What is more surprising is that this idea is also reflected in various rabbinic passages. The gist of the tradition is an a fortiori argument. If the Israelites at Sinai had to abstain from women temporarily to prepare for God's brief, once-and- for-all address to them, how much more should Moses be permanently chaste, since God spoke regularly to him
. The same tradition, but from the viewpoint of the deprived wife, is related in the Sipre on Numbers 12.1. Since the rabbis in general were unsympathetic--not to say hostile--to religious celibacy, the survival of this Moses tradition even in later rabbinic writings argues that the tradition was long-lived and widespread by the time of the rabbis…In view of this "marginal" tradition in early Judaism, it is hardly surprising that the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes has no difficulty in seeing Jesus as celibate and explaining his unusual state by his prophetic call and the reception of the Spirit."
So, although it would have been “normal” and expected for a young Jewish man to be married, we have examples of where celibacy was accepted, encouraged, or required. Therefore, Jesus would not have had to have been married.
Part 7 Coming Soon.......
“…Jesus as a married man makes infinitely more sense than our standard biblical view of Jesus as a bachelor…Because Jesus was a Jew…the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned, and the obligation for a Jewish father was to find a suitable wife for his son. If Jesus were not married, at least one of the Bible’s gospels would have mentioned it and offered some explanation for His unnatural state of bachelorhood.”
All of this is in service of an explanation that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and is taken not from any reputable source on Jewish customs, but from Baigent and Leigh’s material (see below). And is it correct? Once again Teabing would be pulled over by the History Police for this sort of bungle. First, he is committing the classic fallacy of argument from silence – you cannot affirm whatever you want simply because the text doesn’t deny it. Second, the following data from Glenn Miller’s Christian ThinkTank overturns his speculations altogether:
It would have been “normal” for [Jesus] to have been married, but not obligatory for that time (or any other time, for that matter).
1. The rabbinic literature--which is what people sometimes use to argue that celibacy was a capital offense(!)--notes and gives rules for exceptions to rules which were themselves non-binding:
"Celibacy was, in fact, not common, and was disapproved by the rabbis, who taught that a man should marry at eighteen, and that if he passed the age of twenty without taking a wife he transgressed a divine command and incurred God's displeasure. Postponement of marriage was permitted students of the Law that they might concentrate their attention on their studies, free from the cares of support a wife. Cases like that of Simeon be 'Azzai, who never married, were evidently infrequent.
He had himself said that a man who did not marry was like one who shed blood, and diminished the likeness of God. One of his colleagues threw up to him that he was better at preaching that at practicing, to which he replied, What shall I do? My soul is enamored of the Law; the population of the world can be kept up by others...It is not to be imagined that pronouncements about the duty of marrying and the age at which people should marry actually regulated practice."
2. Judaism at the time of Jesus, of course, was a "many splintered thing", with the forerunners of the rabbinics being only one sect among many, one viewpoint (actually, multiple viewpoints!) on a spectrum of viewpoints. Accordingly, there were other groups at the time that either (a) required celibacy; or (b) allowed it.
The Essenes (and the somehow-related Qumran folks) were described by Josephus, Philo, and Pliny as being celibate, but the data is inconclusive as to whether they REQUIRED it or merely ENCOURAGED it.
Philo describes another Jewish sect of both men and women--the Therapeutae --who were celibate in their studies and pursuit of wisdom and the holy life (De Vita Contemplativa 68f).
3. But the dominant class of individuals who were “allowed” or “expected” to be celibate were prophetic figures, throughout Jewish history:
The prophet Jeremiah…
The wilderness prophet Banus:
"More well-known, though still exceptional, would have been the undoubted celibacy of wilderness prophets like Banus (Josephus Life 2.11) and John the Baptist."
John the Baptist (and possibly his prototype Elijah]…
Even the 2nd century AD Hasidic miracle-worker, the Galilean rabbi Pinhas ben Yair taught that abstinence was essential to reception of prophetic wisdom and the Holy Spirit.
4. Although the Rabbinic writers stressed the importance of marriage for procreation, it is noteworthy that this prophetic ideal of celibacy still showed up in the rabbinics:
"Judaism saw nothing wrong in portraying as celibate the great primordial prophet, seer, and lawgiver Moses (though only after the Lord had begun to speak to him). We see this interpretation already beginning to develop in Philo in the 1st century A.D. What is more surprising is that this idea is also reflected in various rabbinic passages. The gist of the tradition is an a fortiori argument. If the Israelites at Sinai had to abstain from women temporarily to prepare for God's brief, once-and- for-all address to them, how much more should Moses be permanently chaste, since God spoke regularly to him
. The same tradition, but from the viewpoint of the deprived wife, is related in the Sipre on Numbers 12.1. Since the rabbis in general were unsympathetic--not to say hostile--to religious celibacy, the survival of this Moses tradition even in later rabbinic writings argues that the tradition was long-lived and widespread by the time of the rabbis…In view of this "marginal" tradition in early Judaism, it is hardly surprising that the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes has no difficulty in seeing Jesus as celibate and explaining his unusual state by his prophetic call and the reception of the Spirit."
So, although it would have been “normal” and expected for a young Jewish man to be married, we have examples of where celibacy was accepted, encouraged, or required. Therefore, Jesus would not have had to have been married.
Part 7 Coming Soon.......
Thursday, June 08, 2006
But It’s Just Fiction….(Part 5)
Part 5
At [the Council of Nicea]….many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus….until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.
This is a half-truth. The Council of Nicea did seriously consider alternating views of Jesus, not so much as “mortal” versus “God” but as “eternal” versus “created,” and they were debating because heretics had come out against the already-held view that Jesus was divine. The heretical view, held by the presbyter Arius, maintained that Jesus was not divine by nature, but was created in ages past by God. Jesus was thus not argued to be “mortal” or just a “great and powerful man” even by the heretical. (As an aside, Constantine, who Teabing blames so much on, was himself sympathetic to the Arians!
Beyond this, the New Testament itself gives clear evidence of Jesus being viewed as divine:
Through the New Testament, Jesus describes himself, and other New Testament writers describe him, in terms of the Wisdom of God, a pre-New Testament Jewish figure that was regarded as divine, and as an attribute of God personified.
Jesus identified himself as the Son of Man, a phrase associated with a divine figure in Daniel 7.
Paul in 1 Cor. 8:4-6 offers a revised version of the Jewish Shema which includes Jesus in the identity of Yahweh, the God of the Jews.
A variety of New Testament passages affirm the absolute and full deity of Christ, such as John 1:1 (“the Word was God”), John 5:18 (“calling God His own Father, making himself equal with God”), John 20:28 (“[you are] my Lord and my God”), “Titus 2:13 (our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ,”), Romans 9:5 (“God over all, blessed forever”), and Colossians 2:9 (“within Him dwells all the fullness of being God in bodily form”), and others.
Chapter 55 of The DaVinci Code, then, is laden with error and represents the poorest scholarship one will find between two covers. To put these sorts of statements into the mouth of a historian is an insult to the profession.
Part 6 Coming soon......
At [the Council of Nicea]….many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus….until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.
This is a half-truth. The Council of Nicea did seriously consider alternating views of Jesus, not so much as “mortal” versus “God” but as “eternal” versus “created,” and they were debating because heretics had come out against the already-held view that Jesus was divine. The heretical view, held by the presbyter Arius, maintained that Jesus was not divine by nature, but was created in ages past by God. Jesus was thus not argued to be “mortal” or just a “great and powerful man” even by the heretical. (As an aside, Constantine, who Teabing blames so much on, was himself sympathetic to the Arians!
Beyond this, the New Testament itself gives clear evidence of Jesus being viewed as divine:
Through the New Testament, Jesus describes himself, and other New Testament writers describe him, in terms of the Wisdom of God, a pre-New Testament Jewish figure that was regarded as divine, and as an attribute of God personified.
Jesus identified himself as the Son of Man, a phrase associated with a divine figure in Daniel 7.
Paul in 1 Cor. 8:4-6 offers a revised version of the Jewish Shema which includes Jesus in the identity of Yahweh, the God of the Jews.
A variety of New Testament passages affirm the absolute and full deity of Christ, such as John 1:1 (“the Word was God”), John 5:18 (“calling God His own Father, making himself equal with God”), John 20:28 (“[you are] my Lord and my God”), “Titus 2:13 (our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ,”), Romans 9:5 (“God over all, blessed forever”), and Colossians 2:9 (“within Him dwells all the fullness of being God in bodily form”), and others.
Chapter 55 of The DaVinci Code, then, is laden with error and represents the poorest scholarship one will find between two covers. To put these sorts of statements into the mouth of a historian is an insult to the profession.
Part 6 Coming soon......
Sunday, May 28, 2006
But It’s Just Fiction….(Part 4)
Part 4
In his text Brown only names one particular mystery religion alleged to provide a source for Christian beliefs (see below), but in general, this can be said in reply:
The taking over of symbolism is true – but signifies ideological victory, not borrowing. Note to begin with that we are talking here not of apostolic Christianity of the first century, but of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries.
What we see here is not so much “borrowing” but a sort of advertising campaign, or a type of artistic one-upmanship. The pagan deity Mithra was depicted slaying the bull while riding its back; the church did a lookalike scene with Samson killing a lion. Mithra sent arrows into a rock to bring forth water; the church changed that into Moses getting water from the rock at Horeb.
Why was this done?
It was done because this was an age when art usually was imitative. This is because the people of the New Testament world thought in terms of what could be "probabilities," or verification from general or prior experience. Imitation was a way of asserting your superiority: “Mithra is not the real hero. Samson is. Ignore Mithra.” “This mystery religion uses a miter as a sign of power. Well, we have the true power. We claim the miter for our own.” Note that the borrowing only involved art and ritual – it did not involve borrowing of ideology.
Now in terms of the only specific mystery religion Brown names, Mithraism:
The pre-Christian God Mithras – called the Son of God and the Light of the World – was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.
Not surprisingly, scholars of Mithraism know nothing of any of this. Let’s look at the claims one at a time:
He was called the Son of God and the Light of the World. This is simply false. I have previously surveyed Mithraic studies literature and neither of these titles is noted by Mithraic scholars.
He was born on December 25. This may be true, but it is of no relevance, for the New Testament does not associate Dec. 25th with Jesus’ birth at all. When the Christian Church chose December 25 as the birthday celebration for Jesus Christ, they did so in direct opposition to the pagan mid-winter festival of Saturnalia, not because they believed Jesus was born, like the pagan god(s), on that date.
He died,and was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. This is simply false. The Mithraic scholar Richard Gordon says plainly that there is “no death of Mithras – which means, there can be no burial of Mithras, and no resurrection of Mithras, either. Some amateur writers cite the church writer of the fourth century, Firmicus, who says that the Mithraists mourn the image of a dead Mithras; but this is far too late to have influenced Christianity (if anything, the influence was the other way around) and after reading the work of Firmicus, I found no such reference at all. More relevant perhaps is the late second-century church writer Tertullian's Prescription Against Heretics, chapter 40 which says, "if my memory still serves me, Mithra…sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers; celebrates also the oblation of bread, and introduces an image of a resurrection, and before a sword wreathes a crown…" The argument therefore relies on Tertullian's memory, and it isn't the initiates of Mithra, but Mithra, himself who introduces an “image” of a resurrection(?) – he is not “resurrected” himself.
Therefore, the comment of Brown’s character is a dismally erroneous assessment of what is reported by Mithraic scholarship.
“Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.”
This is also simply false. All available evidence indicates that Christianity was honoring Sunday long before Constantine. Brown is perhaps confused because certain New Testament passages, for example, record Paul going to the synagogue on the Sabbath to preach to the Jews (if one wants to preach to the Jews and the Gentile God-fearers who attended with them, then it is logical to look for them where they are found - on the Sabbath, in the synagogue!). However, it is clear that Christian observations are held on the “first day of the week” (Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:2; cf. Rev. 1:10), and there is also ample evidence of Sunday being observed well before Constantine:
1. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (110 AD), wrote: "If, then, those who walk in the ancient practices attain to newness of hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but fashioning their lives after the Lord's Day on which our life also arose through Him, that we may be found disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher.” Ignatius specifies the "Lord's Day" as the one on which "our life arises through Him" -- the resurrection day, which was a Sunday.
2. Justin Martyr (150 AD) describes Sunday as the day when Christians gather to read the scriptures and hold their assembly because it is both the initial day of creation and the day of the resurrection.
3. The Epistle of Barnabas (120-150) cites Isaiah 1:13 and indicates that the "eighth day" is a new beginning via the resurrection, and is the day to be kept
4. The Didache (70-75) instructs believers: "On the Lord's own day, gather yourselves together and break bread and give thanks."
5. Other later testimonies from Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Pliny the Younger, which pre-date Constantine significantly, testify that Christians worshipped on Sunday.
So once again, Brown’s “historian” receives a dismal grade in history.
Part 5 Coming Soon...........
In his text Brown only names one particular mystery religion alleged to provide a source for Christian beliefs (see below), but in general, this can be said in reply:
The taking over of symbolism is true – but signifies ideological victory, not borrowing. Note to begin with that we are talking here not of apostolic Christianity of the first century, but of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries.
What we see here is not so much “borrowing” but a sort of advertising campaign, or a type of artistic one-upmanship. The pagan deity Mithra was depicted slaying the bull while riding its back; the church did a lookalike scene with Samson killing a lion. Mithra sent arrows into a rock to bring forth water; the church changed that into Moses getting water from the rock at Horeb.
Why was this done?
It was done because this was an age when art usually was imitative. This is because the people of the New Testament world thought in terms of what could be "probabilities," or verification from general or prior experience. Imitation was a way of asserting your superiority: “Mithra is not the real hero. Samson is. Ignore Mithra.” “This mystery religion uses a miter as a sign of power. Well, we have the true power. We claim the miter for our own.” Note that the borrowing only involved art and ritual – it did not involve borrowing of ideology.
Now in terms of the only specific mystery religion Brown names, Mithraism:
The pre-Christian God Mithras – called the Son of God and the Light of the World – was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.
Not surprisingly, scholars of Mithraism know nothing of any of this. Let’s look at the claims one at a time:
He was called the Son of God and the Light of the World. This is simply false. I have previously surveyed Mithraic studies literature and neither of these titles is noted by Mithraic scholars.
He was born on December 25. This may be true, but it is of no relevance, for the New Testament does not associate Dec. 25th with Jesus’ birth at all. When the Christian Church chose December 25 as the birthday celebration for Jesus Christ, they did so in direct opposition to the pagan mid-winter festival of Saturnalia, not because they believed Jesus was born, like the pagan god(s), on that date.
He died,and was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. This is simply false. The Mithraic scholar Richard Gordon says plainly that there is “no death of Mithras – which means, there can be no burial of Mithras, and no resurrection of Mithras, either. Some amateur writers cite the church writer of the fourth century, Firmicus, who says that the Mithraists mourn the image of a dead Mithras; but this is far too late to have influenced Christianity (if anything, the influence was the other way around) and after reading the work of Firmicus, I found no such reference at all. More relevant perhaps is the late second-century church writer Tertullian's Prescription Against Heretics, chapter 40 which says, "if my memory still serves me, Mithra…sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers; celebrates also the oblation of bread, and introduces an image of a resurrection, and before a sword wreathes a crown…" The argument therefore relies on Tertullian's memory, and it isn't the initiates of Mithra, but Mithra, himself who introduces an “image” of a resurrection(?) – he is not “resurrected” himself.
Therefore, the comment of Brown’s character is a dismally erroneous assessment of what is reported by Mithraic scholarship.
“Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.”
This is also simply false. All available evidence indicates that Christianity was honoring Sunday long before Constantine. Brown is perhaps confused because certain New Testament passages, for example, record Paul going to the synagogue on the Sabbath to preach to the Jews (if one wants to preach to the Jews and the Gentile God-fearers who attended with them, then it is logical to look for them where they are found - on the Sabbath, in the synagogue!). However, it is clear that Christian observations are held on the “first day of the week” (Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:2; cf. Rev. 1:10), and there is also ample evidence of Sunday being observed well before Constantine:
1. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (110 AD), wrote: "If, then, those who walk in the ancient practices attain to newness of hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but fashioning their lives after the Lord's Day on which our life also arose through Him, that we may be found disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher.” Ignatius specifies the "Lord's Day" as the one on which "our life arises through Him" -- the resurrection day, which was a Sunday.
2. Justin Martyr (150 AD) describes Sunday as the day when Christians gather to read the scriptures and hold their assembly because it is both the initial day of creation and the day of the resurrection.
3. The Epistle of Barnabas (120-150) cites Isaiah 1:13 and indicates that the "eighth day" is a new beginning via the resurrection, and is the day to be kept
4. The Didache (70-75) instructs believers: "On the Lord's own day, gather yourselves together and break bread and give thanks."
5. Other later testimonies from Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Pliny the Younger, which pre-date Constantine significantly, testify that Christians worshipped on Sunday.
So once again, Brown’s “historian” receives a dismal grade in history.
Part 5 Coming Soon...........
Saturday, May 13, 2006
But It’s Just Fiction….(Part 3)
Teabing goes on, with more specific claims:
“Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen….Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land….More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament,and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them…The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
Was Jesus a figure of “staggering influence” about whom “thousands of followers” wrote? The answers to these questions is, “No, not exactly,” and “No, not that the evidence would allow.”
Jesus became a figure of “staggering influence” only AFTER the Christian church became a prominent force. As far as the historians of the day were concerned, Jesus was just a "blip" on the screen. Jesus was not considered to be historically significant by historians of his time. He did not address the Roman Senate, or write extensive Greek philosophical treatises; He never traveled outside of the regions of Palestine, and was not a member of any known political party. It is only because Christians later made Jesus a "celebrity" that He became known. Historian E. P. Sanders, comparing Jesus to Alexander the Great, notes that the latter "so greatly altered the political situation in a large part of the world that the main outline of his public life is very well known indeed.
Jesus did not change the social, political and economic circumstances in Palestine ..the superiority of evidence for Jesus is seen when we ask what he thought.” Jesus was also executed as a criminal, providing him with the ultimate “marginality”. He lived an offensive lifestyle and alienated many people. He associated with the despised and rejected: Tax collectors, prostitutes, and the band of fishermen He had as disciples. Finally, he was a poor,rural person in a land run by wealthy urbanites. The idea that Jesus had a ‘staggering influence” during his own life on earth is completely in error, which means that he could not have had “thousands of followers” to write authoritative biographies.
In fact, three or four biographies would be the most we should expect – especially since 90 to 95 percent of all ancient persons were illiterate and unable to write such a work to begin with!
Were there eighty Gospels out of which four were chosen? If this is so, then we are justified in asking several questions:
1) What are the dates of the manuscripts of the “excluded” Gospels?
If we are to consider any such work, we need to know how close it is to the time when Jesus lived. One way of determining this is to know what the earliest manuscript of it is. When we look at the evidence (sadly,evidence doesn’t seem to bother Brown in the least), we find that while there is near universal Christian knowledge and acceptance of the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John)
by the middle of the second century, none of the non-canonical Gospels were even close in date of composition, breadth of distribution, or proportion of acceptance. These were, for the most part, pseudo-gospels attributed to other Apostles but generally disqualified by most churches because they had no historical “chain of evidence” actually connecting them to real Apostles,and/or because they made claims that were contrary to what was already accepted in the canonical Gospels. This issue is also well known among Biblical scholars and information is easily obtainable in books written on a lay level such as Norman Geisler and William Nix’s A General
Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986) or online in sources such documented by the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia’s documents at
http://www.reference-guides.com/isbe/B/BIBLE_THE_IV_CANONICITY/ .
2) Is there any evidence of this “excluded” Gospel being used at an earlier date?
It is also useful to find citations of a work in contemporary writers, for if they quote a work, that is evidence that it existed at the time of their writing. Although there may have been as many as 50 pseudepigraphal gospels, most are known only by name from a few isolated statements by early church writers. The most significant ones are well known and the reasons they were never accepted by the majority of the church is well known and has never been kept secret by any
hierarchy. Geisler and Nix provide lay readers with a good summary of this issue in their book referenced above (pages 297-317) saying, “the extra-canonical literature, taken as a whole,manifests a surprising poverty. The bulk of it is legendary, and bears the clear mark of a forgery. Only here and there amid a mass of worthless rubbish, do we come across a priceless jewel” (311). In fact, that “priceless jewel” in almost every instance is a mere repetition of what we find in one or more of the canonical Gospels.
3) Does the context cohere with what we would expect of the historical Jesus?
In other words,if Jesus is said to open a “refrigerator” and take out a “burrito” and put it in a “microwave oven,” then we can be fairly sure that it does not accurately report the activities of a Jesus living in the first century. For example, in the Gospel of the Ebionites we find that John the Baptist didn’t eat honey and locusts, as the canonical Gospels record, but only honey. The Ebionites were vegetarians and didn’t let the truth get in the way of their dietary agenda. The
Gospel of Peter laid the blame for the crucifixion solely at the feet of the Jews, exonerating the Romans – an anti-Semitic stance Brown should consider intolerable. The very “Gospels” Brown brings forth to undermine the consistent story of the canonical Gospels promote teachings completely contrary to the “secret” Christianity Brown says they represented! It is this sort of data that scholars take into account when deciding whether a document is an authoritative source. In this chapter Brown does not name any of the other Gospels he has in mind, but he will name two of them in a later chapter, and we will address them in our discussion of those chapters. In closing, it is worth noting that Brown’s putative historian perpetrates two enormous blunders that would be an embarrassment to any scholar:
“Fortunately for historians…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.”
First, as I explained to the woman at the bookstore, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, not in the 1950s. (Note for those with problems: Three times I have had people write me claiming that Brown is right here because Dead Sea Scrolls continued to be discovered into the 1950s. But this is clearly not what Brown intends to report: If it were, he would have said that they were found beginning in 1947 and through the 1950s; as it is, his claim here remains a blunder. In addition, I have noted with satisfaction that two different experts in Burstein's
guidebook [see below] peg Brown for exactly the same error.)
Second, they did not contain any “gospels” or anything mentioning Jesus. They overwhelmingly predate the New Testament and are mostly copies of Old Testament books, and internal documents for the Qumran community. Brown also has his character allege that the Vatican “tried very hard to suppress the release of these Scrolls” because they contained damaging information. This is merely an obnoxious conspiracy
theory found in popular writers, with no basis in fact. Again, the evidence concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls has been written about in so many books, journals, and articles, many on a lay level, that Brown can only make his erroneous statements with a complete disregard for the facts. There is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls that promotes either traditional or deviant Christianity. The community at Qumran responsible for the Scrolls was not Christian, but Jewish. While the Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing directly about Christianity, they do provide two important substantiations of traditional Christianity.
First, the texts of the Old Testament preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us with verification that the Old Testament preserved by Jews and Christians throughout the centuries after Christ was an accurate rendition of what was known to Jews of Jesus’ day.
Second, the community at Qumran reflects a first century Judaism much more like that depicted by the New Testament writers than it does the Judaism that developed after the destruction of the Second Temple in A. D. 70. Those who speculated in times past that the Judaism presented in the New Testament was a later invention by Christian opposers to Judaism were refuted by what we have learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Did Constantine decide the canon? How did the process work?.
Constantine was not the decider of the canon, and played in fact no role at all in its assembly; the church at large was the party responsible. The process of canonizing the New Testament was based on a model that had existed for centuries whereby various religions chose a collection of normative sacred books. It is
likely that Paul himself began the process by collecting his own letters, or that one of his friends like Luke or Timothy did so. Far from being an arbitrary process, or one decided upon by Constantine much later, the formation of the canon was the result of carefully-weighed choices over time by concerned church officials and members. Later votes on the canon were merely the most definitive steps taken at the end of a long and careful, sometimes difficult, process.
Biblical scholar Robert Grant, in The Formation of the New Testament, writes that the New Testament canon was:...not the product of official assemblies or even of the studies of a few theologians. It reflects and expresses the ideal self-understanding of a whole religious movement which, in spite of temporal, geographical, and even ideological differences, could finally be united in accepting these 27 diverse documents as expressing the meaning of God's revelation in Jesus Christ and to his church. To claim that Constantine was behind the canon, or was responsible for destroying Gospels he did not approve of, is a ludicrous distortion of history.
In fact, Constantine convened the Council at Nicea, paid the travel expenses of those who attended, and provided his summer lake palace for the site, but he had no ecclesiastical authority at all. The information we have on the Council is fascinating and in no way supports the idea of a pagan Roman’s overthrow of “early
Christianity” or any conspiracy. A good introduction to the facts about the Council is available in the Summer 1996 issue of Christian History magazine, “Heresy in the Early Church,” at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/51h/.
“The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual – the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of “God-eating” – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.”
Stay tuned for Part 4. Coming soon......
“Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen….Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land….More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament,and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them…The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
Was Jesus a figure of “staggering influence” about whom “thousands of followers” wrote? The answers to these questions is, “No, not exactly,” and “No, not that the evidence would allow.”
Jesus became a figure of “staggering influence” only AFTER the Christian church became a prominent force. As far as the historians of the day were concerned, Jesus was just a "blip" on the screen. Jesus was not considered to be historically significant by historians of his time. He did not address the Roman Senate, or write extensive Greek philosophical treatises; He never traveled outside of the regions of Palestine, and was not a member of any known political party. It is only because Christians later made Jesus a "celebrity" that He became known. Historian E. P. Sanders, comparing Jesus to Alexander the Great, notes that the latter "so greatly altered the political situation in a large part of the world that the main outline of his public life is very well known indeed.
Jesus did not change the social, political and economic circumstances in Palestine ..the superiority of evidence for Jesus is seen when we ask what he thought.” Jesus was also executed as a criminal, providing him with the ultimate “marginality”. He lived an offensive lifestyle and alienated many people. He associated with the despised and rejected: Tax collectors, prostitutes, and the band of fishermen He had as disciples. Finally, he was a poor,rural person in a land run by wealthy urbanites. The idea that Jesus had a ‘staggering influence” during his own life on earth is completely in error, which means that he could not have had “thousands of followers” to write authoritative biographies.
In fact, three or four biographies would be the most we should expect – especially since 90 to 95 percent of all ancient persons were illiterate and unable to write such a work to begin with!
Were there eighty Gospels out of which four were chosen? If this is so, then we are justified in asking several questions:
1) What are the dates of the manuscripts of the “excluded” Gospels?
If we are to consider any such work, we need to know how close it is to the time when Jesus lived. One way of determining this is to know what the earliest manuscript of it is. When we look at the evidence (sadly,evidence doesn’t seem to bother Brown in the least), we find that while there is near universal Christian knowledge and acceptance of the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John)
by the middle of the second century, none of the non-canonical Gospels were even close in date of composition, breadth of distribution, or proportion of acceptance. These were, for the most part, pseudo-gospels attributed to other Apostles but generally disqualified by most churches because they had no historical “chain of evidence” actually connecting them to real Apostles,and/or because they made claims that were contrary to what was already accepted in the canonical Gospels. This issue is also well known among Biblical scholars and information is easily obtainable in books written on a lay level such as Norman Geisler and William Nix’s A General
Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986) or online in sources such documented by the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia’s documents at
http://www.reference-guides.com/isbe/B/BIBLE_THE_IV_CANONICITY/ .
2) Is there any evidence of this “excluded” Gospel being used at an earlier date?
It is also useful to find citations of a work in contemporary writers, for if they quote a work, that is evidence that it existed at the time of their writing. Although there may have been as many as 50 pseudepigraphal gospels, most are known only by name from a few isolated statements by early church writers. The most significant ones are well known and the reasons they were never accepted by the majority of the church is well known and has never been kept secret by any
hierarchy. Geisler and Nix provide lay readers with a good summary of this issue in their book referenced above (pages 297-317) saying, “the extra-canonical literature, taken as a whole,manifests a surprising poverty. The bulk of it is legendary, and bears the clear mark of a forgery. Only here and there amid a mass of worthless rubbish, do we come across a priceless jewel” (311). In fact, that “priceless jewel” in almost every instance is a mere repetition of what we find in one or more of the canonical Gospels.
3) Does the context cohere with what we would expect of the historical Jesus?
In other words,if Jesus is said to open a “refrigerator” and take out a “burrito” and put it in a “microwave oven,” then we can be fairly sure that it does not accurately report the activities of a Jesus living in the first century. For example, in the Gospel of the Ebionites we find that John the Baptist didn’t eat honey and locusts, as the canonical Gospels record, but only honey. The Ebionites were vegetarians and didn’t let the truth get in the way of their dietary agenda. The
Gospel of Peter laid the blame for the crucifixion solely at the feet of the Jews, exonerating the Romans – an anti-Semitic stance Brown should consider intolerable. The very “Gospels” Brown brings forth to undermine the consistent story of the canonical Gospels promote teachings completely contrary to the “secret” Christianity Brown says they represented! It is this sort of data that scholars take into account when deciding whether a document is an authoritative source. In this chapter Brown does not name any of the other Gospels he has in mind, but he will name two of them in a later chapter, and we will address them in our discussion of those chapters. In closing, it is worth noting that Brown’s putative historian perpetrates two enormous blunders that would be an embarrassment to any scholar:
“Fortunately for historians…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.”
First, as I explained to the woman at the bookstore, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, not in the 1950s. (Note for those with problems: Three times I have had people write me claiming that Brown is right here because Dead Sea Scrolls continued to be discovered into the 1950s. But this is clearly not what Brown intends to report: If it were, he would have said that they were found beginning in 1947 and through the 1950s; as it is, his claim here remains a blunder. In addition, I have noted with satisfaction that two different experts in Burstein's
guidebook [see below] peg Brown for exactly the same error.)
Second, they did not contain any “gospels” or anything mentioning Jesus. They overwhelmingly predate the New Testament and are mostly copies of Old Testament books, and internal documents for the Qumran community. Brown also has his character allege that the Vatican “tried very hard to suppress the release of these Scrolls” because they contained damaging information. This is merely an obnoxious conspiracy
theory found in popular writers, with no basis in fact. Again, the evidence concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls has been written about in so many books, journals, and articles, many on a lay level, that Brown can only make his erroneous statements with a complete disregard for the facts. There is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls that promotes either traditional or deviant Christianity. The community at Qumran responsible for the Scrolls was not Christian, but Jewish. While the Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing directly about Christianity, they do provide two important substantiations of traditional Christianity.
First, the texts of the Old Testament preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us with verification that the Old Testament preserved by Jews and Christians throughout the centuries after Christ was an accurate rendition of what was known to Jews of Jesus’ day.
Second, the community at Qumran reflects a first century Judaism much more like that depicted by the New Testament writers than it does the Judaism that developed after the destruction of the Second Temple in A. D. 70. Those who speculated in times past that the Judaism presented in the New Testament was a later invention by Christian opposers to Judaism were refuted by what we have learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Did Constantine decide the canon? How did the process work?.
Constantine was not the decider of the canon, and played in fact no role at all in its assembly; the church at large was the party responsible. The process of canonizing the New Testament was based on a model that had existed for centuries whereby various religions chose a collection of normative sacred books. It is
likely that Paul himself began the process by collecting his own letters, or that one of his friends like Luke or Timothy did so. Far from being an arbitrary process, or one decided upon by Constantine much later, the formation of the canon was the result of carefully-weighed choices over time by concerned church officials and members. Later votes on the canon were merely the most definitive steps taken at the end of a long and careful, sometimes difficult, process.
Biblical scholar Robert Grant, in The Formation of the New Testament, writes that the New Testament canon was:...not the product of official assemblies or even of the studies of a few theologians. It reflects and expresses the ideal self-understanding of a whole religious movement which, in spite of temporal, geographical, and even ideological differences, could finally be united in accepting these 27 diverse documents as expressing the meaning of God's revelation in Jesus Christ and to his church. To claim that Constantine was behind the canon, or was responsible for destroying Gospels he did not approve of, is a ludicrous distortion of history.
In fact, Constantine convened the Council at Nicea, paid the travel expenses of those who attended, and provided his summer lake palace for the site, but he had no ecclesiastical authority at all. The information we have on the Council is fascinating and in no way supports the idea of a pagan Roman’s overthrow of “early
Christianity” or any conspiracy. A good introduction to the facts about the Council is available in the Summer 1996 issue of Christian History magazine, “Heresy in the Early Church,” at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/51h/.
“The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual – the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of “God-eating” – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.”
Stay tuned for Part 4. Coming soon......
Sunday, May 07, 2006
But It’s Just Fiction….(Part 2)
Brown’s imaginary arguments undermining the trustworthiness of the Biblical text are so unsophisticated and off the mark that one example will suffice to show his inadequacies.
In Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel, Biblical scholar Maurice Casey examines the process of Mark's use of Aramaic sources in composing his Greek Gospel and offers a list of inevitable complications of translation and bilingualism and actual examples in practice. How a bilingual learns a language -- and how they keep up with it -- inevitably affects their translation ability.
There is a vast difference between a person who grows up with both languages (and may therefore be less proficient in both of them) and a person who learned a second language, and did not use their first language for many years. A modern scholar who learns ancient Greek or Hebrew must encounter similar difficulties. As Casey puts it, "All bilinguals suffer from interference," and translators more so. A few of examples offered by Casey bring this point home:
Bilinguals "often use a linguistic item more frequently because it has a close parallel in their other language." Thus: "...Danish students are reported using the English definite article more often than monoglot speakers of English. This reflects 'the fact that Danish and English seem to have slightly different conceptions of what constitutes generic as opposed to specific reference.' " Or: "...there is a tendency for English loanwords among speakers of Austrian German to be feminine -- die Road, die Yard, etc. -- and this is probably due to the similarity in sound between the German die and the accented form of English 'the', whereas the German masculine der and neuter das sound different."
When a source text is culture-specific, there is great need for changes to make the text intelligible. The example of how two German editions of Alice and Wonderland translated a particular passage differently serves well:
“Perhaps it doesn't understand English,” thought Alice, “I dare say it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.”
One edition substituted "English" so that the translation simply said that the mouse did not understand much, and to make the reference to William the Conqueror intelligible, added a phrase about William coming from England. A different translation made the language not understood by the mouse into German, and changed William the Conqueror into Napoleon. There were thus two different methods used to make the text intelligible to native readers.
A German person on a bus asks a person next to an empty seat, "Ist dieser Platz frei?" It is literally in English, "Is this place free?" But an English person would say, "Is this seat taken?" Or, a polite request in Polish to a distinguished guest to take a seat is literally, in English, "Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! Sit!" The "short imperative" to "Sit!" sounds "like a command rather than a polite request" made to someone unruly rather than to a distinguished guest.
Translating Dickens into German, there is a phrase in The Olde Curiosity Shop where a character speaks of it being "a fine week for ducks." English speakers naturally know this to mean it was a rainy week. A German translator however concluded that for us, "a fine week for ducks" meant it was a fine week to go hunting for them!
Such then are typical problems of translating from one language to another. The sort of exhaustive knowledge required to perform an exact translation is simply beyond the understanding of most people, and presents a practical impossibility. This does not mean we must press a panic button over not being able to provide “definitive” translations of every single word immediately, giving us the full range of meaning implied in every word, but nevertheless enough to be reasonably certain of what is being said. Even the examples above clearly transmit the main meaning of the passage, even if some nuance is lost to non-native speakers. Linguistic studies continue to be performed to this day giving us new insight into ancient languages. This is so not only for Biblical languages, but other ancient languages like Latin, and a professional historian, unlike our fictional Teabing, would never offer such a ridiculously generalized statement.
Additions and revisions are also of no more issue than those found in any other document. Again, without a specific “addition” or “revision” to address, we can only offer some general points. There are a number of “checkpoints” that give us a reasonable certainty of what the Bible originally said when written. The first set of checkpoints come through the process called textual criticism. Put simply, scholars collect and compare copies of the work in question, work out their relative ages, and by this means decide what the likeliest reading of the original document was. In terms of evidence, it is common to speak of the “embarrassing” wealth of evidence we have for the text of the New Testament, comprised of over 24,000 copies or pieces of manuscripts, some dating as early as the second and third century. In contrast, consider that the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, writing about 100 AD, are attested to by a mere handful of manuscripts (less than a dozen) which date to a far later time at the earliest (the eleventh century!).
The Old Testament does not have quite as much or the same quality of manuscript evidence, but does still exceed significantly what is available from the likes of Tacitus and most other ancient works. On this basis, it is difficult to justify any claim that we do not possess a “definitive” idea of what the Bible actually said in its originals, or autographa, unless one wants to throw out all other ancient writings with it.
In terms of revisions, ancient writers did have justifiable reasons for performing certain types of revisions: As language changed or as certain facts become less known, it would become necessary to adjust the text in order for it to remain coherent to later readers. The Greek historian Herodotus, for example, used Greek measurement units to report weight, currency, and distance which would not have been used by the people of the places he reported upon. He does this even when translating inscriptions made by the people he is studying. Such revisions are very easy to discern and are not as problem for arriving at a “definitive” version of the biblical text.
Moreover, they should not be mistaken for wholesale content-revisions, or changes in ideology, and they were certainly not “countless,” if we are to have any respect at all for the evidence provided by textual criticism.
In Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel, Biblical scholar Maurice Casey examines the process of Mark's use of Aramaic sources in composing his Greek Gospel and offers a list of inevitable complications of translation and bilingualism and actual examples in practice. How a bilingual learns a language -- and how they keep up with it -- inevitably affects their translation ability.
There is a vast difference between a person who grows up with both languages (and may therefore be less proficient in both of them) and a person who learned a second language, and did not use their first language for many years. A modern scholar who learns ancient Greek or Hebrew must encounter similar difficulties. As Casey puts it, "All bilinguals suffer from interference," and translators more so. A few of examples offered by Casey bring this point home:
Bilinguals "often use a linguistic item more frequently because it has a close parallel in their other language." Thus: "...Danish students are reported using the English definite article more often than monoglot speakers of English. This reflects 'the fact that Danish and English seem to have slightly different conceptions of what constitutes generic as opposed to specific reference.' " Or: "...there is a tendency for English loanwords among speakers of Austrian German to be feminine -- die Road, die Yard, etc. -- and this is probably due to the similarity in sound between the German die and the accented form of English 'the', whereas the German masculine der and neuter das sound different."
When a source text is culture-specific, there is great need for changes to make the text intelligible. The example of how two German editions of Alice and Wonderland translated a particular passage differently serves well:
“Perhaps it doesn't understand English,” thought Alice, “I dare say it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.”
One edition substituted "English" so that the translation simply said that the mouse did not understand much, and to make the reference to William the Conqueror intelligible, added a phrase about William coming from England. A different translation made the language not understood by the mouse into German, and changed William the Conqueror into Napoleon. There were thus two different methods used to make the text intelligible to native readers.
A German person on a bus asks a person next to an empty seat, "Ist dieser Platz frei?" It is literally in English, "Is this place free?" But an English person would say, "Is this seat taken?" Or, a polite request in Polish to a distinguished guest to take a seat is literally, in English, "Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! Sit!" The "short imperative" to "Sit!" sounds "like a command rather than a polite request" made to someone unruly rather than to a distinguished guest.
Translating Dickens into German, there is a phrase in The Olde Curiosity Shop where a character speaks of it being "a fine week for ducks." English speakers naturally know this to mean it was a rainy week. A German translator however concluded that for us, "a fine week for ducks" meant it was a fine week to go hunting for them!
Such then are typical problems of translating from one language to another. The sort of exhaustive knowledge required to perform an exact translation is simply beyond the understanding of most people, and presents a practical impossibility. This does not mean we must press a panic button over not being able to provide “definitive” translations of every single word immediately, giving us the full range of meaning implied in every word, but nevertheless enough to be reasonably certain of what is being said. Even the examples above clearly transmit the main meaning of the passage, even if some nuance is lost to non-native speakers. Linguistic studies continue to be performed to this day giving us new insight into ancient languages. This is so not only for Biblical languages, but other ancient languages like Latin, and a professional historian, unlike our fictional Teabing, would never offer such a ridiculously generalized statement.
Additions and revisions are also of no more issue than those found in any other document. Again, without a specific “addition” or “revision” to address, we can only offer some general points. There are a number of “checkpoints” that give us a reasonable certainty of what the Bible originally said when written. The first set of checkpoints come through the process called textual criticism. Put simply, scholars collect and compare copies of the work in question, work out their relative ages, and by this means decide what the likeliest reading of the original document was. In terms of evidence, it is common to speak of the “embarrassing” wealth of evidence we have for the text of the New Testament, comprised of over 24,000 copies or pieces of manuscripts, some dating as early as the second and third century. In contrast, consider that the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, writing about 100 AD, are attested to by a mere handful of manuscripts (less than a dozen) which date to a far later time at the earliest (the eleventh century!).
The Old Testament does not have quite as much or the same quality of manuscript evidence, but does still exceed significantly what is available from the likes of Tacitus and most other ancient works. On this basis, it is difficult to justify any claim that we do not possess a “definitive” idea of what the Bible actually said in its originals, or autographa, unless one wants to throw out all other ancient writings with it.
In terms of revisions, ancient writers did have justifiable reasons for performing certain types of revisions: As language changed or as certain facts become less known, it would become necessary to adjust the text in order for it to remain coherent to later readers. The Greek historian Herodotus, for example, used Greek measurement units to report weight, currency, and distance which would not have been used by the people of the places he reported upon. He does this even when translating inscriptions made by the people he is studying. Such revisions are very easy to discern and are not as problem for arriving at a “definitive” version of the biblical text.
Moreover, they should not be mistaken for wholesale content-revisions, or changes in ideology, and they were certainly not “countless,” if we are to have any respect at all for the evidence provided by textual criticism.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
But It’s Just Fiction….(Part I)
Excerpt from an article by J.P. Holding
“Is this not a work of fiction? Why worry about a few misplaced facts?” Why worry, indeed. While waiting in line to purchase The DaVinci Code at the local Borders bookstore, I scanned a primary chapter of concern, having been forewarned by Bob Passantino of its content. A woman behind me spoke up: “That’s a great book!” I looked back at her. “Not really,” I replied shortly. “It’s full of poor scholarship.”
The woman was shocked. “But it’s just fiction,” she said. Curious nevertheless, she asked for an example.
“Well, it has the date of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls wrong,” I told her, and pointed out specifics of the error. If the author cannot get something that elementary and fundamental right, what else is he wrong on? “Interesting,” she said, nodding. Very much so. The seed of doubt is important, as author Brown uses it to entice his prospective readers. One the first things a reader of The DaVinci Code will see, in prefatory material and under a heading in bolded, capital letters, reading “FACT”, is this statement:
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.
In terms of documents and rituals, however – and even artwork and architecture -- The DaVinci Code contains few “facts” and what few it does contain require serious qualification. All of this might be excused, except that Brown baptizes such aspects of the book with the brand of FACT, and that he also puts many of these “facts” into the mouth of a character named Teabing who is described as a reputable historian. I rather think if any genuine, academic historian made certain statements attributed to Teabing, he would be promptly demoted to janitorial duties and remanded for training in History 101. Sadly, Brown’s sleight-of-hand under the cloak of fact has tricked others, including the Book Review Editor of the New York Daily News, who commented naively that “his research is impeccable.”
The work is fiction, yes, but it claims to be rooted in fact. Brown himself, it should be added, acknowledged on the television special that he “became a believer” in the theories The DaVinci Code espouses after allegedly trying to disprove them. We should no more let this pass than one would let pass a fictional work rooted in the premise that a particular race was inferior, and that put the claims of this premise into the mouth of someone cast as a trained anthropologist, and prefaced by a statement that, “All descriptions of cultures, biology, sociology, and genetics in this novel are accurate.” Would such a book stay long on the shelves of a Barnes and Noble? I think not. It is only because Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular is considered “fair game” that this sort of work is received not with outrage, but with a Ho Hum.
Leaving aside questions of literary deficiencies and inaccuracies concerning other minor areas, our material of concern does not emerge until about halfway through the book, in Chapter 55. The statements that follow are all put in the mouth of our historian Teabing, answering some questions from the two lead characters about the nature and background of their quest. To begin:
…“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven….The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”
Even in this vague summary, a host of problems emerges:
The implied view being addressed – that “the Bible arrived by fax from heaven” or “dropped out of the clouds” – is a tendentious straw man. The Bible was composed by men, yes, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is never claimed, however, that this inspiration involved the Spirit taking any kind of unnatural force over the Bible’s authors, much less that it fell from the clouds. Rather it is held that God chose specific instruments from men and that the Spirit guided them.
“Countless translations, etc.” is excessive hyperbole and vague generalization. Without a specific charge of what was translated, added, or revised, it is impossible to respond to this point specifically. Generally however, these considerations may be offered:
Translation issues for the Bible are not different than translation issues for any document, and cause no more difficulty. The statement implies that there is some great confusion over translation that is cause for concern. It is true that there are issues one may discuss in terms of translating the Bible from ancient Hebrew and Greek to any modern language, but this is a natural function of all translation processes, and in no way is this ever thought to detract from offering a “definitive,” reasonable account of what has been written. In fact, the transmission of the ancient texts, the voluminous quality of manuscript copies, the science of textual criticism, and the art of translation ensure that any reputable modern translation of the Bible is an accurate rendition of what was originally said. This subject has been covered so comprehensively and so well by so many scholars that Brown’s misrepresentation of the facts is inexcusable.
“Is this not a work of fiction? Why worry about a few misplaced facts?” Why worry, indeed. While waiting in line to purchase The DaVinci Code at the local Borders bookstore, I scanned a primary chapter of concern, having been forewarned by Bob Passantino of its content. A woman behind me spoke up: “That’s a great book!” I looked back at her. “Not really,” I replied shortly. “It’s full of poor scholarship.”
The woman was shocked. “But it’s just fiction,” she said. Curious nevertheless, she asked for an example.
“Well, it has the date of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls wrong,” I told her, and pointed out specifics of the error. If the author cannot get something that elementary and fundamental right, what else is he wrong on? “Interesting,” she said, nodding. Very much so. The seed of doubt is important, as author Brown uses it to entice his prospective readers. One the first things a reader of The DaVinci Code will see, in prefatory material and under a heading in bolded, capital letters, reading “FACT”, is this statement:
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.
In terms of documents and rituals, however – and even artwork and architecture -- The DaVinci Code contains few “facts” and what few it does contain require serious qualification. All of this might be excused, except that Brown baptizes such aspects of the book with the brand of FACT, and that he also puts many of these “facts” into the mouth of a character named Teabing who is described as a reputable historian. I rather think if any genuine, academic historian made certain statements attributed to Teabing, he would be promptly demoted to janitorial duties and remanded for training in History 101. Sadly, Brown’s sleight-of-hand under the cloak of fact has tricked others, including the Book Review Editor of the New York Daily News, who commented naively that “his research is impeccable.”
The work is fiction, yes, but it claims to be rooted in fact. Brown himself, it should be added, acknowledged on the television special that he “became a believer” in the theories The DaVinci Code espouses after allegedly trying to disprove them. We should no more let this pass than one would let pass a fictional work rooted in the premise that a particular race was inferior, and that put the claims of this premise into the mouth of someone cast as a trained anthropologist, and prefaced by a statement that, “All descriptions of cultures, biology, sociology, and genetics in this novel are accurate.” Would such a book stay long on the shelves of a Barnes and Noble? I think not. It is only because Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular is considered “fair game” that this sort of work is received not with outrage, but with a Ho Hum.
Leaving aside questions of literary deficiencies and inaccuracies concerning other minor areas, our material of concern does not emerge until about halfway through the book, in Chapter 55. The statements that follow are all put in the mouth of our historian Teabing, answering some questions from the two lead characters about the nature and background of their quest. To begin:
…“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven….The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”
Even in this vague summary, a host of problems emerges:
The implied view being addressed – that “the Bible arrived by fax from heaven” or “dropped out of the clouds” – is a tendentious straw man. The Bible was composed by men, yes, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is never claimed, however, that this inspiration involved the Spirit taking any kind of unnatural force over the Bible’s authors, much less that it fell from the clouds. Rather it is held that God chose specific instruments from men and that the Spirit guided them.
“Countless translations, etc.” is excessive hyperbole and vague generalization. Without a specific charge of what was translated, added, or revised, it is impossible to respond to this point specifically. Generally however, these considerations may be offered:
Translation issues for the Bible are not different than translation issues for any document, and cause no more difficulty. The statement implies that there is some great confusion over translation that is cause for concern. It is true that there are issues one may discuss in terms of translating the Bible from ancient Hebrew and Greek to any modern language, but this is a natural function of all translation processes, and in no way is this ever thought to detract from offering a “definitive,” reasonable account of what has been written. In fact, the transmission of the ancient texts, the voluminous quality of manuscript copies, the science of textual criticism, and the art of translation ensure that any reputable modern translation of the Bible is an accurate rendition of what was originally said. This subject has been covered so comprehensively and so well by so many scholars that Brown’s misrepresentation of the facts is inexcusable.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
The Da Vinci Deception: Excerpts #38 and #41
Book Excerpt:
38. Sometimes Langdon says that all these incredible secrets have been known for centuries by scholars, but at other times he insists that this "secret knowledge" has been cleverly covered up by the Church and nobody knows about it. How can both claims be true?
Logically, they cannot. But remember, The Da Vinci Code doesn’t have a burning interest in truth. If we read its claims not as attempts to tell truth, but as attempts to manipulate us into believing a lie, we can then understand the motivation for its many contradictions. Brown’s strategy is to intimidate the reader with his phony erudition. Then, he inflames the reader’s pride at discovering a blockbuster secret about Jesus and Christianity.
To intimidate, few things work as well as making the reader feel ignorant. And so, we see Langdon and Teabing continually delivering lectures to a wide-eyed Sophie, who (like the reader) exclaims, "What? I had no idea!" as each alleged "revelation" is unfolded. They then pat her (and us) on the head and refer to her as "dear girl" while constantly reiterating the mantra that "scholars have known all this for ages." Since most readers don’t know much about Leonardo da Vinci, the Priory of Sion, Aramaic, Greek, the Council of Nicea, or the way in which the Bible was written and assembled by the Church, they feel stupid. People of faith may feel embarrassed because whatever they say to articulate their beliefs sounds like the protests of a child who has just been shown the Santa suit in the closet and informed that "it’s all a lie."
We can see this at the heart of the novel when Teabing bluntly declares that "Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers." In his patronizing way, Teabing makes clear Brown’s message: "What I mean," he says, "is that almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false."
Nobody likes to feel stupid, of course. And nobody likes the feeling of being a sucker. Brown plays on these aversions with the second part of his strategy. Having persuaded you that the Christian herd is just a bunch of suckers, he offers you the chance to escape suckerdom by buying into his newly revealed "truth." If you accept his claims that "scholars have known this for ages," he promises you liberation from the mental slavery you have lived in all your life. It’s an appealing sophistry and many people fall for it. Yet, in doing so, they are actually falling prey to the manipulation they think they are escaping.
41. But isn’t the essential thing about a religion its timeless truths rather than its historical claims?
Not always. If a religion is founded on some universal moral principle such as "Abandon the desires of the flesh," it does not require roots in history. Thus, Buddhism would not be harmed if it could be proven that Buddha (i.e, Siddhartha Gautama) never existed. Why? Because the point of Buddhism is not Buddha himself but the teachings of Buddha. But religions that are essentially rooted in history—such as Judaism or Christianity—do stand or fall on the validity of their historical claims, because they are about persons, not merely ideas.
Judaism, for instance, exists because it is rooted in an historical claim: that the One God of the Universe entered into a covenant with the Jewish people through the ministry of Moses. If that claim can be shown to be false, then Judaism itself is false. Imagine if somebody wrote a book about the "real" Moses and the "secret origins" of Judaism, claiming that the entire Jewish religion is based on a pack of lies. What if it said the "historical" Moses was really a Hindu-like mystic who believed in many deities and preached tolerance and free love? He did not lead the people out of Egypt in the Exodus, did not give the Ten Commandments, performed no miracles, and gave no moral rules.
Suppose this same book claimed that, centuries later, the Jewish priests who claimed to be Moses’ successors rewrote their nation’s history and decided to give Moses an "upgrade." They turned him into a prophet who saw the one true God and spoke with Him. They then made him into a great military leader who defeated Pharaoh and led his people out of slavery. In effect, the Jewish priests created Moses in their own image—a priest like themselves—leading the people in worship and animal sacrifice. And they recast Moses as a divinely appointed moral teacher who gave the people Ten Commandments from God Himself on Mount Sinai, thus establishing the covenant with God.
Then, imagine that the book argued that the Jewish priests did all this to strengthen their own positions of power. For the priests wanted to be recognized as the divinely appointed leaders of the people, the teachers of a God-given law, and the spokesmen for God—just like the Moses they invented. So in the end, many core Jewish beliefs are really based on lies told by these power-hungry priests who successfully duped the people in their efforts to solidify their political control over Israel. And many Jews have fallen for the "legend of Moses" ever since.
Such a book would be widely condemned as being anti-Semitic and a direct assault on Judaism—and rightly so. But when Dan Brown comes out with an anti-Catholic conspiracy theory novel, we are assured that "It’s just a story!" As Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, has recently argued, anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable American prejudice (see Phillip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Oxford University Press, 2003). The phenomenal success of a book like The Da Vinci Code bears this out.
38. Sometimes Langdon says that all these incredible secrets have been known for centuries by scholars, but at other times he insists that this "secret knowledge" has been cleverly covered up by the Church and nobody knows about it. How can both claims be true?
Logically, they cannot. But remember, The Da Vinci Code doesn’t have a burning interest in truth. If we read its claims not as attempts to tell truth, but as attempts to manipulate us into believing a lie, we can then understand the motivation for its many contradictions. Brown’s strategy is to intimidate the reader with his phony erudition. Then, he inflames the reader’s pride at discovering a blockbuster secret about Jesus and Christianity.
To intimidate, few things work as well as making the reader feel ignorant. And so, we see Langdon and Teabing continually delivering lectures to a wide-eyed Sophie, who (like the reader) exclaims, "What? I had no idea!" as each alleged "revelation" is unfolded. They then pat her (and us) on the head and refer to her as "dear girl" while constantly reiterating the mantra that "scholars have known all this for ages." Since most readers don’t know much about Leonardo da Vinci, the Priory of Sion, Aramaic, Greek, the Council of Nicea, or the way in which the Bible was written and assembled by the Church, they feel stupid. People of faith may feel embarrassed because whatever they say to articulate their beliefs sounds like the protests of a child who has just been shown the Santa suit in the closet and informed that "it’s all a lie."
We can see this at the heart of the novel when Teabing bluntly declares that "Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers." In his patronizing way, Teabing makes clear Brown’s message: "What I mean," he says, "is that almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false."
Nobody likes to feel stupid, of course. And nobody likes the feeling of being a sucker. Brown plays on these aversions with the second part of his strategy. Having persuaded you that the Christian herd is just a bunch of suckers, he offers you the chance to escape suckerdom by buying into his newly revealed "truth." If you accept his claims that "scholars have known this for ages," he promises you liberation from the mental slavery you have lived in all your life. It’s an appealing sophistry and many people fall for it. Yet, in doing so, they are actually falling prey to the manipulation they think they are escaping.
41. But isn’t the essential thing about a religion its timeless truths rather than its historical claims?
Not always. If a religion is founded on some universal moral principle such as "Abandon the desires of the flesh," it does not require roots in history. Thus, Buddhism would not be harmed if it could be proven that Buddha (i.e, Siddhartha Gautama) never existed. Why? Because the point of Buddhism is not Buddha himself but the teachings of Buddha. But religions that are essentially rooted in history—such as Judaism or Christianity—do stand or fall on the validity of their historical claims, because they are about persons, not merely ideas.
Judaism, for instance, exists because it is rooted in an historical claim: that the One God of the Universe entered into a covenant with the Jewish people through the ministry of Moses. If that claim can be shown to be false, then Judaism itself is false. Imagine if somebody wrote a book about the "real" Moses and the "secret origins" of Judaism, claiming that the entire Jewish religion is based on a pack of lies. What if it said the "historical" Moses was really a Hindu-like mystic who believed in many deities and preached tolerance and free love? He did not lead the people out of Egypt in the Exodus, did not give the Ten Commandments, performed no miracles, and gave no moral rules.
Suppose this same book claimed that, centuries later, the Jewish priests who claimed to be Moses’ successors rewrote their nation’s history and decided to give Moses an "upgrade." They turned him into a prophet who saw the one true God and spoke with Him. They then made him into a great military leader who defeated Pharaoh and led his people out of slavery. In effect, the Jewish priests created Moses in their own image—a priest like themselves—leading the people in worship and animal sacrifice. And they recast Moses as a divinely appointed moral teacher who gave the people Ten Commandments from God Himself on Mount Sinai, thus establishing the covenant with God.
Then, imagine that the book argued that the Jewish priests did all this to strengthen their own positions of power. For the priests wanted to be recognized as the divinely appointed leaders of the people, the teachers of a God-given law, and the spokesmen for God—just like the Moses they invented. So in the end, many core Jewish beliefs are really based on lies told by these power-hungry priests who successfully duped the people in their efforts to solidify their political control over Israel. And many Jews have fallen for the "legend of Moses" ever since.
Such a book would be widely condemned as being anti-Semitic and a direct assault on Judaism—and rightly so. But when Dan Brown comes out with an anti-Catholic conspiracy theory novel, we are assured that "It’s just a story!" As Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, has recently argued, anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable American prejudice (see Phillip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Oxford University Press, 2003). The phenomenal success of a book like The Da Vinci Code bears this out.
Coalition of Catholics Offer Antidote to The Da Vinci Code
"The Da Vinci Code is the epitome of the old saying that if you’re going to tell a lie, make it really big one. The book has wooed and intimidated more than 30 million readers by skillfully tapping into what many have identified as America’s last acceptable prejudice – anti-Catholicism".– Tom Allen, President & Editor-in-Chief, CatholicExchange.com.
Encinitas, CA, February 21, 2006 – The Da Vinci Code, the Dan Brown novel and forthcoming (May 19th) Ron Howard/Tom Hanks motion picture urges audiences in its marketing literature to "Seek the Truth." Ironically, the book begins with a list of "facts" that apparently neither the author nor the filmmakers ever actually fact-checked.
A coalition of Catholics, including Ascension Press, Catholic Exchange, and Catholic Outreach, has formed an initiative called DaVinci Outreach to help readers and moviegoers navigate their way through the web of bogus history and outright lies conjured up by Dan Brown and brought to life by Imagine Entertainment and Sony Pictures.
"A simple Google search would have revealed to Academy Award-Winning director Ron Howard the myriad of factual errors in The Da Vinci Code. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls are identified in the novel as Christian documents, not Jewish, and Brown cites the Vatican eleven centuries before it even existed," said Matthew Pinto, president of Ascension Press, which is spearheading this outreach. "
These examples merely scratch the surface. What it boils down to is that 30 million readers have been duped by a deceptively good piece of fiction. Da Vinci Outreach has been launched to counter these claims and provide Catholics with the resources they need to effectively defend Christ and the Catholic Church."
The Da Vinci Outreach campaign hopes to clear up the historical and theological confusion that surrounds The Da Vinci Code. The outreach effort provides concerned individuals with the resources they need to seek the real truth and equip themselves for the inevitable watercooler conversations that will attack the principles of Christianity, the Catholic Church, and the Person of Jesus Christ.
"The Da Vinci Code is a frontal assault on Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church," continues Matthew Pinto. "DavinciOutreach.com, a Web site that offers resources, study guides, local speaker information, and other free materials, is the much-needed antidote to the spiritual and intellectual poison that permeates Dan Brown’s novel and that will undoubtedly be depicted in the forthcoming film."
Encinitas, CA, February 21, 2006 – The Da Vinci Code, the Dan Brown novel and forthcoming (May 19th) Ron Howard/Tom Hanks motion picture urges audiences in its marketing literature to "Seek the Truth." Ironically, the book begins with a list of "facts" that apparently neither the author nor the filmmakers ever actually fact-checked.
A coalition of Catholics, including Ascension Press, Catholic Exchange, and Catholic Outreach, has formed an initiative called DaVinci Outreach to help readers and moviegoers navigate their way through the web of bogus history and outright lies conjured up by Dan Brown and brought to life by Imagine Entertainment and Sony Pictures.
"A simple Google search would have revealed to Academy Award-Winning director Ron Howard the myriad of factual errors in The Da Vinci Code. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls are identified in the novel as Christian documents, not Jewish, and Brown cites the Vatican eleven centuries before it even existed," said Matthew Pinto, president of Ascension Press, which is spearheading this outreach. "
These examples merely scratch the surface. What it boils down to is that 30 million readers have been duped by a deceptively good piece of fiction. Da Vinci Outreach has been launched to counter these claims and provide Catholics with the resources they need to effectively defend Christ and the Catholic Church."
The Da Vinci Outreach campaign hopes to clear up the historical and theological confusion that surrounds The Da Vinci Code. The outreach effort provides concerned individuals with the resources they need to seek the real truth and equip themselves for the inevitable watercooler conversations that will attack the principles of Christianity, the Catholic Church, and the Person of Jesus Christ.
"The Da Vinci Code is a frontal assault on Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church," continues Matthew Pinto. "DavinciOutreach.com, a Web site that offers resources, study guides, local speaker information, and other free materials, is the much-needed antidote to the spiritual and intellectual poison that permeates Dan Brown’s novel and that will undoubtedly be depicted in the forthcoming film."
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Jesus Decoded
Introduction
By Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco
Causing people to see something they never saw before in a five-hundred-year-old work of art which is among the most famous and reproduced of all time is an accomplishment of genius, if that “something” is a valid new insight. If it is not, then this kind of achievement usually goes by other names.
The Da Vinci Code novel contains a claim that in Leonardo’s mural The Last Supper, which portrays Jesus and his twelve apostles at the meal he took with them on the night before he died, one of the twelve is not the apostle John but actually a woman who is Mary Magdalene.
Forget the Gospel narratives through which Leonardo, like every other Christian, would have known about the Last Supper and which contain no mention of Mary Magdalene; forget the fact that this mural seems to have caused no sensation among the monks whose refectory it decorated and who would have been as likely to recognize a female form then as we are today; forget the many paintings of the Last Supper which show a handsome youth often leaning on Christ’s shoulder or on his chest following the tradition that identified John with the unnamed “beloved disciple” of the fourth Gospel. If such a claim is put between the covers of a book, apparently it merits respectful consideration no matter how absurd.
What this novel does to Leonardo’s Last Supper, it does to Christianity as such. It asks people to consider equivalent to the mainstream Christian tradition quite a few odd claims. Some are merely distortions of hypotheses advanced by serious scholars who do serious research. Others, however, are inaccurate or false.
By Msgr. Francis J. Maniscalco
Causing people to see something they never saw before in a five-hundred-year-old work of art which is among the most famous and reproduced of all time is an accomplishment of genius, if that “something” is a valid new insight. If it is not, then this kind of achievement usually goes by other names.
The Da Vinci Code novel contains a claim that in Leonardo’s mural The Last Supper, which portrays Jesus and his twelve apostles at the meal he took with them on the night before he died, one of the twelve is not the apostle John but actually a woman who is Mary Magdalene.
Forget the Gospel narratives through which Leonardo, like every other Christian, would have known about the Last Supper and which contain no mention of Mary Magdalene; forget the fact that this mural seems to have caused no sensation among the monks whose refectory it decorated and who would have been as likely to recognize a female form then as we are today; forget the many paintings of the Last Supper which show a handsome youth often leaning on Christ’s shoulder or on his chest following the tradition that identified John with the unnamed “beloved disciple” of the fourth Gospel. If such a claim is put between the covers of a book, apparently it merits respectful consideration no matter how absurd.
What this novel does to Leonardo’s Last Supper, it does to Christianity as such. It asks people to consider equivalent to the mainstream Christian tradition quite a few odd claims. Some are merely distortions of hypotheses advanced by serious scholars who do serious research. Others, however, are inaccurate or false.
The DaVinci Code Deception
About The Da Vinci Deception:
Why has The Da Vinci Code sold tens of millions of copies worldwide?
Is the book’s phenomenal success due to its compelling characters, thrilling plot points, or impeccable research?
No. The Da Vinci Code has become an international hit because of its lurid prose and its sensationalistic—even blasphemous—claims regarding the “true” history of Christianity.
In the end, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled assault on the person of Jesus Christ and His Church. Millions of people, who are not experts in history, art, theology, or archeology, are being led astray by The Da Vinci Code’s fraudulent assertions and invented history.
On May 19th, The DaVinci Code will be released as a major motion picture. Film critics have predicted it will be one of the year’s biggest blockbusters.
The Da Vinci Deception is a powerful antidote to the spiritual poison found in The DaVinci Code. This easy-to-read, question-and-answer book tackles the key errors in this devastating cultural phenomenon. It is the perfect giveaway to family, friends, parishioners, and anyone you think may be in danger of having their faith in Christ and His Church eroded by the mockery of Truth that is The Da Vinci Code.
Why has The Da Vinci Code sold tens of millions of copies worldwide?
Is the book’s phenomenal success due to its compelling characters, thrilling plot points, or impeccable research?
No. The Da Vinci Code has become an international hit because of its lurid prose and its sensationalistic—even blasphemous—claims regarding the “true” history of Christianity.
In the end, it is nothing more than a thinly veiled assault on the person of Jesus Christ and His Church. Millions of people, who are not experts in history, art, theology, or archeology, are being led astray by The Da Vinci Code’s fraudulent assertions and invented history.
On May 19th, The DaVinci Code will be released as a major motion picture. Film critics have predicted it will be one of the year’s biggest blockbusters.
The Da Vinci Deception is a powerful antidote to the spiritual poison found in The DaVinci Code. This easy-to-read, question-and-answer book tackles the key errors in this devastating cultural phenomenon. It is the perfect giveaway to family, friends, parishioners, and anyone you think may be in danger of having their faith in Christ and His Church eroded by the mockery of Truth that is The Da Vinci Code.
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