Katrina, Rita, and The Da Vinci Code

Judging by the public response to The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown is dancing on a bundle of nerves running just beneath the surface of Christian culture. Perhaps this vigorous reaction should occasion no surprise: in the history of the Christian church, more blood has been spilled over fine points of doctrine—whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or whether it proceeds from the Father and the Son—than was ever shed by the saints and martyrs. So the book and the movie invite analysis on two levels: first, concerning the historical claims made about early Christianity, and second, reasons for the powerful fascination exerted by the book. Why has this particular book at this particular time generated so much controversy?

Obviously, the power of a good story has a great deal to do with it. Dan Brown delivers all the half-truths, mistakes, and falsehoods on the rails of fast-paced detective story. This vehicle takes the material to a whole new audience, and moreover, like the Trojan Horse, smuggles the ideas into people's heads, right past the critical walls that tend to deflect historians and their tiresome factual claims. Once a reader buys into the world of the story, the furnishings of that world are more likely to be received as fact. Scholars have been saying threatening—and truer—things about the historical foundations of Christian faith for two hundred years, but the population as a whole has paid them no mind.

From an historical perspective, The Da Vinci Code contains two broad truths in the midst of much error and general silliness. The truths are as follows: 1) early Christianity was a much more diverse and varied movement than later Orthodoxy has allowed us to remember, and 2) women did indeed play an important role in growth of the new religion, only to be squeezed out of leadership roles as Christian churches advanced down the path of institutionalization. In particular, Mary Magdalene seems to have had special standing: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all assert that she was the first person to see Jesus after his resurrection.

Apart from these two statements, a great many of the claims, both major and minor, are simply false. Constantine did not single-handedly transform Jesus from a human prophet to a divine being; some followers of Jesus made this move centuries earlier, as a reading of John 1:1 will demonstrate. Nor was Constantine responsible for the shape of the New Testament: as far as we know, the subject was not formally discussed at the Council of Nicaea. There were indeed many other gospels in addition to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, among them, the Gospel According to Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. However, with the partial exception of the Gospel According to Thomas, these writings spring from the second and third centuries and while they contain precious testimony to the rich variety of Christian belief at this time, they contain no reliable historical information about Jesus. Nor are the Dead Sea Scrolls among the "earliest Christian documents," as Sir Leigh Teabing proclaims: they are not Christian at all. As for the origin and nature of the so-called "Purist Documents" and the "Magdalene Diaries," only Dan Brown knows for sure. But why shouldn't he make things up? After all, this book is shelved in the fiction section.

While some Christians might resist the idea of a married or sexually active Jesus for theological reasons, an unbiased historian would find marriage, sexual activity, and offspring a natural and certainly possible state of affairs for a Jewish man of Jesus' time and place. And yet, some of Jesus' sayings project a decided coolness toward the joys of family life. In his teachings about divorce, Jesus congratulates those who have "made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven," in other words, forsworn procreation. According to Mark 3:31-35, Jesus seems to have turned his back on his own family and encouraged his followers to do the same (Luke 14:26). And finally, Jesus got his start under John the Baptist, and based on the Gospel accounts, John seems barely housebroken, let alone married. The Essenes, who were contemporaries of John and Jesus, also rejected marriage so it is not impossible that Jesus did too. In any event, reports about royal bloodlines, children in France, and so on, are medieval legends or modern fantasies..

A great deal more could be said on these and other historical points, but it is equally interesting to consider why the book has caused such a stir. While the book paints an erroneous picture of the ancient world, much can learned about the modern world by observing the lively reaction to this particular stimulus. There being seven planets, seven days of the week, seven liberal arts, seven sacraments, not to mention Seven Dwarves, it seems auspicious to offer seven reasons why the book has sparked such a reaction.

1) Truth. Do we have the whole story? Are my beliefs built on sand? Or worse: have I been fooled? Christianity—especially Protestant Christianity—has been configured in such a way that the edifice of belief rests heavily on events that allegedly took place during the thirty-year span of time embracing Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. The version of events purveyed by The Da Vinci Code raises questions about the truth of scripture and the events to which it supposedly bears witness.

2) Authority. Related to the question of truth is that of authority: who has it and what is it based upon? In large measure, the Roman Catholic Church bases its claim to authority on the genealogy of its leadership that allegedly stretches back to St. Peter, the rock upon which Jesus was to found his church. Along comes Dan Brown to tell us that it was all a mistake: it was really Mary Magdalene that should have had the top job. Regardless of whether this bit of pseudo-history is true or not, the fact that some people might believe it is enough to make the Church hierarchy sit up and take notice.

3) The role of Jesus in Christian identity formation. For many Christians, their ideas about Jesus are enmeshed with their own sense of themselves. Developmentally, people have forged their identities in response to and in lifelong conversation with the ideal Jesus presented to them by their religious communities. Changing the image of Jesus is threatening to their very own Jesus-formed self. In this way, it's quite different than changing the standard view of other historical characters such as Napoleon or Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr.

4) Sex. More specifically, The Da Vinci Code advances a picture of Jesus profoundly at odds with people's internal images of him, images that are deeply held and riddled with contradictions. The basic issue is sex. If Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene, he must have had sex with her, and rightly or wrongly, most Christians are quite allergic to this idea. As someone said in a group where I was discussing the book, "If you tell people that Jesus walked on water, there's no problem; if you tell them he was married, they freak out."

5) Cover-ups and Conspiracies. What could be more interesting than "the biggest cover-up in human history," as Sir Leigh Teabing calls it? People love to sniff out conspiracies; they're quick to believe themselves entangled in one. This probably stems from a particularly American distrust of big, old-world institutions, either governmental or religious; a certain anti-Catholic animus is certainly fueling reception of the book.

6) Women in the Church. The Da Vinci Code suggests that women played a different role in early Christianity than the one later orthodoxy has sanctioned. This gets everyone's attention: for some, it's profoundly attractive, for others, repellant. One cannot watch Christmas Mass at St. Peter's, where the Pope arrives in the train of 193 male cardinals, or scan the statement of faith of the Southern Baptist convention, without wondering whether women have gotten a fair shake where matters of religious leadership are concerned. While Langdon's balmy talk about the "divine feminine" owes more to modern New Age notions, it is true that women were deeply involved in the foundations of early Christianity, only to be sidelined as the church became institutionalized. And even if the "divine feminine" idea is modern, an infusion of kindly maternal ideology, receptive and generous, would be a welcome counterweight to the bellicose religious stance that seems all too common these days.

7) Rivalry. People who have felt stifled, oppressed, or generally unconvinced by the Church, by Christians, or by Christian dogma are quite happy to see Christian fur rubbed the wrong way and may be inclined to receive Dan Brown's version of events with special relish and perhaps with a somewhat reduced level of skepticism.

The release of the movie has revived all the issues raised by the book and moreover, presented them in still more accessible form. Two years ago, people had to shell out the money for a hardback book, spend all night reading it, and then reap the consequences at work the next day. Now, for the price of a movie ticket, they can get the whole thing in two hours. It's reminiscent of Hurricane Rita following along in the wake Hurricane Katrina. No wonder churches and organizations around the globe are getting ruffled to various degrees. This alarm is misplaced: the best response would be to relax a bit, give Dan Brown credit for writing an enjoyable story, then take the opportunity to debate, to learn, and to educate people about the profoundly important issues raised by the book