Sermon for Sunday, April 30, 2006THE DAVINCI CODE TRUTH, FICTION AND FALSEHOOD1st in a series on Spirituality and The Arts By Rev. Dr. Harvey C Martz |
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Scripture: John 20:1-2 1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. 2 So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him." Do you know what novel has sold the most copies of it hardcover edition than any other fiction work in history? It is “The DaVinci Code” by Dan Brown, and it has sold 43 million copies world wide. It has been on the New York Times best seller list 160 weeks, and with the paper edition just out and the Tom Hanks movie about to premier in 18 days, I know the paperback version will just increase that sales record. The hooplah about the book and movie is also increasing, and every week I am reading something new. Just two weeks ago Time Magazine devoted its cover story to the secret Catholic society, “Opus Dei”, which plays a major role in the book. When the book came out two years ago, we devoted an evening’s discussion in our church with about 150 people present. We also brought in New Testament scholar Ann Brock who had just written a book on Mary Magdalene. I said at that time that I thought the novel was a fun read and a good mystery but it contains terrible scholarship about the Bible and about the first 300 years of Christian history and we need to correct some of those falsehoods. I think the challenge is even greater now because more people have read the false statements about the Bible and Jesus—as well as the false statements about DaVinci and art history—and they believe those falsehoods because Dan Brown has said in the beginning of the book that everything he is writing is true! That statement is part of the misleading material about the novel. The problem is that so many people are ignorant about the Bible and about Jesus that they are going to be misled because I imagine that more people have read Brown’s book than those who have read the Gospel of Mark in the past couple of years. I want to take some time today to look at just a few of the outrageous claims Brown puts in the mouth of one of the characters. I will not take time to even summarize the plot except to say that it involves Leonardo DaVinci and his painting of the Last Supper and the search for the Holy Grail and the supposed conspiracy of the Christian church over the centuries to cover up some fictional claims about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Part of the appeal of the book has been that many of us love conspiracy theories and will find them in places where they are totally incredible. My thesis today is that the novel is a fun read and is also, in the words of one scholar, “The DaVinci Code is a mess, a riot of laughable errors and serious misstatements.” The book puts most of its wrongheaded ideas into the mouth of a character named Teabing who is portrayed as a scholar of the Grail—thought by some to be the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper but portrayed by Brown to be quite different. Let’s just look at some of those and correct them. The first is the claim that there were over 80 different gospels—versions of the life and teaching of Jesus—that were around in the first 200 years after Jesus and that the four we have—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not reliable. The fact is there were 15 or so different gospels and many of them had very bizarre portrayals of Jesus and that is why they were not chosen for inclusion in the Bible. Brown claims through his book that those other gospels had a much more human picture of Jesus than the four we have, and that is false. The left out gospels—most of them are Gnostic (a belief that the material world is evil and the spirit world is good) and picture Jesus as a supernatural magician and not human like us, and the four we have—do we see the humanity of Jesus in those? He got angry and frustrated with his friends; he prayed in anguish all night in Gethsemane; he voiced his sense of abandonment from the cross. The church has always affirmed Jesus as human and as divine, and we began the service with the Apostle’s Creed to remind us that Jesus’ humanity was always part of the church’s message: he was born, suffered, was crucified, he died, descended into hell or the place of the dead. He was human like us. AND, the gospels tell us, God was uniquely present in him and so he is called in the four gospels the Messiah, Son of God, and “Son of Man”, a messianic term. Brown’s book gets the portrayal of Jesus totally backward. It also says that Jesus must have been married because all first century Jewish men were married. Is that true from what you know? Do you think of any other church leaders who were single? Most were married, that was the most common status, but Paul was single and there was another whole group of people who lived a monastic life near the Dead Sea and most of them were single. They were the Essenes and they lived in the Qumran community and from them we get what important documents? The Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus was probably pretty close to that community of mostly single men. Speaking of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Brown says they contained writings about Jesus and that is dead wrong also—they contain some of the books in our Old Testament and some other Qumran community principles but nothing at all about Jesus. Brown says that the Emperor Constantine decided what books would be in our New Testament in the year 325, and that is silly. Constantine did not have that power, the early church leaders did and most of the 27 books we have in our New Testament had been agreed on by the year 200 except for a couple of controversial ones—Revelations and maybe James. Brown also says that Jesus’ friends wrote things about Jesus while Jesus was alive and there is absolutely no evidence for that. He also says that Jesus wrote about himself in what is speculated as the Q document and that is equally wrongheaded. We have no evidence that Jesus wrote anything and the Q document is a theory by scholars to explain where Matthew, Mark and Luke got their common material. Back to the topic of marriage: Brown’s character says that if Jesus had been married, he could not have been the Son of God, the Messiah! One of the most interesting responses to that came from Catholic scholar Father Richard McBrien from Notre Dame whom many of you heard in this sanctuary last fall when we brought him here. He had said in a one hour ABC special on Brown’s book that it would not have been impossible for Jesus to be married and that would have not prevented him from being the Messiah or the Son of God. One of the most glaring errors in the book for people who know the origins of some of the Bible words is what Brown says about the origin of the word ‘Jehovah’. Actually that word is a mistranslation of the Hebrew word ‘Yahweh’, the name of God and Brown makes it into something really weird having to do with the names of some pagan deities. There are a couple of things the book gets right in Christian history. Part of the thesis of the novel is that in the early Jesus movement, women were respected as leaders; in fact we see that respect and acceptance of female leaders and female disciples and ministers by both Jesus and Paul. That was very unusual and very admirable in an oppressive patriarchal culture where Jewish boys were taught this prayer: I thank you God that you did not create me as a Gentile, a Samaritan or a woman. Paul had women leaders in the churches he founded. But by the end of the first century the male dominance had prevailed again and Mary Magdalene who had been called the apostle to the apostles had lost her influence and was later declared to be a prostitute by a pope in the sixth century—a claim that is never in the Bible and a claim that has been corrected the last few years in Catholicism. I think that for those of you who had received last weeks’ e mail with the true/false survey, we have addressed most of those questions and if you did not get that e mail, we have copies of that survey in your bulletin today or it can be found on the foyer table along with some very helpful websites that have sprung up recently. I am personally excited about what a teachable moment this is for mainstream Christians and I hope people will read Brown’s book and then get the real scoop from those websites and from several other sources: one of those sources is the best of the twenty books that have shown up to respond to Dan Brown. Most of them are written by fundamentalist and evangelical authors, but the best one is by mainstream church historian Bart Ehrman who teaches at the University of North Carolina. His book, “Truth and Fiction in the DaVinci Code”, is on our shelves and we actually studied it a year ago in our Monday evening book group. I commend it to you highly as a reliable guide for sorting out what’s accurate and what is hogwash. The best resource is for you to be familiar with your Bible and to know that with the diversity among the gospels, that the Bible is reliable! Get familiar with the gospels starting with Mark, the earliest, shortest, and simplest. You will see the humanity and divinity of Jesus and, as we said Easter Sunday, you will see the event that convinces people Jesus is a prophet and is more than that. Easter, the resurrection shows us that, and as we also said two weeks ago, if there had been no resurrection, no Easter, we would not be here in a church and we would probably not have heard of Jesus of Nazareth. Look at those resources and then read the book, see the movie, become part of the discussion and pass on some of these materials and these resources to your friends who might not know enough to sort out the truths from the falsehoods. I think that we are actually in the midst of a very teachable moment for people to so some additional study and growth in their faith so we can continue to follow the commandment to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength! |
