The Da Vinci Code and the Bible


 

by Father Donald Senior


This is a novel, a work of fiction, a good page-turner (most of the time). It is not a work of scholarship; it is not a revelation of things unknown. The problem? Its claim: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” (p. 1). I am not an expert on art, architecture or secret rituals, but I do know something about the Bible and what the author says about the Bible contains many assertions that are far from “accurate” but just plain wrong.

 

A few examples:
a) Assertion: there were “80” gospels written. There were other accounts written about Jesus or his teaching (see the prologue to Luke’s Gospel) in the first three centuries of the Christian era but most were later than the canonical gospels, often derivative from them, and often are not gospel-like at all (i.e., not narratives about Jesus’ life). The number “80” sounds convincing but no such number can be verified. We have fragments of about 30 such early Christian texts—most of them very fragmentary-- dating from the first three or four centuries of the Christian era. Christians have known about these writings since the beginning and no one has tried to hide this. The canonical (i.e., the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) were composed in the last quarter of the first century, incorporating historical traditions about Jesus and his teaching that had circulated mainly orally in the early church.

 

b) Assertion: the early church “suppressed” these other gospels in order to insure male domination of the early church and to erase a more “human” view of Jesus. To put it mildly, this is pure baloney. These extra-canonical gospels Brown refers to portray Jesus in much less human terms than the Four Gospels.

 

c) Assertion: Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and the church conspired to portray her as a prostitute in order to suppress this sensational information. There is absolutely no evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene; the gospels do not portray her as a prostitute (some popular later church traditions did) but as a friend of Jesus and as an important figure in the gospel story (see especially the Gospel of John). Mary Magdalene is a saint in the Catholic Church’s calendar.

 

d) Assertion: reference to Jesus and his link with Mary was found in Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient Christian writings—a fact which the Vatican tried to suppress. This is another howler on Brown’s part. There were no Christian writings at all found in the Dead Sea Scrolls (they have all been published now) nor is Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene found in the Dead Sea Scrolls or in any other ancient text such as the Nag Hammadi texts (which the author also refers to) Also the Vatican had absolutely nothing to do with the long time it took to publish the Dead Sea Scrolls (scholarly arrogance did).

 

e) Assertion: Constantine (4th century A.D.) was the one who determined the Four Gospels as official (excluding the others) and was responsible for having Jesus declared divine by a close vote (rather than the human figure he had been viewed as previously). This is again completely wrong historically: the early Christians viewed Jesus as divine in the earliest Christian writings of the New Testament (e.g. hymns embedded in the early letters of Paul which date from the very first decades of the Christian movement clearly affirm Christ’s divine status) and the four Gospels were accepted as normative by Christians at least by the beginning of the second century—long before Constantine.

 

f) Assertion: Christianity derived almost all of its beliefs and rituals from “paganism”; “Nothing in Christianity is original.” While it is true that Christianity absorbed a lot of wisdom and social structures and some religious language and concepts from its surrounding culture (how could it not?), the fact is Christianity is much more dependent on Judaism for its belief and structures (Jesus, his disciples, Paul and most of the first generation of Christians were Jewish). And it is also true that Jesus and his teaching gave to Christianity something unique and fresh that was not duplicated either in Judaism or in the Greco-Roman religious world. That is one reason why Christianity had such an impact and spread so rapidly.

 

g) Assertion: a fundamental thesis of the book is that the male-dominated church leadership, in order to exert control, chose gospels that portrayed Jesus as an exalted divine figure and suppressed other equally valid gospel accounts which accurately portrayed him as human and which gave leadership roles to women, suppressed the fact of his marriage to Mary Magdalene and the fact that he had children by her, and that this conspiracy has continued to the present day.

 

The early Church and the New Testament did spring from a time and context throughout the Roman Empire which was largely patriarchal. This patriarchal bent to society certainly predated Christianity. However, the gospels, the Pauline letters, and other New Testament writings while reflective of their original social context still portray Jesus as human and divine, as associating freely with women and making them his disciples, as giving exceptional equality and respect to women, as including women in leadership roles. There is also no doubt that this egalitarian perspective of the New Testament and early church went against the grain of the prevailing society (and not just the church leaders) and that the vision and ideals of the New Testament have not been fully incorporated in the church’s life to this day. The fact is we do not need the fictitious Da Vinci code to tell us this. The full inclusion of women in the church (and society) is one of the most fundamental challenges of our time. As with many issues, consciousness of this issue develops over time (just as the moral challenges of slavery or use of nuclear weapons have) and at a certain moment in history becomes acute. At those points in time, we need to turn back to our most fundamental sources and read them in a new light and reform the church in that spirit. Many would argue (and I agree) that feminism is a consequence of the Christian vision of the human person before God not its antithesis.

 

Fr. Donald Senior, C.P.
Catholic Theological Union