The DaVinci Code and Jesus as Myth

Here is an interesting critique of the DaVinci Code from George Weigel at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Looks like a treasure trove of cutting edge information here. Check it out:

Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, The DaVinci Code, will certainly outsell N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God by a factor of 10,000:1, and probably more. Quite unintentionally, though, Dr. Wright’s book is the perfect response to the anti-Christian slander that underwrites The DaVinci Code – the charge that the early Christians deliberately lied about Jesus, his friendships, and his fate in order to keep women subjugated. Really.

Jesus, you see, was not a carpenter and itinerant preacher of the Kingdom but a wealthy religious intellectual with aspirations to David’s throne. His well-healed and royally inclined lover, Mary Magdalene, is the “holy grail,” because she held within herself the blood of Jesus while bearing his children. After Constantine legalized Christianity, the Church rewrote the story to suit its, and Constantine’s, imperial purposes. Thus the truth (sic) about Jesus and the origins of Christianity can only be found in the “gnostic Gospels,” ancient texts never incorporated into the New Testament but unearthed by archaeologists in recent decades. These esoteric texts reveal the story the Church has suppressing for almost two millennia, often by violence.

All of which could be dismissed as the most ludicrous rubbish were it not for the fact that recent academic work on the gnostic Gospels has tilted, if in a more refined way, toward a thesis not unlike Dan Brown’s in The DaVinci Code. I recently saw a whole slew of such books displayed on a single table in a large bookstore under the rubric, “Now that you’ve read The DaVinci Code…”. (I asked the store manager whether they were planning a display entitled “Now that you’ve read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the classic anti-Semitic canard. He didn’t know what I was talking about.)

Now that’s hard hitting stuff!

I understand that revising history seems to be in vouge nowadays. Heck, take a good trip to Borders and take a look at all the new books being published today. Dissertations turned into books, thesis papers being turned into books, the great American rant being turned into books. . . you get the idea.

Sometimes I wonder whether we are burying ourselves in a culture of too much information – where we can’t separate the jewels from the glass.

Books like the DaVinci Code come under the guise of scholarship, but is it really a reliable source of information? Catholic-basher Gary Willis is another outstanding example of trash disguised as scholarship. His “extensive Vatican research” consisted of three documents and fifteen minutes. . . research indeed.

I have no problems sorting out the good from the bad. I just feel utter contempt for those who would write this knowing deep down that what they have published is more rant than research. What a disservice to the reader.