Defending the story, vs. The Da Vinci Code

This semester I am studying Conspiracy Theories, a philosophy paper at Victoria University which looks at how we can know anything about the validity of conspiracy theories. As an example of a popular conspiracy theory we looked at the claims of the Da Vinci Code, of a massive conspiracy on the part of the Catholic church to cover up the true history of Jesus of Nazareth.

On Friday 21 August I was involved in a very casual and fun debate. The lecturer asked one student to volunteer to represent the official story of the Catholic Church, and another to represent the claims of the Da Vinci Code, in a 1-part each debate. I volunteered to present the official story.

I can still remember vividly my first confrontation with the claims of The Da Vinci Code, before I’d even heard of the book, when a colleague in the halls of residence at Massey University confronted me about my Christian beliefs. She told me Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a sexual relationship and ran off to France and had babies. She put it much more graphically than that, and I was completely shocked at the dishonour of this heresy. I was so shocked that I totally dropped the discussion there and then and walked off. I couldn’t believe a person would promote such a ridiculous idea without any proof, or any sensitivity to its abhorrence to the believer!

When I finally learned about the book I purchased it and read it. I found it a good read, but didn't find its claims of conspiracy compelling. I saw the movie when it was released, but unlike the book I found it boring, unimaginative and ridiculous, leaving the heretical claims of the story bare and naked, and leaving me feeling just as sick as I had in that conversation years earlier. On attending the screening of the movie, in New Plymouth, I was given a small booklet which explores the claims of the movie, written by a popular author in Christian apologetics – Campus Crusade for Christ man Josh McDowell.

When I read The Da Vinci Code, one thing that seemed apparent about the book was what I'll call its inverse truthiness. What I mean is that it left me wondering if the opposite of the claims of the Da Vinci Code might be true. That is to say that the Catholic church are the good guys and have, in the main, preserved the truth about Jesus. Those who The Da Vinci Code potrays as the good guys on the other hand – the Cathars, the Knights Templars, the Freemasons and other high-placed occultists – have forever been conspiring against God and the church by trying to discredit the Christian gospel. Indeed, the shadowy existence of freemasonry and its associated networks has been the subject of conspiracy theories for over 200 years, increasingly so in the last 40 years – and not without effect on membership numbers. I couldn't help but wonder if the Masonic Lodge were looking for a way to rekindle their ever-dwindling membership. They discovered Brown and sponsored him to make some of their oddball ideas more palatable to the general public, and to make their role in history and in the world appear more moral and appealing.

So when my lecturer asked for a volunteer to present the official story in class I knew that it had to be me! Here was a great opportunity to present the gospel I love so much in the face of a heresy with which I'd developed some familiarity. I dug up the booklet I'd been given at the movie, retrieved a statement by the Anglican bishops which had come out at the time, called on the historical Jesus material I had studied last semester, and got to work.

This was the result.


Defending the story

“In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown has created the ultimate conspiracy novel. In the world of subversive plots the stakes can go no higher – hiding aliens in Roswell or the identity if JFK's assassin are but pranks compared to the idea of a conspiring Church hiding the true identity of Jesus Christ and misleading billions of the faithful.”

These are the opening few lines from Josh McDowell's Companion Guide to the Movie. McDowell is a popular Christian apologetics author who has worked for decades in Christian student ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ. Like McDowell, many Christians have written responses to The Da Vinci Code. New Zealand's own Anglican bishops issued a press statement when the movie was released, which actually referred to Tony Robinson's The Real Da Vinci Code which we have watched as part of this course. And of course Opus Dei issued their own press statement late in 2006 defending the true nature of their organization.


The Gospel

So what are the core beliefs these Christians are defending, which The Da Vinci Code threatens to undermine?

1.The Christian account of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is that he was brutally crucified by Roman forces, and subsequently buried in a tomb. Two days later he miraculously rose from the dead. He then spent some time visiting and teaching his disciples in Judea, before, as the Christian texts put it, “ascending into heaven” before the disciples’ very eyes.

2.This account is derived primarily today from the gospels of the New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In earlier times the story was passed on by the oral traditions of Christian communities.

3.Vast attention has been given to the academic historiography of Jesus Christ, particularly over the last century, in which Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus was seminal. Chris Marshall, in Victoria University’s own paper on the historical Jesus, describes this historically skeptical academic tradition as having recently entered a “third quest.” Third quest scholars are increasingly open to accounts of the miraculous and supernatural as being historically viable, especially where objections seem more grounded in personal philosophical commitments rather than historicity.

4.Evidence or Christ’s resurrection & ascension include:
*Empty tomb
*Antiquity & simplicity of narratives
*Discovery of female witnesses – unlikely to be fabricated as the testimony of a woman was not as valued as that of a man at the time
*Authorities did not dispute empty tomb
*No evidence of secondary burial (ie Ossuary)
*No evidence of tomb veneration
*Resurrection appearances over period of 6 weeks, to up to 500 people at a time
*Unprecedented nature of resurrection - Walked through walls & ate fish
*Transformation of disciples/aftermath - Interpretation of Jesus' death and resurrection as the transactive means of God's power to forgive sin & give new & eternal life


The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code explains Jesus’ empty tomb and the emergence of early Christianity by arguing that:

1.Mary Magdalene was pregnant with Jesus' child when he died on the cross, and left Judea and went to France, where they died and were buried.
2.The early church viewed Jesus as a mortal prophet
3.The gospel accounts of Jesus, with its stories of resurrection and ascension, were later fabrications employed inevitably by Constantine to be used as an official religion to control his empire.


Christian response

How do Christians respond to these allegations?

“Not a single one of our ancient sources indicates that Jesus was married, let alone to Mary Magdalene.” – McDowell

The arguments of the Da Vinci Code are not grounded in available historical documents – indeed, as a conspiracy theory they cannot be. The book refers to the gnostic gospels, opposed by early Christians and supposedly passed on through groups like the Priory of Sion and held at Rossyln Chapel. Yet, as Robinson shows in his documentary, we are unable to access those documents.

Contrary to what The Da Vinci Code asserts of Constantine, the divinity of Christ is confessed to in a wide range of divergent Christian traditions – dating to the 1st Century AD even in India and Ethiopia. It would seem a wild stretch of the imagination that these traditions would all be involved in a conspiracy to fabricate the life of a 1st century Palestinian Jew.


Closing thoughts

The argument of Jesus’ marriage & progeny is intended to a) support the idea that his royal Davidic bloodline may still be intact with its divine claim to the throne of God's kingdom, and b) challenge Catholic views of sexuality and gender so that chastity is not seen as a high calling, and the feminine is properly recognised as integral to the godhead. Yet The Da Vinci Code fails to deliver in this regard.

Lets take this idea that there is one sacred bloodline, a san greal, which claims descent from Jesus. The Da Vinci Code refers to the Merovingian dynasty as the early carrier of the holy bloodline, and links this dynasty to the Plantard & St Clare family via Merovingian king Dagobert II. However it is often claimed by genealogists that everybody in Europe is descended from French king Charlemagne – and Charlemagne himself is believed to have claimed descent to the Merovingians. Charlemagne aside, I can trace my own ancestry back to the Plantards and Merovingians via the Duff, Huntingdon & Boulogne families, and the Counts of Louvaine & Brabant. As Steve Olson put it in Why We're All Jesus' Children, “If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet.”

In closing, I would like to ask – if Jesus did marry, would this actually detract at all from the claims made about Jesus in terms of the good news of his gospel, and his worship as God? Those who propose that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene generally assert that the Catholic Church portray him as virginal because this somehow adds to his divinity. Yet there is nothing in the biblical or early church understanding of Christology which would crash and burn if it turned out Jesus had been married. It is highly unlikely that a man intent on ascending to heaven not long after his resurrection would have chosen or been led by God to marry (of course, Da Vinci Code type conspiracy theorists allege that Jesus did not in fact ascend to Heaven, but instead moved to France). But it was probably this sense of the immanence of God's kingdom and its urgency, and the metaphor of Jesus as groom to his brode the church, that led him to make the statement that celibacy is a higher calling. He in no way denounced sexuality as somehow inferior. The challenge of The Da Vinci Code to Christology is not so much the implication he was married, but that he did not ascend to heaven. And as for the allegations of misogyny, the idea that Mary Magdalene's role was covered up in order to protect the patrinomy of Roman Catholic leadership seems clearly at odds with the rise to prominence of the veneration of Jesus mother Mary , in significant contrast to most other Christian traditions.