Reviewed by Steven R. Harmon, Associate Professor
Campbell University Divinity School, NC
The Da Vinci Code-Quest for a Relevant Christianity
Dan Brown, New York, Doubleday, 2003.
Note: This article was first published in the Biblical Recorder (NC) and is printed with permission.
Every Christmas season for the past several years, inquiring minds have been treated to television documentaries and news magazine cover stories summarizing the latest scholarly perspectives on Jesus Christ and the birth of Christianity. Those I`ve viewed and read during the past couple of Christmases suggest that, on the whole, journalists are doing a better and better job of investigating biblical and historical scholarship and reporting its various viewpoints fairly. Such stories frequently leave viewers and readers, however, with the impression that the Christ of traditional Christian faith diverges significantly from the Jesus being discovered by contemporary scholarship and may even have been a conspiratorial fabrication.
This impression was intensified for some during Christmas 2003 by the coincidence of a best-selling novel and a couple of non-fiction books written by scholars of religion for general audiences, each of which suggests in some manner that the traditional understanding of the place of what came to be known as "orthodoxy" and "heresy" in the early development of Christian thought is a distortion at best and a cover-up at worst.
Dan Brown`s novel, The Da Vinci Code, supports the idea that traditional Christianity has for almost two millennia suppressed an original Christianity that valued the feminine and was more affirming of human sexuality (and in which, by the way, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and produced offspring).
Elaine Pagels` book Beyond Belief relates Pagels` own discovery of a relevant Christianity not in the historic church`s canon of Scripture and ancient confessions of faith but rather in the Gnostic version of Christianity reflected in such documents as the Gospel of Thomas. Bart Ehrman provides a more evenhanded treatment of the theological diversity that characterized early Christianity prior to the triumph of what we now know as "orthodoxy" in the fourth century in his book Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew The title lends itself to the common notion that the canon and orthodoxy were imposed by an elite hierarchy and that Christianity is the poorer for what it lost in the process.
As a theologian with a keen interest in the doctrinal developments of the first few centuries of the church, I welcome this popular curiosity about ancient Christianity beyond the pages of the New Testament. Most Christians, especially Protestants, would profit from a deeper understanding of the early doctrinal controversies that continue to shape our present faith and practice. Non-Christians as well would learn much about the essence of Christian faith by reading about the conflicts of this formative period of Christian thought.
On the other hand, there is something that troubles me about this current interest in ancient alternative versions of Christianity. I am concerned that those who are looking for a more relevant version of Christianity-one that is less patriarchal and more inclusive of women, that is less hierarchical and more egalitarian, and that is less other-worldly and more affirming of the material order and human sexuality-will not find what they are looking for in the Gnostic gospels or other "lost scriptures." A revival of Gnostic Christianity would have to be selective in what it retrieves from the Gnostic gospels in order to be inclusive of women, for Saying 114 of the Gospel of Thomas states, "Simon Peter said to them, `Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, `I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.`"
Ancient Christian Gnosticism was anything but egalitarian, for it admitted to its circle only a select group of elites who were deemed intellectually capable of receiving the secret gnosis, "knowledge," that granted salvation. Far from affirming the material world and our fleshly human nature, Gnosticism attributed the creation of the material order to a lesser, evil deity and pronounced creation "bad." Such a theology has no proper place for the aesthetic, the sensual, or ecological concern. It moves God farther from us rather than nearer to us. Concerning the tragedy of human suffering, it can only deny that God has any relationship to this experience. It was with good reason that this sort of Christianity was "lost." The triumph of Gnosticism would have rendered Christianity irrelevant to a post-Auschwitz and post-9/11 world.
Those seeking a relevant Christianity will find it in a rediscovery of the faith expressed in rich detail in the church`s canonical Scriptures, summarized in ancient confessions of faith such as the Apostles` Creed and Nicene Creed, and clarified in the ancient ecumenical councils defining the triune nature of God and the relationship between the divine, and human natures of the person of Christ. This traditional faith of the church tells the thrilling story of the relational God who creates humanity in God`s image as social beings, who pronounces creation "good," who does not stand distant from the world but in the Incarnation entered into it and embraced it, who does not shun the material but sanctifies it so that material things like water and bread and the fruit of the vine become tangible expressions of the presence of God, who does not abhor human flesh but assumed our humanity, and who is not impassive but shares our sufferings. That is good news indeed, and it is just as relevant today as it was at the time it triumphed over less relevant versions of Christian faith.
Go ahead and read the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Truth-but read also Athanasius and Augustine and the Bible they taught (links to the Gnostic gospels and other "lost scriptures" as well as the writings of the church fathers are easily accessed on the web site of the North American Patristics Society, www.patristics.org). Go ahead and read The Da Vinci Code and Pagels and Ehrman-but read also Robert Wilken`s book The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, which does an excellent job of helping the lay reader understand the genius of classical Christian doctrine and why it succeeded in transforming the world of late antiquity.
I`m hopeful that those who do so will find that the fulfillment of their quest for a more relevant Christianity will be, in the words of T. S. Eliot, "to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time."
