Father Kleppner - February 1st 2004
A number of people have been asking me about the book, The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. I share with you a review of this book by Rev. Gerald O’Collins, S.J., a professor of Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
The Da Vinci Code teems with historical misinformation. The claim that the Emperor Constantine shifted the Christian day of worship to Sunday (p. 232) is simply false. Evidence from St. Paul and the Acts of the Apostles shows that right form the start of the Christian movement Christians replaced Saturday with Sunday as their day of worship. Sunday was the day when Jesus rose from the dead. What Constantine did on March 3, 321, was to decree Sunday to be a day of rest from work. He did not make Sunday the day of worship for Christians; it had been that from the first century. Brown tells us that under pressure from Constantine, Christ was declared to be divine at the Council of Nicaea in 325. “Until that movement in his history Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet...a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.” Would Brown please read St. John’s Gospel, which has St. Thomas calling Jesus “My Lord and my God” and expresses Christ’s divinity in many other passages. Decades before John’s Gospel was finished, St. Paul’s letters repeatedly affirm faith in Christ as divine. The Council of Nicaea did not invent faith in Christ’s divinity but added another (semi-philosophical) way of confessing it—declaring his “being of one substance with the Father.” When pleading his case for the eternal feminine and goddess worship, Brown ignores recent scholarship and belittles the Jewish roots of Christianity. He assures us that “virtually all the elements of Catholic ritual—the miter, the altar, the doxology and communion, the act of ‘God-eating’—were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.” Doesn’t Brown know about the use of altars in Jewish worship, in which much of Christian ritual has its roots? The wearing of the miter by patriarchs and then by other bishops in Eastern Christianity originated from the emperor’s crown. In the West the use of miters can be traced back to the 11th century, when the pagan mystery religions had long disappeared. The Christian doxology (“Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit”) is based on some of the Jewish psalms (e.g., Psalms 8, 66, 150). Holy Communion has its origins in the Jewish Passover, celebrated by Jesus and his disciples on the night before he died. Apropos of Judaism, Brown introduces some stunning errors about ritualistic sex and God. Old Testament scholars agree that prostitution was sometimes used to obtain money for the temple. But there is no convincing evidence for sacred or ritual prostitution, and none at all for Israelite men coming to the temple to experience the divine and achieve spiritual wholeness by having sex with priestesses (p. 309). On the same page, Brown explains that the Holy of Holies “housed not only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah.” A word not found as such in the Bible but in later rabbinic writings, Shekinab refers to the nearness of God to his people and not to some female consort. It is also breathtaking nonsense to assert as a “fact” that the sacred tetragrammatron, YHWH, was “derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Fah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah.” YHWH is written in Hebrew without any vowel signs. Jews did not pronounce the sacred name, but “Yahweh” was apparently the correct vocalization of the four consonants. In the 16th century some Christian writers introduced Jehovah, under the mistaken notion that the vowels they used were the correct ones. Jehovah is an artificial name created less than 500 years ago, and certainly not an ancient, androgynous name from which YHWH derived. One could go on and on, pointing out the historical errors in The Da Vinci Code. One last example. Killing so-called witches was a horrible crime in the story of Christianity. But the idea that the Catholic Church burned at the stake “five million women” (p. 125) is bizarre. Savagery of that extent would have depopulated Europe. Experts give instead the figure of around 50,000 victims over the three centuries when witch hunts were carried out by Catholics and Protestants. But it suits the tenor of Brown’s book to multiply the figure by 100. The historical misinformation is put in the mouth of the villainous Sir Leigh Teabing, a former British Royal Historian (is there such a post?), and in the mouth of the hero, Robert Langdon, a “professor of smybology” (a new field to me). On their performance, I would not have given either of them their jobs, let alone voted for Langdon’s tenure. In short, enjoy the read, but discount the history. Dan Brown adds no new evidence to previous, discredited attempts to establish that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered children by her. |
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