“The DaVinci Code: Untangling Fact from Fiction”
By Reverend James Kubal-Komoto
Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church
Des Moines, Washington
April 16, 2006
It’s Easter Sunday.
As Unitarian Universalists, many of us do not believe the literal truth of the Easter story, the literal truth of Jesus’ resurrection from death three days after his crucifixion.
Nevertheless, we can affirm and celebrate the universal truths, as opposed to the literal truths, that may be discovered within the Easter story…that love is stronger than death and that there is a promise of a new life for us all on the far side of frustration, failure, loss, and despair.
These are not bad truths to affirm and celebrate.
As minister of this church, I’ve also discovered that while many Unitarian Universalists suffer a mild to moderate case of “cross cringe” it is around this time of the year that Unitarian Universalists are a little more willing to reflect on the life and teachings of Jesus and the Christian tradition that emerged among his followers after his death, and I want to make the most out of that opportunity this morning.
That’s why I’ve decided to talk this morning about The DaVinci Code, the best-selling novel by Dan Brown that will be released as a movie starring Tom Hanks next month.
Just to let me know, how many of you have read The DaVinci Code? How many of you have at least heard about it?
What kind of book is The DaVinci Code?
On the one hand, The DaVinci Code is a run-of-the-mill murder mystery and thriller. On the other hand, The DaVinci Code is a book that raises a lot of questions about Jesus, early Christianity, and the early church and can be read as a critique of Christian orthodoxy.
In fact, one could say that some of the ideas that Dan Brown presents in his novel are closer to a Unitarian Universalist historical understanding of Christianity than they are to any other faith tradition’s understanding of Christianity in this country.
However, there’s a problem. Dan Brown presents his book as a novel, as a work of fiction. Yet it’s a novel that at least reads like it is based on facts. In the novel, Brown even references actual nonfiction books. So a lot of readers of the novel might be tempted to think that everything he says about Jesus and early Christianity and the early church is completely factual, but it isn’t.
A lot of it is factual, but a lot of it isn’t, and a lot of it is somewhere in between.
Why do I care? Why should you care?
I’ve read The DaVinci Code twice, and I’ll probably see the movie. To tell the truth, I didn’t think it was a very good book, even for pulp fiction. However, for whatever reason, it’s a book that has a lot of popular appeal. It’s a book and movie that a lot of people are talking about.
And since the novel deals with a few questions that have been important in the history of our own tradition, I think it’s important that we as Unitarian Universalists, whether talking about the book among ourselves or talking about it with others have some idea about what’s fact and what’s fiction in the book.
So this morning, I’d like to try to untangle some of the facts from some of the fiction that is presented in the novel.
Let me give you, in a nutshell, some of the most important religious claims that Brown presents in the book.
Let’s take a look at these one by one, starting with the first one, “Jesus was fully human but not divine.” Fact or fiction? My answer: Fact.
Actually, whether Jesus was human, divine, or both is a matter of faith. However, I can tell you how others have historically understood Jesus and how he most likely understood himself.
For example, early Unitarians in this country rejected Jesus’ divinity and the doctrine of the trinity not only because these beliefs seemed irrational, but because they believed them to be unscriptural. No where in the Hebrew or Christian scripture can you discover the word “trinity” or any description of the doctrine of the trinity. In fact, as The DaVinci Code also points out, it wasn’t until nearly 300 years after Jesus’ death that the doctrine of the trinity became official church doctrine.
More recently, many academic scholars, through careful study of biblical texts, have come to an even more radical understanding of Jesus. Most likely, Jesus himself did not understand himself to be the divinely begotten Son of God. He did not understand his own purpose in life to be to die for the sins of the world. He did not understand his own most important message to be the saving importance of his death and the importance of believing in him. All of these beliefs about him were attributed to him later after his death.
Instead, as I’ve said from this pulpit before, the three most important things for us to remember about Jesus is that he practiced and preached a gospel of radically inclusive, unconditional love, he railed against anything that oppressed the human spirit, especially exploitive economic relationships, and he advocated non-violent resistance to oppression.
So I think The DaVinci Code gets it right regarding Jesus’ humanity.
Let’s now look at another claim I mentioned the novel makes: “Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and she bore his child.” Fact or fiction? My answer: Fiction.
Who was Mary Magdalene?
She is mentioned only 12 times by name in the New Testament. She first appears in the Gospel of Luke as one of the several wealthy women that Jesus cures of possession. We are told that seven demons are cast from her, and after that, she became a follower of Jesus, also providing for Jesus out of her own means.
It’s not surprising that she became a follower of Jesus. One of the most scandalous things about Jesus was that he treated women as equals to men.
We don’t meet her again in the gospels until the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, and here she has a very prominent role. She is one of his only followers to be present at his crucifixion. She helps take care of his body after his death. She is one of the women to return to his tomb three days later. Most significantly, in the Gospel of Luke, she is the person to whom the resurrected Jesus first appears, and Jesus instructs her to spread the news about his resurrection to the other apostles and the rest of the world.
A few non-canonical gospels tell us a little more. For example, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas both suggest that Mary Magdalene had a special relationship with Jesus of which the other disciples, especially Peter, were jealous. The Gospel of Phillip even says that Jesus used to kiss her on the mouth.
What are we to make of all this? Is it possible that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers, or even married, as the Gospel of Phillips seems to suggest? (Both Martin Luther and Brigham Young believed so, by the way.)
Nothing in our understanding of understanding of Jesus seems to preclude that he and Mary Magdalene were either lovers or spouses. For example, Jesus was often called “rabbi” and rabbis were usually married. On the other hand, nothing seems to support the idea either, not even the titillating verse from the Gospel of Phillip I mentioned earlier.
Why not?
One of the general rules most academic scholars follow regarding biblical text is that the later something was written, the less likely it is to be a good historical record and the more likely it is to be a reflection of events happening at the time it was written, and the Gospel of Phillip was probably written in the second or third century. In other words, the Gospel of Phillip is probably less likely about the historical relationship between Jesus and Mary and more of an allegory about the tension that existed in the second-century church about the role that women should play in the emerging Christian community.
So I think The DaVinci Code gets it wrong regarding a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. However, from my perspective, I believe the most important thing for us to know about Mary Magdalene is that not only was she equal in Jesus’ eyes to all of his other followers, Jesus may have considered her his most important follower and the one he wanted to carry on his message after his death.
In a world where women are still denied positions of leadership in many religious traditions, this possibility is far more radical, tells us much more about Jesus, and has more implications for today than the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married.
Let’s now look at another claim I mentioned the novel makes. “There were dozens of gospels that spoke of the marriage between Jesus and Mary, but the Emperor Constantine had them destroyed, leaving only the 27 books we have in the New Testament today.” Fact or fiction? My answer: Fiction.
The DaVinci Code is right when it says that there were dozens of other texts that were eventually excluded from the New Testament. There were at least 80. However, it is wrong about the motivations for having them destroyed. As I said before, not even the Gospel of Phillip speaks directly of a marriage between Jesus and Mary.
These excluded gospels do say some interesting things, however (and thankfully, we know what they say since some Egyptian monks disobeyed the order to destroy these extra texts, burying them in the desert instead and leaving them not to be discovered again until 1945).
What interesting things do these texts say?
For example, the Gospel of Thomas says that that Jesus was the son of God, but all of us are children as God as well, and each of us has a divine spark within us. The Gospel of Thomas also emphasizes direct expect as a way of knowing. Though written 1600 years before Emerson, it is very Emersonian in some ways.
In a world where so many people believe there is only one right way of understanding Jesus’ life and message and there has always been only one right way of understanding Jesus’ life and message, the important thing for us to remember here is, as one of Brown’s characters says in the novel, “The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.” From the time of Jesus’ death, there were many competing Christian traditions, disagreeing about who Jesus was and what he was about, and each of these had their own sacred text. The process by which these texts were narrowed down to those that now appear in the New Testament took place over several hundred years and was often as much about politics and power as it was about anything else, especially after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Constantine wanted everybody believing the same thing because he understood that religious divisions could lead to political divisions, which he didn’t want.
Let’s look at another claim I mentioned the novel makes: “The early church engaged in a smear campaign against Mary Magdalene and presented her as a prostitute.” Fact or fiction? Fact.
But why would the early church do such a thing?
There is good historical evidence that for the first few centuries of Christianity - - when Christianity was mostly a “house movement” with followers of Jesus meeting together in each others houses - - there were women who were recognized a priests and even bishops.
However, as Christianity became a more public religion, and especially after it became the official religion of the Roman Empire under Emperor Constantine - - there was more and more pressure for the church to abandon the radical ideas about equality that Jesus had practice and conform to the patriarchal norms of the larger Greco-Roman society, and Mary Magdalene was an obstacle to this.
Why? Because even the accepted gospels portrayed Mary Magdalene as an example of a strong, faithful, independent woman who was a leader among Jesus’ followers. How could the church deny women leadership roles when Mary Magdalene presented such a good example of a woman leader?
Early church leaders found their solution in a sixth-century version of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Campaign. They smeared Mary Magdalene’s reputation.
In the Gospel of Luke, there is a story about a nameless prostitute who bathes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with her hair, and kisses them and anoints them with ointment, and she is forgiven by Jesus for her sins.
In an Easter sermon in 591, Pope Gregory the Great declared, despite there being no evidence at all for this being true, that this nameless prostitute and Mary Magdalene were one in the same, thus transforming her popular image from a strong, faithful, independent woman into a penitent whore.
This and other efforts, such as St. Augustine’s re-interpretation of the Adam and Eve story, helped legitimize the early church’s decision to make women second-class citizens, further betraying the radical egalitarianism that Jesus practiced and making sure there were only two role models for women in the church - - chaste Madonna or penitent sinner. There was no room for a faithful, strong, independent women.
(By the way, it wasn’t until 1969, 1400 years later, that the Roman Catholic Church officially acknowledged that Pope Gregory had been wrong.)
As The DaVinci Code also points out this was part of an even larger effort to wipe out any forms of spirituality traditionally associate with the “sacred feminine,” including any spirituality that saw either nature or human sexuality as sacred.
So here’s what I’d like you to remember about some of the religious claims made in The DaVinci Code. Jesus did most likely think of himself as fully human, not the divine son of God, and the doctrine of the trinity wasn’t established until a few hundred years after his death. He probably wasn’t married to Mary Magdalene, but, there’s good evidence to suggest that he may have considered her, not Peter, his most important follower. Soon after Jesus died, there was never, ever just one orthodox understanding about who Jesus was or what his message was, but a plurality of understandings. The early church did participate in a smear campaign against Mary Magdalene as part of its efforts to de-legitimize women in leadership roles.
I have some small hope that The DaVinci Code might bring new life to the understanding our wider culture has about Jesus, early Christianity, and the early church, because I believe our wider culture’s understanding of these topics continues to be relevant today.
For example, I hope The DaVinci Code might give new life to a conversation in our wider culture about how truly radical Jesus’ message really was, not only about women, but also about all kinds of social inclusion and exclusion, about oppression, about wealth and poverty, about war and violence. I hope that it might bring new life to a conversation about how his message was often hijacked and distorted to serve the needs of those in power, as it still is today. I hope that it might bring new life to a conversation about the hundreds of years of efforts that went into taming and domesticating his message so it wouldn’t be disruptive of prevailing social norms, as also still happens today. I hope that it might bring new life to a conversation about what happens when we don’t see the sacred in nature, in sexuality, and in other things traditionally associated in Western history with the feminine.
These would be resuurections worth celebrating.