Da Vinci Vode: Exploiting Jesus

The Da Vinci Code is right in according the Roman emperor Constantine a central role in determining the history and nature of Christianity. Constantine did not just ordain the toleration of Christianity and convey to the young religion the charisma of the Roman Empire.

Crucially, he was instrumental in establishing the doctrine of the divinity of Christ as the central core of Christianity.

Without Constantine, the differentiation between Christianity and Islam, which was to emerge centuries later, might never have been established. Indeed Islam might not have emerged. For in that fourth century after Christ there was a powerful movement within Christianity to ordain that, while Christ was the most significant of all the prophets, he was not divine, he was not one with the Father, he was not “consubstantial”.

The Da Vinci Code is entirely wrong in claiming it was Constantine who “successively converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity”. He played no such role. Nor was he, by the standards of the time, anti-women, quite the contrary. As Emperor he inaugurated laws which gave stronger protection to women, tightened the rules governing divorce, as well as initiating new safeguards for children and slaves.

But The Da Vinci Code is right in drawing attention to an ignored gospel, the gospel of Mary Magdalen. That gospel accords Mary Magdalen a central role in the new Church and quotes Peter as acknowledging that Jesus loved her more than any other women, while balking at the idea that Jesus may have preferred her to the male disciples. It shows Mary Magdalen recounting a vision of a dialogue with Jesus (“the Saviour”) in which Jesus describes to her how to win the battle of the Powers of the world that seek to keep the soul imprisoned in the body and ignorant of its spiritual nature. (Visionary testimonies are by no means strange to the New Testament, after all St Paul's crucial role in bringing Christianity to the gentile world was originated in a vision.)

No complete copy of the gospel of Mary now exists – it exists only in fragments. It was rejected as authentic by the early Church, possibly because it was regarded as theologically unsound but also probably because it challenged the pre-eminence of men within Christianity.

On 20 May 325ad (1,891 years almost to the day before the release of The Da Vinci Code film, not accounting for the changes introduced by the Gregorian calendar) the most important Council in the history of the Christian Church took place in Turkey, in a town called Nicaea. It was convened by the Roman Emperor Constantine and its purpose was to resolve a dispute that was raging on the nature of Christ: was he indeed one with God-The-Father or was he of some inferior deity or not divine at all. The movement which rejected the divinity of Jesus was known as Arianism, called after one of its foremost protagonists, Arius.

Constantine, who had inaugurated the toleration of Christianity and had introduced several measures favouring the new religion, was not himself Christian in any meaningful sense. He continued to believe in some of the Pagan Gods and his motivation seemed to have accepted within the empire a single religion, which he probably envisaged as some kind of syncretism, a mixture of Christianity and the Pagan religions. And in an effort to advance his programme, he summoned a council of bishops to resolve the dispute over Arianism.

He opened in the formal sessions of the Council in June 325, seated on a golden throne but then withdrew to permit the two factions to fight it out over the divinity of Christ. From there emerged the Nicaean creed, which is the bedrock of Christian belief. Interestingly, the then Pope (bishop of Rome) took no part in the proceedings and was a marginal figure in the convening of the council, although probably Constantine consulted him about it in advance.

Jesus is challenged only by Mohammed as the central figure of human history. The religion to which he gave rise (whether intentionally or not is not clear) has been the major religious movement of the past two millennia – and certainly nothing like it was known in human history before his time. But his influence was hugely propelled by the engine of the Roman empire and the influence of Constantine in first attaching it to the empire and then obtaining “clarification” of the nature of Jesus both as God and man.

The Da Vinci Code states the Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. This is true and importantly so. The Bible was the construct of fallible human beings, based on their recollections and their agendas. The four Gospels were written between 40 and 70 years after the death of Jesus and were based on an “oral tradition” which has to be suspect, along with some documentary evidence which is now lost. The gospel writers also wrote to agenda that were being played out within the fractious early Church. Furthermore, the gospels as we know them today date not from the original manuscripts but from later copies, all of which were handwritten, often with amendments on earlier copies.

The Da Vinci Code is right to claim there were far more gospels than the four “cannonical” gospels (ie those officially approved) but there was nothing like the 80 gospels the book claims. The only important gospel, aside from Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, is the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in Egypt in 1945.

The claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen is far-fetched. But it is also improbable that Jesus was not married, for most Jews of his time and of his age would have been married well before the age of 30. The fact that this is not mentioned in the gospels tells us nothing, for the gospel writers would have assumed readers would have assumed he was married.

The contention that it is now possible to trace the descendants of Jesus is ridiculous but that does not mean he did not procreate children and that descendants of those children are not alive today.

The Da Vinci Code is a clever cocktail of fact and fiction, often making it difficult to disentangle the two. But the facts it deploys are challenging, especially for those of Christian belief, although many of the “facts” are outrageously wrong. For instance, it is claimed the Catholic Inquisition published the book “that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history, Malleus Maleficarum or The Witches Hammer (which) indoctrinated the world to the dangers of free-thinking women”. The Malleus Maleficarum was indeed published at the time of the Inquisition by two Dominican inquisitors. But claims that it was authorised by the then Pope, Innocent VII, were untrue and, shortly after its publication, the Church banned it.

Nevertheless, the book reignites many of the controversies surrounding Jesus and draws attention to the mysoginy which has characterised Christian religion since its outset.