[Dialogue] Spong on DaVinci

[KroegerD at aol.com]

 On Viewing "The Da Vinci  Code" 

For other perspectives on "The Da Vinci Code" and a full exploration  of the 
issues raised in the movie, see _Beliefnet.com._ 
(http://www.beliefnet.com/davinci)   
Separating fact from fantasy is not always easy. This is especially so when  
the two are skillfully woven together by a very competent novelist named Dan  
Brown and then projected onto the screen by one of Hollywood’s premier  
directors, Ron Howard. When this combination of fact and fantasy is then woven  
around Christianity’s origins and calls into question both its ultimate claim  and 
the continued honesty of Christian leaders, you have the prescription for a  
cultural phenomenon. That is what “The Da Vinci Code” has become.  
To get into the theater for its first showing in New Jersey, I had to walk  
past a small picket of three Roman Catholic women from Montville, New Jersey,  
saying their rosaries and carrying a sign that read, “The Da Vinci Code” 
insults  our Lord and his Church. Stop blasphemy.” Presenting my press card, I 
asked for  an interview. They told me they were part of a statewide Catholic 
effort to  oppose the distortions of their faith in “The Da Vinci Code.” When I 
asked if  they had read the book, they answered, “No,” and then said they 
would not think  of reading blasphemy. “How do you then know that it insults your 
Lord and his  Church?” I inquired. “Our church said so,” they responded. I 
next asked if they  had seen Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” “Oh yes,
” they said, “that  was wonderful.” Are you aware, I continued, that most 
biblical scholars think  Mel Gibson’s film grossly distorted the New Testament 
portrait of the  crucifixion by blending it with medieval Catholic piety? “Our 
church told us  that it was true,” they intoned. That interview was going 
nowhere so I departed,  recalling the words of an evangelical leader who said, “We 
live in a  Jesus-haunted culture that is biblically illiterate.”  
I am neither a fan of detective stories nor of the cinema. My chief  
experience in viewing this motion picture was boredom. The plot was beyond  
credibility, the claimed historical basis was badly flawed and the acting, other  than 
that of two non-starring characters, was not spectacular. Despite its  chases 
and violence, I found it slow moving. Had the story not been draped  around the 
central icon of the religious tradition that has informed our  civilization, 
I do not believe it would come close to having the appeal of the  “007” 
series or “Murder She Wrote.”  
Keeping the heirs of Jesus concealed for more than 2000 years in order to  
preserve a theologically correct interpretation of Jesus, as the Incarnation of  
God and the second person of the Holy Trinity, is a bizarre theme, to say the 
 least. The titillating idea that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and 
that  this union produced a daughter, who in turn kept the divine and royal 
bloodlines  of Jesus alive for 2000 years, despite a massive ecclesiastical plot to 
destroy  this theological bombshell, makes for good theater but it doesn’t 
make for good  history. First of all, the time between Jesus and today would 
represent a  minimum of 60 generations. Even if the union of Jesus and Magdalene 
had produced  an heir who would presumably be half divine, by the time one 
follows this line  for 10 generations, the “divine blood” would be no more 
than1/2032nd present in  the heir, by the 25th generation, it would only be 
1/66,584,576th and by the  60th generation an infinitesimal percentage. The idea that 
after 60 generations,  this bloodline resided in a single 21st century woman 
and not in literally  hundreds of thousands of heirs is patently absurd unless 
each generation had  only a single child. In the final scene of the movie, 
this lone bearer of the  divine blood discovered that she could not walk on 
water but hoped to do better  at turning water into wine. That was amusing but 
completely uninformed. It  assumed that these two biblical images of Jesus were 
literally true. Most New  Testament scholars regard the walking on water story 
as an application to Jesus  of the Jewish praise for the God who can “make a 
pathway” for Godself “in the  deep” and whose “footprints can be seen on the 
water.” Turning water into wine  is a Johanine story that didn’t enter the 
Christian tradition until the 10th  decade. Biblical scholarship no more 
supports the assumptions of “The Da Vinci  Code” than it did either “The Passion of 
the Christ” or Cecil B. DeMille’s, “The  Ten Commandments.”  
When I asked the picketers how this motion picture insulted Jesus, they  
responded that it said he was married and had a child. I found in those words  the 
negative definition of women that is the legacy of the patriarchal sexism  
practiced by the Christian Church through the centuries. Is there something evil 
 about marriage and childbirth? Is marriage a compromise with sin, as the 
Church  fathers have proclaimed? St. Jerome went so far as to argue that the only 
 redeeming feature of marriage was that it produced more virgins! I do not  
believe that women are the corrupters of “holy men.” Yet that idea lingers on 
in  a church that installed mandatory celibacy and unnatural virginity as 
pathways  to holiness. What those “ideals” produced, however, has been little 
more than  distorted sexuality and massive amounts of debilitating guilt.  
To examine the other issues briefly, nowhere in the Bible does it say that  
Jesus was married. Before one feels too relieved at this news, nowhere in the  
Bible does it say that he was not married. In fact the only hint we have that  
any of the disciples were married comes in a story in Mark’s Gospel in which  
Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. Yet Mark, Matthew and Luke all assert that 
a  band of women accompanied Jesus and the disciples all the way from Galilee 
to  Jerusalem. Under the Jewish social and cultural norms of that time, these 
women  could have been only one of two things: wives or prostitutes! When 
these women  were listed in the biblical texts, Magdalene was always placed first 
as if she  had a claim to status the other women did not possess. Of course, 
these hints  constitute only circumstantial evidence, but they do raise 
questions and open  the door to a way to read the gospels outside the box of 
literalism.  
Other biblical data that might point to a significant relationship between  
Jesus and Magdalene are that she is portrayed in every gospel as one of the  
chief mourners at his tomb. In the fourth gospel she is the only mourner and is  
also depicted as demanding access to the body of Jesus that she believes has  
been removed from the tomb. For a first century Jewish woman to demand access 
to  the deceased body of a Jewish male would have been off the charts in 
terms of  propriety unless she was the nearest of kin. The name Magdalene also 
does not  appear to be connected with a village called Magdala, since there is no 
evidence  that such a place ever existed. People tell me they have been to 
the village of  Magdala to which I respond, “Yes and it was built just to 
attract people like  you!” Scholars now think Magdalene is related to the word ‘
migdal’ and can be  translated as large or great. Suppose Mary Magdalene means 
Mary the Great. Other  places in the gospels might be read as suppressed hints 
of the possibility that  Jesus and Magdalene were actually husband and wife. I 
outlined them in a 1991  book entitled, “Born of a Woman.” These hints do not 
prove that Jesus and  Magdalene were married. They simply suggest that this 
possibility cannot be  ruled out. Dan Brown, by making the marriage of Jesus 
and Magdalene the theme of  his exciting page-turner, has now placed that 
possibility into the public arena.  It is not likely to disappear soon.  
Brown is incorrect in his suggestion that Constantine and the Council of  
Nicea in 325 picked the books that would make up the New Testament and  
proclaimed Jesus to be the divine Son of God. The New Testament was pretty much  intact 
by 150 C.E. and the major debate at Nicea was between Arius and  Athanasius 
over how Jesus’ divinity was to be understood. Was he of the same  nature of 
God or of like nature? The idea that books that supported the humanity  of Jesus 
were suppressed at Nicea is simply not so. The apocryphal and Gnostic  
gospels that the Church rejected were later works, generally more miraculous not  
less, with a more godlike not a less godlike Jesus, unless one assumes that to  
be involved significantly with a woman ipso facto makes one less godlike.  
What neither Brown’s book nor the motion picture understands is that the  
debate over whether Jesus was a human life, somehow infused with God’s presence,  
or a divine life, simply masquerading as a human being, has been ongoing 
since  the dawn of the Christian era. The first gospel, Mark, written in the 
eighth  decade, portrays Jesus as fully human, with no hint of a miraculous birth, 
who  at the time of his baptism was filled with the Holy Spirit. The Fourth 
Gospel,  John, written in the tenth decade, portrays Jesus as the pre-existent 
Word of  God incarnated in a human form, which allowed him to do godlike 
things. That  debate actually turned on how God is to be understood. If God is a 
supernatural  being, dwelling outside the life of this world, who periodically 
enters human  history to split the Red Sea or to answer prayers, to meet God in 
Jesus is to  see Jesus as a divine visitor. However, if God is conceived, as 
many modern  theologians suggest, as the “Ground of Being,” the source of life 
and love, then  Jesus becomes the human vessel through whom the God presence 
is experienced,  enabling people like Paul to say: “God was in Christ.”  
Through the centuries the church has tended to see Jesus as a divine visitor. 
 In the 21st century the emphasis has been to look at God through the lens of 
 humanity. At the end of the movie version of “The Da Vinci Code,” Tom Hanks 
 raises this question poignantly when he says, “Maybe the human is the divine”
 or  at least maybe the human is the only medium through which men and women 
can talk  about God. I think that is true and because I hold that conviction, 
I think the  only task facing the Christian Church in our day is to enhance 
the humanity of  every person, so that living fully, loving wastefully and 
daring to be all that  they can be, they make visible all that the human word ‘God’
 means. The Jesus I  serve was understood by John’s gospel to be the one who 
came that “we might have  life abundantly.” The religion of Jesus can do no 
less. When Hanks says, “As  long as there has been one “true” God, there has 
been killing,” he spoke the  truth that plagues religion. When any religious 
system thinks that its  understanding of God is the same thing as God it becomes 
idolatrous and it  kills.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Grimes G. Slaughter of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, writes:  
I have just been fired as a Jr. Hi Sunday School teacher at the First  
Presbyterian Church in Oak Ridge, TN, because I would not represent the Bible as  
perfect and infallible to the children. I have lots of proof to the contrary: I  
have many versions of the Bible on my hard drive and can search any of them 
for  any word or phrase in a fraction of a second. It is possible that I have 
found  ugly and evil content of which you are unaware. I would be pleased to 
send you a  list of what I have found. Apparently “The Sins of the Scripture: 
Exposing the  Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love’ is exactly what 
I need. I  intend to procure a copy soon.  
Dear Grimes,  
There is much in the Bible that is, in your words, “ugly and evil.” When I  
wrote the “Sins of the Scripture” I examined only the most glaring texts that 
 have shaped public behavior. The idea that any educated person would today 
try  to defend the idea that the Bible is either perfect or infallible is 
difficult  for me to imagine.  
When I confront people quoting biblical texts literally and thus in defense  
of some theological agenda or prejudiced attitude, I tell them they are asking 
 the wrong question of the Bible. The appropriate question is not, “Is this  
literally true?” for the world of biblical scholarship settled that question  
years ago with a resounding ‘no’. The proper question is rather, “What does 
this  story mean? Then I might inquire about “What need in the life of the 
person  making the literal claim does the presumed literal authority of scripture 
meet?”  Religion has always been more about the search for security than it is 
the  search for truth – people crave certainty. When there is no certainty or 
 insufficient certainty, people will go to great lengths to create it. The 
more  irrational the claim, the more the insecurity is apparent. There is 
nothing  rational about claims for the inerrancy of the Bible, or for the 
infallibility  of the Pope. There is nothing rational about religious anger, religious  
persecution, religious wars, religious inquisitions or religious hatred of 
other  faith traditions. However, the way to confront this irrationality is not 
with  rational arguments no matter how tempting it is to try that approach.  
If you were dismissed in order for the myth of biblical perfection to  
continue to live, proving them wrong by rational argument will not touch the  issue. 
What you have done is to threaten the security system of your  congregation’s 
leadership. You have two choices for an appropriate response:  
1. Remain in the congregation and bear your witness lovingly – hoping to  
bring about change.
2. Find a new church whose leadership is not so  threatened and help to make 
an alternative available for people like you in Oak  Ridge.  
I did a series of lectures in Oak Ridge last year so I know there are  
churches there that are open to reality and truth in a way your church is  
apparently not. My first advice is always to stay where you are and to work for  
change. If change is impossible, my second choice is to go to a place where you  can 
be fed.  
John Shelby Spong 
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