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UU Look at the DaVinci code
Delivered by
Ilona Forgeng, July 2, 2006
At the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, New Bern, NC
By now everyone is probably pretty tired of hearing more than you ever wanted to know about DaVinci, Constantine and Mary Magdalene. Probably every UU church from Maine to San Diego has heard at least one sermon on the sacred feminine and the Prieury de Sion, so now it is your turn. Except, being neither a conspirationalist nor a bible believer, I tend to look at the controversy in a rational way.
And what I see, the arguments about whose version of all this is the truth, it reminds me of two children fighting about which one has the best imaginary friend.
That’s not meant to be derogatory, and it’s not meant to be flippant, or not too flippant, at least. But the fact is, it’s all myth. It’s all story. It’s all metaphor.
At least some of the early Christians who wrote the stories that Dan Brown relies on for the DaVinci Code were able to see the stories as metaphor, while those who eventually became the conservative Christians -- Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and especially those we call fundamentalists, they see the stories as literal history. These people see themselves as having to defend every word of the Bible as the literal word of God, for if there is one single mistake, it calls into question the whole story and for conservative Christians, the story of the miracles, the crucifixion and the resurrection IS Christian religion.
A few weeks ago David Webb talked about Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong and his fresh look at the bible stories. It was Bishop Spong’s book, Looking at the Bible through Jewish Eyes, that our Myth and Metaphor discussion group began with six years ago. In his book Spong talks about Jewish Midrash and Jewish storytelling. It is said that God created the Jews because she loved stories. Spong credits midrash for the numerous parallels in the stories about Jesus and the stories about Moses and Elijah. God parts the Red Sea for Moses so he can lead the Hebrews to freedom on dry land. Jesus doesn’t need God’s help; he just walks on the water. Moses wanders in the desert for 40 years; it only takes Jesus 40 days. Elijah is taken to heaven in a flaming chariot; Jesus rises without any help at all; a little Elijah, a little Moses, a lot of Midrash.
They form a quilt of stitched-together stories. There may be a faint portrait of a first-century Jewish rabbi in there somewhere, but he is difficult to find amongst all the stories and political statements that got sewn into the original pattern.
The Jesus Seminar paints the most reliable historical portrait we have, and it is still pretty sketchy.
There was a Jesus who was the son of Mary and Joseph, conceived without the help of heavenly sperm. He was baptized by John the Baptist and was his disciple. He became an itinerant teacher who proclaimed the kingdom of God. The Jews were NOT responsible for Jesus’ death. Jesus was flogged and crucified by Roman soldiers during the days of Pontius Pilate. The body of Jesus decayed like any other corpse. The resurrection never happened. Mary Magdalene was a leader in the early Jesus movement along with Peter and Paul.
The Jews have always been great storytellers. And that is what the Gospels are, a collection of stories. All of them are stories. Should we think of Mary Magdalene’s flight to France with Jesus’ daughter as any more or less “true” than the virgin birth of Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem?
The Gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Or Thomas, Judas, Mary or Phillip. It was not until the second century that these names were attached to them. Each was written for a specific audience, so each author made up his own story. Some were written for a specifically Jewish audience, a Gentile audience, some fitted nicely into a spiritual quest for knowledge, for gnosis. They were written by people who saw Jesus as savior, as son of god, as Messiah, as apocalyptic prophet, as prince of peace or as revolutionary. They were written by Gentiles and Jews and Gnostics and pagans; they were rewritten, copied, edited, damaged, lost, found, hidden, and uncovered.
You can find any Jesus you want in the stories. Today there are major scholars who see him as an apocalypticist, a revolutionary rebel, a social reformer, a wisdom sage, or a mystic hero. You can even decide, as many scholars have, that Jesus never actually existed and that Paul made him up from earlier stories of a crucified Jew stitched onto a pagan resurrecting god-man.
So I look at these pieced together stories and see in them colors and patterns joined together in a kind of patchwork quilt. That is what the story of Jesus really is, a patchwork quilt, a dozen different patchwork quilts that have been constructed from the traditions, dreams, needs and imaginations of hundreds of first, second and third century Jews, Gentiles, Gnostics, Pagans and heretical Christians of all sorts.
The Western Christian quilt that has been handed down to us is just one of many; it is the one Paul began stitching together only a few years after the death of Jesus. Many of these quilts have been lost over the years, many have been destroyed.
Before Paul, the original Christians, the “Jesus People,” Palestinian Jews, pieced together the first Jesus quilt. It was stitched from what they remembered of their crucified leader. After his death, Jesus’ followers regrouped in Jerusalem and organized a synagogue. They viewed themselves as a Jewish reform movement. Their Jesus was a prophet and a rabbi, not a deity. They practiced the teachings of Jesus as they interpreted them to be and they told stories of the Jesus they wanted to remember.
Their gospel started out as a sayings gospel, now called “Q.” It is the lost Gospel, and we know of it only in theory. Gradually, over the years, Midrash was added to Q, and the sayings began to have a context. Their leader had been executed as a common criminal; his followers had to justify his death, give meaning to what had happened to them. These early sayings and stories led to the Gospel of Mark, the first Gospel we have access to, written in about the year 60. It is a fairly simple patchwork of sayings and stories about a Jewish rabbi who kept a secret.
Paul made his quilt out of the whole cloth. From the mystery religions he took the idea of atoning sacrifice, from the religion of Isis he took the dying and resurrecting God, from the religion of Mithras he took baptism, atonement and eternal salvation and he created a pattern for an entirely new religion.
Paul's greatest innovation was the successful expansion of the Christian mission to include Gentiles; in the end, this was why Christianity survived. Without the Gentiles, Christianity might have died out, just as the Essenes died out. It was much easier to evangelize the Gentiles if they didn’t have to become Jews to become Christians. It wasn’t the dietary laws so much, but circumcision asked just a little too much of them.
So the Gentile Christians began to add some of their stories to the Jewish ones. They added the story that Jesus was born in a cave, perhaps the same cave Mithras was born in. On December 25. What a coincidence, Mithras was born on December 25. Jesus was born of a virgin. What a coincidence, so was Alexander. Jesus was the son of god. What a coincidence, so were the great Greek
heros.
But Paul has apparently taken something of a bad rap for the misogynism of the Christian Church. Dan Brown was right here. Christianity is anti-female. But most of the Pauline letters that are so disparaging of women are pseudepigrapha, letters by later authors who attached Paul’s name to them for authenticity and authority. Most of the worst misogynism was inserted later when the Church Fathers were so fixated on Eve, the fall, original sin, and women as the source of all evil.
In fact, Paul’s letters show that in his time women often led some of the churches. The church in Corinth was run by Priscilla and Aquila, Priscilla’s name always came first. There are scholars who think Priscilla was the author of one of the Epistles. Paul praises Junia as a prominent apostle, but a later editor, assuming women could not possibly be apostles, changed Junia to
Junius.
Dan Brown’s theory of a conspiracy against women is right. The early Church Fathers were stunningly misogynistic.
When Paul’s version of Christianity made its way to the southern Mediterranean, the Gnostics found that many ideas of Pauline Christianity reflected their world view. According to the story of the Gnostics, our divine spirits are imprisoned in our corrupt bodies. The Gospel of Judas talks about Judas helping Jesus to attain release; the story refers to the release of that divine spark from the corrupt body.
The explosive growth and spread of Christian communities to Alexandria, through Syria, Turkey, Greece, Italy and into France by the late Second Century meant an explosion of beliefs, traditions and rituals. And Stories.
There were so many quilts, so many stories, most of them variations on the standard stories. Each small Christian community, and there were many hundreds of them, each one had its literature, the books and writings that defined what was important to them. We have extensive references to a few of these books, but most of them we know absolutely nothing about. We just know such gospels were in use. We don’t know what stories these gospels told. Some were important only to that community. Some were less established versions of stories that later became canon. And all of them were copied by hand, over and over, by people who were not very literate. As the books became less useful, or as they were dropped as heretical, or as a small community became part of a larger community, there was no longer any need for these books—if they were no longer useful, they weren’t copied, and as long as they weren’t being copied, they would decay to dust and disappear.
Except in the desert. Where the dry climate preserved these books, these codexes, these gospels, and so we are now getting a wonderful glimpse into the diversity of these various gospel stories. The stories of Mary Magdalene and her arguments with Peter, of Judas actually being the only disciple who understood Jesus. We can begin to imagine the crazy quilt of sayings, stories and myths that must have circulated about Jesus. I see him as sort of a Robin Hood or King Arthur, with every local legend tacked onto every other local legend, twisted and twined and cropped and sanitized and eventually emerging as the frozen-forever stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
What happened to all these other stories? Pauline Christianity was so effective that all power gradually came to rest with the proto-orthodox Christians. These proto-orthodox defined the stories that would be allowed in their quilt—they defined the Gospel Truth. Son of God, Virgin Birth, Miracles, Raising the Dead, Sermon on the Mount, Judas the traitor, crucifixion and resurrection. Those are the accepted stories. The only accepted stories.
As the other Christianities were defined as heresies, their books were banned, their leaders were executed, their religion was effectively destroyed, and they converted to orthodoxy. But there were a few monks, a few believers here and there for whom the old stories were still important. We can imagine them as they took their quilts, wrapped them carefully and placed them somewhere for safe keeping. Time, mold, mildew and mice consumed most of them. But some are still out there; we are still finding new stories.
A fascinating illustration of loss and discovery of some of the old stories is the story of “Secret Mark,” a story you have probably never heard, and that definitely smacks of a modern conspiracy of silence. A scholar working in an old monastery in the 1950’s came across a copy of parts of a letter written by Clement of Alexandria, sometime in the late 200’s, discussing parts of Mark that were to be kept secret except for initiates into the advanced mysteries of Christ. There are hints in the Gospel of Mark that some text is missing, and at the end of Mark there is a curious reference to a young man who flees naked from the scene as Jesus is arrested. There is still controversy over whether the letter is authentic, but there is good evidence that it is.
If it is authentic, probably the Fundamentalists should welcome the married Jesus of the DaVinci Code. I think Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson might have a small problem with the Secret Gospel of Mark. According to Clement, the first fragment of the Secret Gospel deals with Jesus and a young man clad only in a linen cloth, who “stayed with him for the night, because Jesus taught him the mystery of the Kingdom of God.” The second section refers to “the young man whom Jesus loved.” At the very least, it is a colorful new piece in the quilt, but like the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Judas, it is unlikely to be incorporated into the established canon. We can appreciate it, however, as another story to be added to all the other stories, the stories of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the apocalypse of Peter, the Gospels of Philip, Thomas and Judas—different stories for different Christianities.
And Dan Brown took some of this, some of that, some of his own and stitched together a whole new story, one that has sold 40 million copies.
They are all stories. They are all myth. The trick is to see the whole quilt, to see the design, to see the pattern, all together and in its parts, to see the patterns within the patterns, and the trick is to try to learn what they have to have to tell us. The stories should be useful. They shouldn’t bind us, wrap us tight, make it impossible for us to move and to grow. Theodore Parker, a 19th century Unitarian Minister said that as a master the Bible is a tyrant, but as a servant, there is not enough time to understand all its uses.
We Unitarians are Heretics. In Greek, heresy means “to choose.” We heretics get to choose which stories, if any, we want to believe.
You can choose to believe the stories of the established canon, the 27 books of the Christian scriptures or you can choose to believe Dan Brown’s stories and think Jesus was married and the Catholics conspired to obliterate the sacred feminine.
You have a choice. You can choose to believe that a first century Palestinian Jew wandered around preaching about getting right with God in preparation for an immanent end-of-times, that he was married, had children and was killed by the Romans for stirring up a revolt at a time when things were a little dicey in Jerusalem. Or you can choose to believe that this guy was born of a virgin, could bring decaying bodies back to life, was the son of God, was killed by the Jews and rose from the dead and took off for heaven, by now probably still traveling somewhere in the middle of the milky way headed to God knows where. You can choose whatever stories make sense or have meaning to you and you can read them in any way you like.
Is it any wonder people are fascinated by the DaVinci Code? Is it possible that people have questioned the stories they have been told all these years? Is it possible that they haven’t questioned them? They are stories. Make your choice.
The quilt on our wall isn’t about women, or fish, or whales or mountains. It is about what the people who donated their t-shirts thought about this place and what they thought this place is about. The quilt is not just a decoration on a blank wall.
Whatever Jesus was, whether Jesus even existed, whether he was married, whether he rose on the third day, whether Judas was his betrayer or his enabler—that is not the story.
Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. The rest is just commentary.
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