Hidden History in The Da Vinci Code

Consolidation, or Cover-Up?

In the beginning there was not one Christianity, but many. Sacred roots and twenty centuries of primacy in the Western world have led to the generally dominant view that modern Christianity evolved in a linear and direct way from the teachings of Jesus. The snapshot Western civilization has tended to see is a natural progression, starting with Jesus and followed by the preaching of the apostles as depicted in the New Testament, on through the establishment of the church by Peter, brought under the wing of Constantine and the Council of Nicea, and from there throughout the Roman Empire, Europe, and on into the modern world. If we think about debate, conflict, and heresy in Christian thought, our history and humanities classes tend to emphasize the comparatively recent experience of the Reformation.

Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code wants to acquaint the reader with the lesser-known, even hidden side of the story, the unanswered questions about the early history of Christianity:

• Who was Jesus?
• Who was Mary Magdalene?
• Why did people accept the notions of a virgin birth or of resurrection?
• Were Jesus and his fellow Jews seeking to define a different path for Judaism, or seeking to create a new religion?
• How credible are the four accepted gospels, when we know they were written many years after the facts they describe, and their accounts are sometimes at odds with each other?
• What can one make of all the other gospel-like accounts that we now know existed but did not find their way into the New Testament?
• What should we think about the fact that very little contemporaneous material survives from the lifetime of Jesus--when nothing has yet been found in his own hand and what we do know of the gospel accounts has clearly been filtered and edited through the screen of the Roman and Greek translators?

Early Christian history proceeds to an untidy story punctuated by loose ends, unknowns, intrigues both political and personal, ironies, and considerable doses of what in today’s political vernacular might be called spin. As it turns out, the history of Christianity is primarily one of widely and sometimes wildly differing understandings of what correct Christian belief is, and considerable zeal in the identification and persecution of those thought not to believe correctly. These divergences, diversities, and differences may even go back to the very first moments of the Jesus movement. As we see throughout this book, the differences between Peter and others, the question of Mary Magdalene’s role, and the inner questions and doubts of Jesus himself are all becoming far more apparent given today’s scholarship, textual analysis, and archaeology than they were at any time in the last sixteen hundred years or so.

The New Testament and Judaism

Scholars have long known that there is roughly a forty-year gap (maybe less, but maybe much more) between the death of Jesus and the writing of the first gospel. During that period the followers of Jesus were consolidating their beliefs through oral tradition, and deciding who Jesus was and what his life and death meant. Each gospel was an evangelists telling of the story from a somewhat different point of view, based on the tellers own circumstances and audience. The Gospel of Luke beging by telling Theophilos that he (Luke) will tell his side of the Jesus history according to what have been related to him by some other witness. Eventually, four gospels and twenty-three other texts were canonized into a bible. This did not occur, however, until the sixth century.

As Deirdre Good points out in her lectures on Mary Magdalene and The Da Vinci Code, Virtually everyone in the New Testament should be thought of as Jewish unless you can produce any evidence to suggest they are not. Most experts agree that Jesus was a Jew. New Testament accounts repeatedly describe his involvements in Jewish temple life--from his precocious understanding of the temple service as a child to his attack on the money changers in the temple during his maturity. In all cases, it is the traditional Jewish temple to which he relates, and which he is trying to induce to change according to his vision.

Indeed, there was so much ferment in Judaism in those days--different cults, sects, clans, tribes, prophets, false prophets, rabbis, teachers, the Greek-influenced, the Roman-influenced--that the Jesus movement may not have appeared as anything shockingly new or different when it first emerged. The Jewish communities scattered across Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere all had their own traditions of modified beliefs and influences drawn from their surrounding cultures. Judaism in those days was a big tent, even if under it things were often unruly, fractious, and bitterly--even fatally--divided.

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Contribute to the Debate

One can see why the issues of The Da Vinci Code have people talking, arguing, searching--however improbable some aspects of the plot may be and however rewoven or spun out of whole cloth the religious history may be. Share your perspectives.

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The Birth of Christianity

It would certainly appear that for a long time after the death of Jesus his followers were not necessarily perceived as believers in a fundamentally different religion. What became Christianity was initially Jews preaching an increasingly different form of Judaism to other Jews. Sometimes called Nazareans by Jews and Christians by gentiles (non-Jews), some of the circles of Jesus’ followers required that males be circumcised and that the Jewish ritual and dietary laws be followed, yet they professed belief that Jesus was the Son of God and the sole path to salvation--beliefs inconsistent with Jewish orthodoxy. Ebionites, described recently as Christians still climbing out of their Jewish shell, insisted that to be part of their movement one had to be Jewish first.

Yet as Bart Ehrman, the contemporary expert on lost Christian beliefs and scriptures argues, the Ebionites believed deeply in Jesus, but they saw him as the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish scripture. The Ebionites believed that Jesus was a mortal man who was so righteous that God adopted him as His son and allowed his sacrifice to redeem humanity’s sins.

Saul, a Greek Jew, was strongly opposed to the Nazareans, but on the road to Damascus he had a vision in which Jesus told him to spend the remainder of his life spreading the gospel to the gentiles. Saul changed his name to Paul. His beliefs differed in significant ways from those then emerging from the Jewish tradition: Paul felt that male converts should not have to be circumcised, and that following Jewish law was not necessary, thereby setting up one of the earliest Christian conflicts. Paul concentrated his efforts on converting gentiles, while others attempted to convert from within the Jewish community. Paul traveled widely and established Christian churches throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Even more zealous than the Paulines were the Marcionites, who sought to cast off their Jewish heritage completely, even to the point of looking on the Jewish concept of God as a God that had failed.

The apostles, and later their followers, went forth to spread the good news (gospels). The spread of Christianity was a protracted, complicated, and decidedly messy process that must be viewed within the context of the political world in the early centuries of this era. This was the time of the Roman Empire. As the empire spread geographically, it incorporated populations whose religious beliefs were primarily pagan and naturalistic, tied to Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and other mythologies. These existed side by side, with the state taking no side.

It was within this theological stew that Christianity arose and developed. Against the dominant polytheistic religions, Christianity and Judaism were monotheistic, teaching an entirely different relationship of man to God (as opposed to man to gods), and a decidedly different path to salvation. Along the way, many diverse interpretations of the Christian belief system arose, some borrowing elements from the surrounding pagan traditions and others simply having alternate interpretations of key doctrinal beliefs.

A Developing Religion

Christianity morphed from belief taught by itinerant evangelists to small communities of believers organized in local churches--each with its own leaders, writings, and beliefs--with no overarching authority or hierarchy. Slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity, a formal hierarchy came about, and with it a need for doctrinal uniformity. Bishops met in synods to declare what was doctrinally correct. Other views were declared heresies and were to be eradicated. In doing so, they chose to glorify certain gospel accounts that reinforced their version of Christendoms message--even to select those accounts to be included in the Bible and in what orderat the same time as they vigorously rejected as heretical anything seen as politically or textually deviating from their own self-declared mainstream. These people, including Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Eusebius, became the editors, so to speak, of the Bible. Reacting as they did to the severe repression of Christians they had witnessed, these church leaders developed their own biases, and have to be understood in their own context. Meanwhile, Gnostics and others set off on very different paths, believing themselves to be good followers of Jesus even while holding to a very different cosmology. Despite the growing formal power of the bishops and church leaders opposed to them, they persisted in their beliefs, often at great risk to their lives.

In the novel, Dan Brown makes a point of telling the reader (through a lecture by Leigh Teabing) of the extreme extension of the church’s arguments against the heresies of this early era, which would be recycled a thousand years later in the Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1487 as the political platform of the Inquisition.

Perhaps it was inevitable that single-scripture Christianity would merge with single-power politics. To achieve primacy, the early church fathers believed they needed to turn Christianity into a force to unite and strengthen the empire, consistent with the empires values, politics, and social and military infrastructure. Those who led the Roman Empire in this pursuit believed that a key task was to distill a core ideology and cosmology out of all the various ideas that made up the Christian message.

Emperor Constantine

In 313 Emperor Constantine declared that it was salutary and most proper that complete toleration should be given by the Roman Empire to anyone who had given up his mind either to the cult of the Christians or any other similar cult. With this Edict of Milan, official persecution of Christianity and Christians was supposed to end. It is often said that Constantine converted to Christianity, but most scholars understand that this was not until very late in life. Possibly on his deathbed, possibly not at all.

Many historians believe Constantine’s decision can best be explained as politically astutea move that took into account the accumulating power of Christianity, and a way to put that power at his disposal. Moreover, it was a decision born of a fascinating mix of mystical, superstitious, military, and philosophical threads, in addition to the political impetus. As the historian Paul Johnson notes, Constantine was a sun-worshipper, one of a number of late-pagan cults which had observances in common with Christians. Thus, the followers of Isis adored a Madonna nursing her holy child, and the followers of Mithras, many of whom were senior military men, celebrated their deity in much the same way Christians would celebrate Christ. Notes Johnson, Constantine was almost certainly a Mithraic . . . Many Christians did not make a clear distinction between this sun cult and their own. They referred to Christ driving his chariot across the sky and held a feast on December 25, considered the suns birthday at winter solstice. Whatever the reality, this was a major turning point in Christian history. When the state became at least nominally Christian, the presiding bishops became judicial and administrative as well as scriptural authorities. Constantine and the church both gained power. Scholar Stringfellow Barr, in his book The Mask of Jove, sums it up this way: Constantine . . . instinctively knew that the Christian polis, around which he had planned to rebuild [the Roman Empire,] must achieve a unity of spirit if his plans were to succeed.

A major thorn in Constantine’s side was the ongoing controversy with the followers of Arius (Arians), who disputed the notion that Jesus was of the same substance as the Father. Only the Father was God, said Arius and his followers; Christ was not a deity. Constantine wanted the matter settled, and so in 325 convened the Council of Nicea, which declared Arianism a heresy. Heresies from the early church point of view had always been struggled against and denounced (see the Pagels and Owen essays in this chapter) and would continue to befrom the Sabellian heresy which said that the Father and the Son were different aspects of one Being rather than distinct persons, to the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials. Although the various shades of opinion of Arians and Donatists and other heretical groups are foggy to us today, the historical record is quite clear that Constantine stepped in and personally presided over the Council of Nicea, even crafting some of the language that came out of the meeting as the ultimate statement on the controversies.

The Da Vinci Code Debate

What did and didn’t happen at the Council of Nicea is one of the key subjects of debate between Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and what many religious practitioners and scholars believe. But Brown's version is highly compelling in this key sense: this was a power struggle over the intellectual infrastructure that would rule much of European politics and thought for the following thousand years. Nicea was not about truth or veracity of religious or moral vision. Ruling some ideas in and others out was fundamentally about politics and power. From Constantine at Nicea to Pope Gregory nearly three hundred years later (and much in between) it turns out, at least in retrospect, to have been largely about developing the intellectual and political infrastructure of Europe for the next thousand years. You might say it was about codification of the code--the Roman Empire’s code.


See also:

• Codes and Symbols
• Da Vinci Code: History
  
• Glossary of Terms
• Mary Magdalene and the Sacred Feminine

• The Da Vinci Code Effect
• The Dan Brown Revelations
• The Da Vinci Code Tour of the Louvre