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back to DeCoding The DaVinci Code Jesus: What Kind of Human? A tutorial question I sometimes used to set for undergraduates was to spot the connection between Moses, Mohammed and Jesus. Well, yes, they are all great religious leaders within a monotheistic and Middle Eastern tradition. But there is also something stranger that connects them. They are all adopted. In the case of Moses, he was abandoned by his birth mother and left to float in a small coracle in the River Nile, and had the good fortune to be picked up by the daughter of one of the Pharaohs, and nurtured as one of her own. Mohammed was orphaned at the age of six, or perhaps earlier, and was brought up by his uncle in the ancient city of Makka. Jesus, of course, according to Christian orthodoxy is not exactly the child of Joseph, since Christian tradition claims no human intervention in his genesis. Although Mary is clearly his mother, he is also the son of God. When most people think about adoption, it is a habit of the heart to believe that it is the child who has somehow been rescued, and that the adopted parents are the redeemers. However, one of the extraordinary things about three of the world’s great religions is that this equation is turned around - as most things are in religion - so that the adopted child becomes the redeemer, or the gift. This is particularly true in Christian thinking where orthodoxy teaches a kind of double adoption: in return for God’s adoption of us by Jesus, we are ourselves adopted into the life of God. Focussing on the birth and early family life of Jesus is, of course, not without its problems. The gospels tell us very little about Jesus’ infancy and youth. But we can be sure that Jesus was raised in a family, and to all intents and purposes, had a relatively normal upbringing. (Despite some of the odd stories and details that we are furnished with by the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas!). Jesus is an individual who had a childhood, knew other children, and was not without opinions, in his adult life, on family and marital values. For many Christians, reflecting on the contingencies of Jesus’ family life may seem pointless, or even possibly irreverent. When people think of Christ, the second person of the trinity, they do not usually want to be engaged in pondering how it is Christ was fed, taught, disciplined and shaped as a child. This is because Christians see Jesus through the event of the resurrection: they see the risen and glorified Christ, but in so doing often fail to appreciate the earthly Jesus. One of the more interesting debates that The Da Vinci Code has prompted: the nature of Jesus’ humanity. Specifically, was he so earthly and fleshly as to have ever had a wife or lover? Or was he so heavenly and ‘other’ as to be above such things, and therefore celibate? For what are perhaps obvious reasons, the debate engages the passions of Christians deeply. Some Christians crave a Jesus whose heavenly origins remain unblemished. For others, ‘flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone’, or ‘fully God and fully man’ (as the early church fathers put it) must mean that Jesus at least could have married. But the latter view, obviously, raises the possibility that there might be offspring. In the post-war period, a number of books have appeared suggesting that Jesus may have married and settled down (in a kind of post-resurrection haze), or that Jesus had been married before he began his ministry. One book suggests that the trigger for Jesus beginning his prophetic work was seeing his wife killed in an ethnic riot. Before going much further down this avenue of exploration, we should be clear about one thing. There is much that the Bible does not tell us about Jesus. We have no description of his physical appearance. We know virtually nothing about his early life. We don’t know if he dated anyone, and if he did, who. Of course, there have been several Gnostic gospels that have tried to fill in these details for us, but they lack credibility and authenticity. Indeed, I would suggest that there is some sense in which the genius of The Da Vinci Code is to marry the more speculative apocryphal texts discussed in Elaine Pagels’ The Gnostic Gospels with the fashionable and familiar adventures of Indiana Jones. Dan Brown, in speculating about the marital state of Jesus, and more than hinting about a plot or conspiracy on gender and sexuality (hatched by the church from earliest times), is intriguingly combining ancient and modern genres. For example, some Gnostic gospels appear to imply a closer relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene than is ever suggested by the four gospels of the New Testament. Moreover, the end of the Gospel of Thomas has Jesus ‘making’ Mary Magdalene a male, so that she may ‘enter the kingdom of heaven’ as the apostles do (see J. K. Elliott’s The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford, OUP, 1993, p. 147). Whilst the ancient specious ancient sources that Dan Brown draws on are interesting to note, the more intriguing question to pose is why the novel should strike such a chord with American and European audiences. What is that draws individuals and church groups to take the text seriously, asking ‘could it be true’, or even actively hoping that it is? There are several reasons, I suspect, but here are three that we might briefly discuss. First, there seems to be a growing amount of circumstantial evidence that The Da Vinci Code appeals to a significant number of women. Beyond the presenting conspiracy theory posed by the book (i.e., that the feminine dimension to religion and spirituality has been wilfully suppressed by the church), there are some intriguing underlying Christological cadences that many women may be drawn towards. The suggestion that Jesus marries, and is or has been, in some sense, a family man, effectively humanises him, and takes him away from idealistic and theoretical constructions that place him at a distance from people’s lives. In perhaps over-stressing (and speculating upon) an incarnational aspect of Jesus’ identity (i.e., marriage, children, etc), Brown re-presents a Jesus who is truly and fully human. And this, of course, does not make Jesus less attractive to some (even it does imply he is not divine). Rather, it simply brings Jesus closer to the experience of his followers. It makes Jesus into ‘one of us’; we adopt him as our own, just as the New Testament will also claim that it is through him, we are adopted. Second, the ‘conspiracy theory’ that Brown sets before us harks back to the original debates concerning the nature of Christ. All good conspiracy theories depend on a number of key elements: uncertainty about the witnesses and their reliability; it being established that there are vested power interests in shaping history and identity; and there being insufficient clarity (or some doubt) about the number, range and quality of ‘facts’ that have hitherto given rise to the commonly-held version of events. The original historical debates about Christ’s nature could be said, in some sense, to fall into this category. And Brown plays his cards well, by suggesting that the church has elevated Jesus to being a person worthy of worship (to protect the interests of the church), thereby denying Christ’s truly human nature. It is a brilliantly simple backdrop for the plot of The Da Vinci Code, and reflects (albeit in a distorted, fictional manner), something of the original flavour of those ancient and hotly contested Christological debates. Third, and perhaps more simply, The Da Vinci Code questions the robustness of many in the Christian faith, who have perhaps hitherto taken too much for granted. Dan Brown’s book takes dogma (rather than doctrine) head on, and by weaving together a sequence of fictions, semi-reliable ancient sources and historical interpretation, manages to challenge the belief of many Christians. I say ‘challenge’ here – but perhaps I mean ‘unsettle’? For that is what the book does best. It questions assumptions. It hints at hidden or suppressed ‘truths’. It seduces the reader into believing that there is an underlying ‘code’ to be broken in Christianity, which reveals the real and exposes the false. All Christians, when faced with such a challenge, are forced to re-examine their faith and the knowledge that underpins it. In so doing, Dan Brown’s legacy may, ironically, provide something of a fillip to faith. His detractors will doubtless that such specious and speculative ideas actually harm the faith of individuals, or at least lead them up false avenues of enquiry. But I suspect that The Da Vinci Code, and all the interest that it has generated, points in another direction. Namely to the fact that, for many people, the Christian tradition is an open one, and one that invites questions, reinterpretation and fresh understandings. Brown’s book, ironically, serves the very faith that some would suggest it undermines. I realise that this is a very positive reading of how to interpret Brown’s book, but that may be no bad thing. A novel that places a considerable emphasis on the human nature of Jesus may serve as an important landmark in understanding religion and culture in the early part of the 21st century. I suspect sociologists might look back in one hundred years time, and puzzle at our interest in the book, and the tens of millions of sales. Why, they will ask, did it strike a chord in the USA and beyond at that time? Who bought it, and why? Why did church groups set about studying it in such detail? The answers to such questions are undoubtedly complex: an insatiable cultural hunger for conspiracy theories; a general and deep mistrust of public institutions; a desire to re-write history; a love of entertainment? And perhaps, just maybe, a desire to reclaim Jesus as a human – one of us. In other words, this is a new take on an old theological trick, and one that was very familiar to the nineteenth century. Namely separating the ‘real’ Jesus of history from the Christ of ‘faith’. Wiser theologians know that can’t be done; it’s the equivalent of splitting the atom; separating Christ’s flesh from his spirit; distinguishing his humanity from his divinity. It can’t be done. Indeed, Christians say it shouldn’t. But along comes Dan Brown’s book, and suggests that the DNA of Jesus may just live on. So the real human Jesus may be closer to you than you think. Brown suggests that our links to Jesus may not just be theological and ideological, but also biological. This is not Christian orthodoxy, to be sure. It is a flight of fancy. But it sure makes for a good read. And no-one can dispute that. Revd. Canon Prof. Martyn Percy back to DeCoding The DaVinci Code |
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