The Truth at the Heart of 'The Da Vinci Code'
by Elaine Pagels
Archbishop Angelo Amato, a top Vatican official, recently railed
against The Da Vinci Code as a work "full of calumnies, offenses and
historical and theological errors.'' As a historian, I would agree
that no reputable scholar has ever found evidence of author Dan
Brown's assertion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had a
child, and no scholar would take seriously Brown's conspiracy
theories about the Catholic group Opus Dei.
But what is compelling about Brown's work of fiction, and part of
what may be worrying Catholic and evangelical leaders, is not the
book's many falsehoods.
What has kept Brown on the bestseller list for years and inspired a
movie is, instead, what is true � that some views of Christian
history were buried for centuries because leaders of the early
Catholic Church wanted to present one version of Jesus' life: theirs.
Some of the alternative views of who Jesus was and what he taught
were discovered in 1945 when a farmer in Egypt accidentally dug up an
ancient jar containing more than 50 ancient writings. These documents
include gospels that were banned by early church leaders, who
declared them blasphemous.
It is not surprising that The Da Vinci Code builds on the idea that
many early gospels were hidden and previously unknown. Brown has said
that part of his inspiration was one of these so-called Gnostic
Gospels as presented in a book I wrote on the subject. It took only
three lines from the Gospel of Philip to send Brown off to write his
novel:
The companion of the savior is Mary Magdalene. And Jesus loved her
more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often... The rest
of the disciples were jealous, and said to him, "Why do you love her
more than all of us?''
Those who have studied the Gospel of Philip see it as a mystical text
and don't take the suggestion that Jesus had a sexual relationship
with Mary Magdalene literally.
Still, by homing in on that passage and building a book around it,
Brown brought up subjects that the Catholic Church would like to
avoid. He raised the big what-ifs: What if the version of Jesus' life
that Christians are taught isn't the right one? And perhaps as
troubling in a still-patriarchal church: What if Mary Magdalene
played a more important role in Jesus' life than we've been led to
believe, not as his wife perhaps, but as a beloved and valued disciple?
In other words, what Brown did with his runaway hit was popularize
awareness of the discovery of many other secret gospels, including
the Gospel of Judas that was published in April.
There have long been hints that the New Testament wasn't the only
version of Jesus' life that existed, and that even the gospels
presented there were subject to misinterpretation. In 1969, for
instance, the Catholic Church ruled that Mary Magdalene was not a
prostitute, as many people had been taught. The church blamed the
error on Pope Gregory the Great, who in 591 A.D. gave a sermon in
which he apparently conflated several women in the Bible, including
Mary Magdalene and an unnamed sinner who washes Jesus' feet with her
tears.
But even that news didn't reach all Christians, and it is the rare
religious leader who now works hard to spread the word that the New
Testament is just one version of events crafted in the intellectual
free-for-all after Christ's death. At that time, church leaders were
competing with each other to figure out what Christ said, what he
meant -- and perhaps most important, what writings would best support
the emerging church.
What we know now is that the scholars who championed the "Gnostic''
gospels are among the ones who lost the battle.
In the decades after Jesus' death, these texts and many others were
circulating widely among Christian groups from Egypt to Rome, Africa
to Spain, and from today's Turkey and Syria to France. So many
Christians throughout the world knew and revered these books that it
took more than 200 years for hardworking church leaders who denounced
the texts to successfully suppress them.
The copies discovered in 1945, for example, were taken from the
sacred library of one of the earliest monasteries in Egypt, founded
about 10 years after the conversion of Constantine, the first Roman
emperor to join the fledgling church. For the first time, Christians
were no longer treated as members of a dangerous and seditious group
and could form open communities in which many lived together. Like
monks today, they kept in their monastery libraries a very wide range
of books they read aloud for inspiration.
But these particular texts appeared to upset Athanasius, then
archbishop of Alexandria; in the year 367 he sent out an Easter
Letter to monks all over Egypt ordering them to reject what he called
"illegitimate and secret books.'' Apparently, some monks at the
Egyptian monastery defied the archbishop's order and took more than
50 of the books out of the library, sealed them in a heavy jar and
buried them under the cliff where they were found 1,600 years later.
In ordering the books destroyed, Athanasius was continuing the battle
against the "Gnostic'' gospels begun 200 years earlier by his revered
predecessor, Bishop Irenaeus, who was so distressed that certain
Christians in his congregations in rural Gaul (present day France)
treasured such "illegitimate and secret writing'' that he labeled
them heretics. Irenaeus insisted that of the dozens of writings
revered by various Christians, only four were genuine -- and these,
as you guessed already, are those now in the New Testament, called by
the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Irenaeus said there could be only four gospels because, according to
the science of the time, there were four principal winds and four
pillars that hold up the sky. Why these four gospels? He explained
that only they were actually written by eyewitnesses of the events
they describe -- Jesus' disciples Matthew and John, or by Luke and
Mark, who were disciples of the disciples.
Few scholars today would agree with Irenaeus. We cannot verify who
actually wrote any of these accounts, and many scholars agree that
the disciples themselves are not likely to be their authors. Beyond
that, nearly all the gospels that Irenaeus detested are also
attributed to disciples -- some, including the Gospel of Thomas, to
the original 12 apostles. Nonetheless, Athanasius and other church
leaders succeeded in suppressing the gospels they (and Irenaeus)
called illegitimate, won the emperor's favor and succeeded in
dominating the church.
What, then, do these texts say, and why did certain leaders find them
so threatening?
First, they suggest that the way to God can be found by anyone who
seeks. According to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus suggests that when we
come to know ourselves at the deepest level, we come to know God: "If
you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save
you.'' This message � to seek for oneself � was not one that bishops
like Irenaeus appreciated: Instead, he insisted, one must come to God
through the church, "outside of which,'' he said, "there is no
salvation.''
Second, in texts that the bishops called "heresy,'' Jesus appears as
human, yet one through whom the light of God now shines. So,
according to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus said, "I am the light that
is before all things; I am all things; all things come forth from me;
all things return to me. Split a piece of wood, and I am there; lift
up a rock, and you will find me there.'' To Irenaeus, the thought of
the divine energy manifested through all creation, even rocks and
logs, sounded dangerously like pantheism. People might end up
thinking that they could be like Jesus themselves and, in fact, the
Gospel of Philip says,
"Do not seek to become a Christian, but a Christ.'' As Irenaeus read
this, it was not mystical language, but "an abyss of madness, and
blasphemy against Christ.''
Worst of all, perhaps, was that many of these secret texts speak of
God not only in masculine images, but also in feminine images. The
Secret Book of John tells how the disciple John, grieving after Jesus
was crucified, suddenly saw a vision of a brilliant light, from which
he heard Jesus' voice speaking to him: "John, John, why do you weep?
Don't you recognize who I am? I am the Father; I am the Mother; and I
am the Son.'' After a moment of shock, John realizes that the divine
Trinity includes not only Father and Son but also the divine Mother,
which John sees as the Holy Spirit, the feminine manifestation of the
divine.
But the Gospel of Mary Magdalene -- along with the Gospel of Thomas,
the Dialogue of the Savior, and the Gospel of Philip -� all show
Peter, the leader of the disciples, challenging the presence of women
among the disciples. We hear Peter saying to Jesus, "Tell Mary to
leave us, because women are not worthy of (spiritual) life.'' Peter
complains that Mary talks too much, displacing the role of the male
disciples. But Jesus tells Peter to stop, not Mary! No wonder these
texts were not admitted into the canon of a church that would be
ruled by an all-male clergy for 2,000 years.
Those possibilities opened by the "Gnostic'' gospels -- that God
could have a feminine side and that Jesus could be human -- are key
ideas that Dan Brown explored in "The Da Vinci Code,'' and are no
doubt part of what made the book so alluring. But the truth is that
the texts he based his novel upon contain much deeper and more
important mysteries than the ones Tom Hanks tries to solve in the
movie version that opened this weekend.
The real mystery is what Christianity and Western civilization would
look like had the "Gnostic'' gospels never been banned. Because of
the discovery by that Egyptian farmer in 1945, we now at least have
the chance to hear what the "heretics'' were saying, and imagine what
might have been.
***
Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief: The
Secret Gospel of Thomas, is a professor of religion at Princeton. She
wrote this article for the Perspective section of the San Jose
Mercury News.