The Gospel According to Michael Baigent
I've been interviewing Michael Baigent, the co-author of the now (in)famous . His new book, Th, develops similarly fantastic claims about the historical Jesus. Jesus survived the crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene, and established a holy bloodline. You know the sort of thing.
In this book, we learn that Jesus also put pen to paper (or papyrus) during his post-crucifixion marital relationship and wrote to the to deny rumours of his death and claims of his divinity. As you do. Mr Baigent claims to have seen this mysterious letter from Christ, but wasn't prepared to tell me the identity of the collector in whose safe keeping the explosive document now resides.
Two problems (at the very least here). First: why would I believe this story? (Answer: You'll have to trust me.)
Second: even if the anti-gospel of Jesus is handed over for international scrutiny, it could either be a fake or just one of many bizarre ancient documents concerning the story of Jesus. (Answer: Why would anyone make a fake unless they planned to make some money from the document ? And, sure the church cherry-picked its own canon of Scripture anyway.)
I suggested that Mr Baigent's book might make some money and that he was doing some cherry-picking of his own to construct an historical theory the size of the Empire State Building on a speck of speculation the size of a ten pence piece.
Mr Baigent accused me of massive overstatement. I feel suitably chided.
Comments
LOL! Do I detect a little skepticism?
That exchange just about says it all. This whole Da Vinci Code theory is beyond ludicrous. Thanks for exposing some of the nonsense!
LOL. It helps one to concentrate when typing with tongue firmly placed in cheek. :)
You raise a very interesting point though.
Did the church not cherry pick their cannon? What about the "lost" gospels of Thomas, Q or most recently Judas?
I'm a firm believer that Jesus was trying to teach us to "be compassionate as God is compassionate" and that he was the wisdom of God incarnate as a man.
I have had a religious fundamentalist tell me that my questioning of religious doctrine and the discrepancies of Biblical scripture stem from me perhaps having read the DaVinci code.
It had nothing to do with my theological reasoning and studying works by Biblical scholars such as Marcus Borg or Richard Holloway.
A belief system that is so easily threatened seems to me a very weak one.
A lot of people get trapped in details which produce division and strife and the creation of situations where a Ballymena councilor says he cannot attend the funeral in a Catholic Church due to religious reasons of a 15 year old boy killed by sectarian hate. On another level the world churches seem overly concerned with sexual issues and again seem to be threatened by the imminent release of The Da Vinci Code movie. Why doesn鈥檛 the church (of whatever denomination) concentrate on issues of compassion and peace rather than feeling threatened all the time?
I heard that at ruins of the World Trade Centre in New York, somebody wrote in black felt tip pen. 鈥淛esus loves the people you hate.鈥 We could all do with putting our energies into thinking about compassion, patience, tolerance and peace at this time.
I think Michael Baigent and Dan Brown, though the latter is rather less sensational, muddy the waters. Any serious reader of the Gospels and the New Testament who is not an orthodox believer has to reckon with some of these questions: Does he believe in the Virgin Birth, the miracles, the physical Resurrection? And if so in what sense? Still it is a profoundly serious story and an enormously consequential one, offering a series of lessons which many value. And we could do without an unnecessary and unwarranted fictionalization of it, though fresh thought is always a help.
I agree with Allen that the church has cherrypicked its canon of Scripture - its a little more complicated than that, but not a LOT.
But something tells me that's a debate for another day.
My congradulations to Will and Testament and William Crawley for exposing these people for what they are, frauds.
The Jesus Papers and The Da Vinci Codes were also written to insult followers of Jesus Christ. The difference is that the reactions from the West have been muted.
I challenge the authors of the Jesus Papers and the Da Vinci Code to write a similar piece on the Islamic Religion and see the reaction of the Islamic People.
Congradulations on exposing the author of The Jesus Papers and The Da Vinci Code.
The value of the DaVinci code is not that it is entirely accurate, but that it encourages people to ask questions about the history of the bible, which is basically the roots of our culture. There is, for example, a reference to the painting "The Last Supper", in which the person standing beside Jesus looks like a woman. This characteristic is not subtle, but obvious. If you were to see the painting that DaVinci did of John the Baptist, you would see a painting that sends the same message, but even more obviously female. If this is not Mary Magdalene, then what are the church saying about John the Baptist?
1 In Corinthians 11:14, Paul wrote, "if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him."
But many of the Apostles have long hair.
Some claim that DaVinci painted John this way because he himself was effeminate or homosexual. He may well have been, but there is one question this does not answer. At the time DaVinci painted this picture the church was completely dominant in society. People who opposed the church in any way could have been and were executed. Despite this, the depiction of John survived along with Davinci. In fact, the picture even survived the Inquisition. Is the church saying it agrees with this depiction of John the Baptist? Is it possible that our Patriarchal church rewrote history because they found the truth to be offensive?
p.s---In the New American Standard bible, preface to "John" it is said that after John the Baptis died, he was routinely painted as effeminate.
I'm a pastor and the author of "Jesus Unplugged". And I'm not worried that Baigent and Brown's books (or movies) will harm anyone's faith. If a mediocre novel brimming with falsehoods can destroy your faith, then your faith wasn't very strong to begin with.
I'm really only concerned about one thing, and it stems from Brown's statement of "fact" at the beginning of The Da Vinci Code. His novel contains this quote: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." This is on a page titled "FACT". This page is the first thing in the book. Historians and biblical scholars alike have debunked this claim over and over in dozens of articles and books (buy Ben Witherington's), yet the public seems to have, by and large, bought this fabrication.
Let me give you one from hundreds of possible examples of why this statement of Brown's is not fact, as he claims, but false.
If you read page 231 of Brown's book, you'll find this statement about ancient documents called "gospels": "More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament and yet only a relatively few were chosen for inclusion - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them." Brown says this statement is "FACT", since the gospels are among the documents that he claims to describe accurately in his novel. But he is wrong. We know of 32 gospels--34 if you include the hypothetical gospels of "Q" and "Signs". 32 is far from "over eighty". Therefore Brown's universal claim of accuracy/fact concerning descriptions of documents in The Da Vinci Code is patently false.
The most absurd claim to me in Brown's novel is the claim that the 4 gospels in the Bible suppress Jesus' humanity and emphasize his divinity. He further claims that the gospels not included in the Bible have been suppressed, and that they emphasize Jesus' humanity, and are therefore more true than the Bible. Dan Brown has this exactly backwards! Our 4 New Testament gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, John - emphasize Jesus' humanity, and the bulk of the other gospels not found in the Bible emphasize Jesus' divinity. Brown couldn't be more wrong.
Are Baigent and Brown intentionally lying about Jesus and the Bible? I don't know. Either they are a very bad researchers or they're misleading the public on purpose. If the former, why not just apologize for the "mistakes"? If the latter, shame on him and buyer beware!