The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (11 page)

What are the implications for the historical Jesus question? They are plain. As many scholars now think, Jesus may first have been remembered simply as a great sage like Pythagoras and Apollonius. Eventually his life became novelized in larger-than-life, hero-worshiping terms, as did the “biographies” of Empedocles, Pythagoras, Epimenides, Apollonius, and others. At this stage, the story would have intended not that Jesus actually died and rose from the dead but that he seemed to die and did not, the Swoon Theory. Recognition scenes in which Jesus says, “It is I myself; no spirit has flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39) simply meant he was not dead, had not died, despite all appearances.

In fact, this is certainly the point in a virtually identical scene from the biographical novel
The Life of Apollonius of Tyana
by Philostratus in the third century CE. The sage Apollonius had attracted the unwelcome attention of the cruel Caesar Domitian, who had summoned him to stand trial before him in Rome. Apollonius gladly complied, knowing that Domitian had no power over him. In prison, he told his disciple Damis not to fear, but to go on home. He would be fine. The day came, and he told off the emperor much as Socrates had put the Athenian senate in its place at his own trial. Then he suddenly vanished into thin air! At once he appeared in the midst of his gaping disciples at the other end of the Mediterranean. At first they believed they were seeing a ghost, but he assured them otherwise: “Take hold of me, and if I evade you, then I am indeed a ghost come to you from the realm of Persephone, such as the gods of the under-world reveal to those who are dejected with much mourning. But if I resist your touch, then you shall persuade Damis that I am both alive and that I have not abandoned my body.” They were no longer able to disbelieve, but rose up and threw themselves on his neck and kissed him, and asked him about his defence” (8:12).

Again, the otherwise pointless loose end of the fact that Jesus seemed to have died so quickly, to Pilate’s surprise (Mark 15:44; John 19:33), is a vestige of the stage when Jesus had simply survived the cross. The quick death, of which nothing further is made in the present gospels, originally would have served as a clue that Jesus had not really died at all. This early release from the cross is what saved his life.

John (or one of his redactors) has interpolated at this point the verses (19:34-37) about the soldier piercing the heart of Jesus. There is a contradiction in that the immediately preceding material says they found him to be dead, but the spear thrust has them make
sure
he’s dead, as if they did
not
know him to be dead. Why this redundancy? John wanted to negate the possibility of reading the story as teaching that Jesus only seemed to die, which must be the way some of his contemporaries were reading it.

Similarly John 20:20 has changed the recognition scene from having Jesus display his
solid
hands and
feet
to his gaping disciples, as we still find it in Luke 24:39, to having him display his
wounded
hands and
side
, a redactional change clearly connected with the lance passage. Here he wants to eliminate the reading of the recognition scene as the reunion with a Jesus who escaped the cross. And note that but for this redactional addition, plus the Doubting Thomas story, told to make the same point (John 20:24-29), there is no note in the New Testament that Jesus was affixed to the cross with nails.

Why does Matthew 27:57 specify that Joseph of Arimathea is wealthy when it says he buried Jesus in his own tomb? Perhaps the evangelist wants to fill out the narrative from Isaiah 53:9a (“And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death”), but to invoke this text would actually cause Matthew problems since it makes Joseph a “wicked” man, in contradiction to Matthew’s own statement. Nor does he draw attention to it as a prophetic fulfillment. No, rather he simply left a vestige of the original version in which Jesus’s burial in a rich man’s tomb provided the motive for tomb robbers to open the tomb, whereupon they found Jesus alive inside, precisely as in the novels. Since it is an opulent tomb belonging to a rich man, the rogues naturally expect it to contain funerary tokens worthy of their attentions. Now that it is sealed, they assume Joseph himself has died and is buried within!

In retrospect, it becomes easier to recognize other narrative clues of what was to come. Note that, in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asks his Father to spare him the chore of the crucifixion, a petition in which there is nothing shameful: He can scarcely have been human had escape not crossed his mind. But can we not recognize this as a wink to the reader that Jesus’s prayer will be answered, and not in the Pickwickian sense of “Sorry, too bad!”? Though Jesus declares himself ready to die, it will turn out he does not have to! The idea is just like Abraham being called by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. He is willing to carry out the act when God intervenes by an angel and tells him he needn’t go through with it. It was only the willingness that God wanted to see, and now that he has seen it, the death is unnecessary. Jews believed that henceforth the sheer willingness of Isaac to
be
sacrificed availed on behalf of Israel so that for Isaac’s sake God would forgive his people’s sins. Was that the point in the garden, too? By his yielding prayer, did Jesus already accomplish his saving work as he knelt in Gethsemane? And if he did, there would have remained no particular reason for him to die. Take a second look at Hebrews 5:7-8a in this light: “In the days of his flesh, he offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear. And though he was a son, he learned obedience.” It is certainly odd to say that God “heard” his prayer for deliverance from the cross—and then let him die the very death he had lamented! Perhaps Hebrews presupposes a different version of the story in which he cheated death on the cross.

Again, consider the infuriating mockery of Jesus’s enemies at the cross (borrowed from Psalm 22:6-8): “Save yourself and come down from the cross!” “He saved others, but he can’t seem to save himself! Let him descend from the cross right now, so we may see it, and we will believe he is the Christ, the King of Israel!” (Mark 15:30-32a). As Jesus-friendly readers, we are surely intended to want to see these villains forced to eat their words! And how might that happen? Well, it certainly could if Jesus did come down off the cross immediately, still living! The irony was, it happened before their very eyes, and yet they didn’t realize it. Prematurely drugged, he was taken down limp in a stupor.

There is even reason to think there had been a sequence in which Jesus left Palestine to teach among the Jewish Diaspora. In John 7:33-35 we read: “Then Jesus said, ‘I shall be with you just a little longer before I return to him who sent me. You will look for me and you will not find me; where I am headed, you cannot follow.’ The Jewish authorities said to one another, ‘Where does this fellow plan on going to be safe from us? Does he mean to journey among the Diaspora among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?’” This is one of the many places where John sets up what he regards as a misunderstanding in order to have Jesus knock it down for the reader’s benefit. That implies he might have heard the view that Jesus had indeed left for a teaching ministry among Greek-speaking Jews. So perhaps this is what some people thought.

Our discussion posits that, underlying the present gospel texts, there may still be discerned traces of an earlier version of the story of Jesus according to which he was providentially rescued from death, surviving his crucifixion. The present, canonical, texts of the gospels seem to assume that Jesus really did die, especially John, who even tries to tighten up the tradition on this point. And yet, as John Dominic Crossan has pointed out, it is certainly odd that not one of the gospel crucifixion accounts seems willing to say, bluntly, “Jesus died.” All of them retreat behind some euphemism (Matthew and Mark: “He breathed his last”; Luke and John: “He gave up his Spirit”), as if possibly to leave some wiggle room. Who knows? My point is simply to be fair and to show how a theory set forth in many of the Teabing-related books, though fully as outlandish-seeming as those I am refuting, does have certain strengths. If we say we are interested in New Testament history, our agenda must not be to defend any conventional party line, whether that of a church or of “mainstream scholarship.” And, again, if we wish to play the role of historians, all we can do is to set forth the probabilities of the case and maintain an open mind. The historian is not in the business of substituting one dogma for another.

NOTES

1
Flavius Josephus,
The Great Roman-Jewish War: A.D. 66-70
, trans. William Whiston, ed. and introd. by William R. Farmer (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1970).

2
David Friedrich Strauss,
Life of Jesus for the People
, vol. 1. (London: Williams, 1879), qtd. in J. N. D. Anderson,
The Evidence for the Resurrection
(Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1974), p. 17.

3
Translated by B. P. Reardon, in Reardon, ed.,
Collected Ancient Greek Novels
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 37.

4
Ibid., p. 53.

5
Ibid., p. 62.

6
Translated by Graham Anderson. In ibid., pp. 151-52.

7
Ibid., p. 67.

8
Ibid., p. 69.

9
Ibid., p. 57.

10
Translated by Ken Dowden. In ibid., p. 703.

11
Ibid., p. 155.

12
Ibid., p. 167.

Chapter 4

THE GNOSTIC CONNECTION

What Was the Secret Tradition?

T
he Da Vinci Code
and many of the books it draws on menhe Da Vinci Code and many of the books it draws on mention “Gnosticism” frequently. Anyone conversant with the history and doctrines of that fascinating movement will realize quickly that the term
Gnostic
is being used in these books in an inflated sense, pretty much equivalent to “heretic” or “freethinker.” There is a positive point to such a wider usage, and I mean to return to it below, but in order to see what it is, we first need to get straight what historic, dictionary-definition Gnosticism was.

NO SUCH THING?

An irony has emerged recently on the scholarly scene: Some urge us to drop the rubric “Gnosticism” altogether, as if there is nothing for such a definition to denote. These scholars urge upon us the notion that there were certain motifs (which I will explain in more detail just below), such as belief in secret knowledge, in the soul having to evade malevolent angels on its way to heaven after death, in the coming of a redeemer in phantom flesh, in a hierarchical categorizing of human beings according to whether they possess a divine spark, in the creation of the world by angelic beings, and so forth. But since we find these various tenets occurring in different combinations in different ancient religious movements (Valentinians, Basilideans, Phibionites, Sethians, etc.), then it is misleading to lump them all together as “Gnosticism,” as if they were a single religion. And to do this, these scholars say, is only to disguise and repeat the ancient Catholic maneuver of labeling these movements as “heresy” as opposed to the shining alternative of
real
Christianity worthy of the name, that is, “Orthodoxy.” We will have just replaced “heresy” with a superficially less offensive term, “Gnosticism.” So, they say, we ought to drop the term “Gnosticism.”

I must respectfully disagree. We simply need to remind ourselves of what we mean by an “ideal type,” since the tag “Gnosticism” is one of those. An ideal type is precisely a textbook definition, an abstraction distilled from several actual instances (in this case, several kindred ancient sects) with more in common than separates them. We use the resulting abstraction as a yardstick with which to measure the differences between the specific instances. This way we are able to understand each particular sect (or whatever) in light of what makes it distinctive. Does the Gospel of Mary lack the notion of salvation being for the elect alone? Fascinating! We will understand this gospel better if we start to work asking why it lacks this tenet while possessing so many other pronounced Gnostic traits. Does Mary reject such elitism? Or is it so early that it does not yet possess this feature of more advanced Gnosticism?

Nor is “Gnosticism” a word of denigration and relegation. One need not oppose it to any implied orthodoxy. When we turn our scrutiny to emergent Catholicism, we may have all manner of theories of understanding it other than as the norm from which Gnosticism deviated. In fact, it might be the reverse! I am of the opinion that Catholic orthodoxy represents a combination of a simplified Gnostic understanding of the Godhead and the Redeemer, together with the sacraments of the mystery religions of the dying-and-rising gods.