The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (17 page)

Arius, by contrast, believed that Christ must be identified with creatures in order to make our deification possible: He, precisely as a creature, attains the reward of deification in exactly the same way we do (“the pioneer and perfector of our faith”; “the firstborn of many brothers”) and thus establishes the possibility of deification for the rest of creatures. No chemistry of essences and natures is needed; God simply effects the adoption as sons/daughters by his grace, that is, by fiat. Arius’s operative slogan differed by one single letter: “
Homoiousias.
” Christ was “of like nature” with the Father before the incarnation, then exalted by grace and in an honorific sense (like receiving an honorary degree) afterward.

One might assume that debates like this never leaked out of the ivory towers of theology, but it was not so. It appears that the Christological controversy was a matter of considerable public interest. Common people lined up on one side or the other, as if they were feuding fans of battling sports teams! We even hear that there were Arian drinking songs echoing in the dockside taverns of Alexandria! Imagine hardy seamen lifting a few to the success of Arianism! “
Oh
. . .
he’s
. . .
not-
one-with-the
Fa
-ther!”

The Council of Nicea, in 325, summoned by Constantine, decided the issue by voting in Athanasius’s favor. After the emperor’s death, the decision was reversed, then reversed again, so that the initially victorious Athanasius was suddenly exiled, then recalled! Arian Christology, the belief that Jesus Christ was not fully God or man but a kind of archangel, survived among the barbarian Goths, evangelized by the Arian missionary Ulfilas. They lived in northern Europe from whence many later relocated to north Africa. Early passages of the Koran seem perhaps to reflect Arian Christology, and many Arian Christians finally converted to Islam. Today, the major Arian group is Jehovah’s Witnesses. Arian Christology has also remained a favorite notion among certain English theologians.
⁷

The aftermath of the Arian controversy was the debate over precisely how
human
Jesus Christ was, granting his full divinity. Athanasius had pretty much taken the humanity of Jesus for granted without defining it. His disciple Apollinarius taught what he believed to be the natural implication of Athanasius’s doctrine, namely, that Jesus Christ had only a human body of flesh and a human soul/mind, but
not a human spirit
. That, he reasoned, must have been “left open” to fit in the divine Logos. After all, it had to plug into the organism
some
place, right?

He was opposed by three theologians (boyhood chums, now ecclesiastical bigwigs), Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basil of Caesarea, all from the Asia Minor province of Cappadocia, hence their collective nickname, the Three Cappadocians. These men argued that if Jesus saved us by becoming human, assuming humanity (i.e., taking humanity onto himself), and so raising us to the level of divinity, then in order to save our spirits he must have
had
a human spirit, not just the divine one. What, did he redeem only two-thirds of any human being? Their formula was “What is not assumed cannot be redeemed.” So Jesus Christ must have been fully human as well as fully divine, not half and half like a mythical demigod.

The Council of Constantinople decided this issue in favor of the Three Cappadocians in 381. While this gathering promulgated no new creed, it did beef up the original draft of the Nicene Creed, adding extra material about the Holy Spirit (“the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified”), so that the version repeated in churches today is actually the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

To gain an idea of what an Apollinarian Jesus might have looked like, take a look at a scene from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas:

And after some days, as Jesus walked with Joseph through the city, one of the children ran and struck Jesus on the arm. But Jesus said to him, “You have reached the end of the road!” And at once he fell to the earth and died. But when those present saw this wonder they cried out, “Where does this child come from?” And they said to Joseph, “It is not right for such a child to live among us!” As he departed, taking Jesus with him, they called out, “Leave this place! Or else, if you must stay with us, teach him to pray and not to curse; for our sons lose consciousness!”

And Joseph called Jesus and began to admonish him:

“Why do you call down curses? Those who live here are coming to hate us!” But Jesus said, “I know these words are yours, not mine, but for your sake I will be silent from now on. Only let them see the result of their own foolishness.” And immediately those who spoke against Jesus were made blind, and as they wandered about they said, “Every word from his mouth is fulfilled!” And when Joseph saw what Jesus had done, he took hold of his ear in anger. But Jesus was annoyed and said to Joseph, “It is enough for you to see me, not to touch me. For you do not know who I am, and if you knew it, you would not vex me. Although I am with you now, I was made before you.”

Here is a Jesus who had flesh and blood all right, since Joseph manages to box his ear, but he is a god dwelling in a human body, scarcely able to endure the inanities of the human race, among whom he is for the time being marooned! “What fools these mortals be!”

The story goes that Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, was disturbed at hearing some of his parishioners praising Mary as the
Theotokos
, Mother of God. This made him reflect upon the Christological question, how are the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ related? He decided they could not be related in any way that would make it meaningful to call Mary’s infant son “God.” He is said to have exclaimed, “God is not a baby two or three weeks old!” Imagine the scene at home with the Holy Family: “Mary, can’t you change God’s diaper?” “Joseph, it’s time for the Almighty’s two o’clock feeding!” In the controversial 1985 French film
Hail Mary
, which sets the nativity story in the modern world, the Holy Family is setting off for a picnic in the country when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, young Jesus announces, to no apparent point, “I am he who is.” Joseph’s reaction: “Get in the car.”

Nestorius was thought to have taught something to the effect that in Jesus Christ there were two subjects, divine and human, perhaps two persons, or something close to this. But according to his own rediscovered writings, admittedly not a model of clarity, Nestorius regarded Jesus of Nazareth as “the assumed Man” that is, assumed, or taken on, by the divine Word, the preincarnate Son of God. By the grace of God they formed one person with two natures. But Nestorius was misrepresented as teaching that Jesus and the Word were two persons sharing but a moral unity.

“Opposing” him (but actually holding to virtually the same view!) was Cyril of Alexandria, who argued that Jesus had been one person with two natures (divine and human) and that the personhood was divine, supplied from the divine side. This meant that, had there been no mission of incarnation for the Word to undertake, there should have been no Jesus of Nazareth at all. The divine Word forms the nucleus of the Incarnation. This sounds sort of like Apollinarianism, but it isn’t, since Cyril readily admits the human Jesus had a body, soul, and spirit. He was fully human, though he wouldn’t have existed at all except for his divine destiny. On the other hand, it is not hard to see how Nestorius’s position might be taken as opening the door to a kind of adoptionism or separationism. It bothered Cyril and his faction that Nestorians spoke of a “Word/man” Christology, not a “Word/flesh” Christology.

The Council of Ephesus decided in 431 in favor of Cyril. Of course this didn’t really settle much; the Nestorian churches just picked up their marbles and left for home. Nestorian Christianity still thrives today, especially in Iran. Nestorius had been vilified, made a straw man against which to define orthodoxy. He did not actually espouse what is called “the Nestorian heresy,” nor do today’s Nestorians. In fact, one photograph of a gathering of Nestorians shows them holding up a big banner praising the
Theotokos
!

It is hard to picture the two-headed Jesus implied in the straw-man “Nestorianism” condemned by the council. To come up with an analogy, one must probably resort to the realm of comic book superheroes, a few of whom have a secret identity that is really an alter ego with whom they share consciousness, each in the background while the other is manifest. For instance, Dr. Don Blake strikes the ground with his cane and turns into and/or is replaced by the Mighty Thor, his cane replaced by a hammer. Billy Batson speaks the magic word “Shazam!” and is replaced by the adult Captain Marvel, with whom, however, he shares memories. Firestorm the Nuclear Man is a fusion between a high school student and his science professor, whose wizened, bearded head is shown hovering about the hero in ghostly form whenever that consciousness makes itself known with a word of advice. Presumably Cyril wanted to fend off something like this in the case of Jesus Christ.

Also, one wonders whether some of today’s feminist theology, which disdains to call Jesus the Son of God and insists on dubbing him the Child of God, is not Nestorian in that it refuses to envision the incarnation “going all the way down.” Just as Nestorius said, “God is not a baby two or three weeks old!” feminist theologians are saying, “God is not a male with a penis!”

Eutyches, pious Archimandrite of a monastery in Constantinople (not to be confused with Eutychus, the kid who fell asleep at Paul’s long-winded preaching and fell out the window in Acts 20:7-12!), tried to explain how the two natures of Christ were related in one person. He admitted that the divine and human natures remained distinct from one another
going into
the union, until the point of the incarnation, namely, the impregnation of Mary. Afterward, Eutyches ventured, the two natures combined into a single nature (
monos physis
), unique to Jesus Christ. From there on in, Christ had a single nature. One person
from
two natures. The implied analogy is like salt and water: They fuse together into a new, single solution. Those who believe this are known as Monophysites.

Opposing Eutyches was Pope Leo, among others, Leo being the actual author of the formal response to Monophysitism,
Leo’s Tome
. These Dyophysites (believers in two natures) insisted that the two natures
remained
distinct, inseparably united, never mingled or confused. The proper analogy here would be that of oil and water: Pour both into a blender and run it till Hell freezes over, and the oil is never going to mix with the water, even though not so much as a film of oxygen molecules separates them.

The Council of Chalcedon decided this one in favor of Leo and his colleagues in 451. Again, there was no actual resolution, since the numerous Monophysite churches went their merry way and exist till this very day. The Coptic Church, Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Armenian Orthodox Church, and so forth are Monophysite.

How to picture a Monophysite Jesus? That’s a tough one, but maybe the best bet would be to picture Jesus as portrayed by Max von Sydow in
The Greatest Story Ever Told
. He speaks and acts always with the imperturbable serenity of a statue of the Buddha. He is floating through the pages of an epic, a self-consciously divine Messiah with nothing to say but sonorous pronouncements that already sound like momentous quotes as he is saying them (unlike, one may add, the Jesus in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
The Gospel according to Saint Matthew
, who seems to be just what he is: some guy videotaped in his back-yard wearing a sheet and spitting out lines from the Bible!).

By contrast, a brilliant portrayal of the Chalcedonian two-nature Jesus who is really and significantly human as well as being truly divine is provided perhaps where most people would least expect it: in Schraeder and Scorcese’s
The Last Temptation of Christ
. Ironically, this much-abused and misunderstood masterpiece takes the prize as the most orthodox Jesus film of them all! Where else will you find a depiction of a man who begins to sense deep inside that he is also God? Would such a realization go down easy? It would not. The ease with which religious conservatives seem to imagine the historical Jesus taking in stride the fact of his divinity shows that they are scarcely reckoning with a historical figure at all, rather just a character in a scripture, which, to them, is the really important thing. But
The Last Temptation of Christ
shows us an up-close view of a man tormented by something scarcely different from demon possession: divine incarnation! If the notion of God becoming a man was supposed to be as alien and scandalous to Jewish sensibilities as apologists are always assuring us it was (since they want to argue that Jewish disciples couldn’t have just made it up), then mustn’t it have been quite an identity crisis for a Jewish God-man to assimilate the two truths about himself? And so Schraeder and Scorsese, following author Nikos Kazantzakis, depict it. And that is why this film has real theological importance: It demonstrates, by means of artistic verisimilitude, that we
can
imagine a truly divine and truly human Jesus. Whether or not it is true, it cannot be easily dismissed as an artificial formula, a confusing bit of oxymoron.

Here, then, is one place where Dan Brown really lets his readers down. His completely false and misleading account of Constantine and the “invention” of the divine Christ is offered to the reader not as part of the fiction but as part of the factual research background. But it seems he could not manage to keep the two straight. And that is what I am trying to do in this chapter.

One last note: In any event, it is in no way clear that for Jesus to have had sex or begotten children, as many of these popular books say he did, would have been incompatible with either his sinlessness or his divine character. And this point is crucial to the Teabing hypothesis: The marriage of Jesus is supposed to be the bombshell to demolish historic Christianity. But would it? It would certainly surprise a lot of people, for whatever that’s worth. But I am reminded of an anecdote told in class by my old mentor David M. Scholer. One day a woman in his church recounted a dream in which she saw Jesus roller skating and smoking a cigarette! Though the skating gave her no pause, the smoking did, but only for a moment. Then, she said, she realized Jesus was Jewish, and “I remembered: Jews smoke!” They also have sex.