Elaine Pagels "The Truth at the Heart of 'The Da Vinci Code'"

[bobbieinok]

(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.)

This article is at TON at NPR b/c Pagels was a guest at TON 5-22-06.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5422879


The Truth at the Heart of 'The Da Vinci Code'
by Elaine Pagels

NPR.org, May 22, 2006 ·

....

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.

....

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.

....

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.

[maxsolomon]

1. you should have seen the program on SciFi last week

hoo, those theologians were spinning so hard! they are SO scared that people might not buy the dogma anymore.

Pagels took some heat for shoddy scholarship, too.

[robbedvoter]

9. Oh, boy! Saw it! Not sure whether to laugh , get scared or barf

The irony of it being on Sci-Fi tilted the balance to laugh

[stellanoir]

2. Leave it to Pagels to be a singular voice of reason

in the face of the plethora of "heresy" and "fiction" claims.

Anyone who is at all familiar with even a smidgen of Hebraic tradition knows that men of that tradition were to be married by 18 years of age or were granted no credibility whatsoever.

The demonization of Magdelene as a hooker didn't happen for a half a millennium later. And has resulted in the desecration of the divine feminine, impowerment of the virgin/whore complex and resulted in sexual deviance and perversion beyond belief.

have a nice day.

and may peace be with you.

[Clovis Sangrail]

3. it worked on me

I'm not religious (though was raised Catholic) but me and my SO have been reading an awful lot lately about the early church.

I'm reading a book called "Misquoting Jesus" about how far current translations of the new testament have diverged from the original texts.
It's really amazing just how far removed from "the word of god" it is.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. One only has to look at the Qur'an

to find some of the stories of Jesus that were around in early times, for some of them can be found there. Long ago I read The Lost Books of the Bible and the Gospel of Thomas-the former made Jesus to be human, the latter gave power to the individual for their own salvation.

[Grateful for Hope]

5. This is so true

I was speaking to a co-worker today about similarities between fundamentalist religions and the oppression of women. Would say more, but, I don't want this to be a flame thread.

I have read other novels that cloak themselves in mystery and intrigue in order to get the message across that the teachings in our churches, particularly in our more fundamentalist religions (and, I do think that Catholicism is leaning toward this extreme given the new pope's ideology), are teachings that suit the purpose of that particular church in terms of monetary considerations.

The push to have more babies, the refusal to allow priests to marry, etc. are all based on monetary considerations.

What I don't get is that why would any church, if what they try to teach is correct, be concerned about money?

I guess I do "get it", but what I see sure is something that would be alien to the average church-going person.

[megatherium]

6. As far as I know, the Gnostic gospels date to 2 - 3 centuries

after Christ, while the canonical New Testament writings date to 30-80 years after Christ. The fourth century Church chose the writings that became our New Testament based on their best judgement as to what writings were from the Apostles themselves. It is clear that their choices weren't always correct: they debated long and hard about the book of Revelation, and modern scholars believe that as many as seven of the twelve Pauline epistles were written well after Paul's life.

Whether this means the Gnostic traditions were not as old as the tradition that became modern Christianity, I wouldn't know. But according to a priest at the Episcopal church I attend, Gnosticism was a later development, the result of the fusing of three traditions: elements of Christianity, neo-Platonic philosophy, and mystery religions. I should mention this priest is not exactly beholden to traditional theology: he cheerfully says he doesn't buy the "atonement theology" (that it was necessary for Jesus to die for us to be saved), even if that makes him a heretic.

[kenny blankenship]

7. Jesus liked nookie is the message I got from the DaV.C. movie

not going to read the book. (having read Foucault's Pendulum by Eco and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 I have had my fill already of the secret history of the world conspiracy theory plot, and much better done in those earlier works, I've no doubt) Elaine Pagels I have read before.
Rather than a message of "jesus had a feminine side", the DaV.C. as a movie conveys an audience flattering message of, "Jesus was just like me!"

Which is reason enough to hold it at arm's length like a loaded diaper.

[robbedvoter]

10. And this would be so offensive - why?

I am a total outsider in this, but if what he said is so valuable to you, why would his being human be demeaning?

[kenny blankenship]

12. It's not the idea of his mortality/humanity that I find offensive

I take that idea for granted. And your assumptions about what Jesus means to me are far, far afield. Flattering an audience and making a challenging figure from the past seem familiar and non-threatening is a lucrative enterprise I'll admit, but not intellectually respectable.

[diddlysquat]

8. Thanks for posting this.

I have always appreciated Elane Pagels.

[katty]

11. Gnostics and the Cathars were very interesting-it's the Church

that engaged in heavy handed revisionist 'history'.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

13. So stated Edgar Cayce in trance in no uncertain terms, he

predicted the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls if memory serves.

[pretzel4gore]

14. But was HE God?

somewhere in this debate this becomes the only issue, as it became back in ancient times. i recall reading once that EVERY question about Jesus and his divinity etc was argued relentlessly within 200 years of his life, and basically resolved..i once spent an afternoon reading the jesus christ section of Encyclopedia Britanica (you try spell it)...which was like a 1/2 inch of this enormous volume. At the very end, the EB concluded that while everything about christ can be debated, what cannot, and what history proves, is that HE transformed a mob of ordinary palestinian jews into a movement that is still alive today, 2000 years later.
So argue all that stuff all you want; christ was/is GOD in a way no other human being was/is....believe it or not :shrug:

[greenman3610]

15. when his disciples asked how they should talk to God..

He said, start with..
"OUR Father..."

OUR Father..
He put us on the same footing as him.
He said we were all children of God.

Obviously, he was speaking in metaphor.
"God" or the ultimate reality, did not
have sex with "Mrs God" and bear us all
as children.
But the "Father/Child" metaphor, (or "Mother/Child")
is a challenge to us. It tells us what we are expected to
be and do. What do children do?

They grow up.

Children of horses grow up to be horses.
Children of whales grow up to be whales.
Children of God grow up to be.....?

[pretzel4gore]

16. woof blitzer? brite hum? Glen Beck? larry king?

to say men grow up to be 'god's' might be true theologically, but... as a collective specie, we act stupid oftentimes....lookit the nuking of hiroshima, or the lynching of emmet gill, or the destruction of the wtc, or the battle of new orleans? or the beef industry, or the blue whale? As you can gather, these are the result of men acting in group, w/out any moral (or even real benefits) to anyone(!)....christ was not a promoter, of any kind - and he really never concerned himself too much about the injustice that hurt him directly. We live in a supposedly 'Christian' country, yet as anyone can see, we are as cruel and vile and sneaky and grasping and goofy etc as anyone (maybe the hitlerite nazis actually murdered more, but the busheviks WANT TO kill at a magnitude that dwarfs anything the nazis even thought of, i believe)...what that says is that the 'message' got hijacked by devilish little bastards (falwell, robertson, john goson, rev moon, geebush etc)
iow, 'christ' is still to be discovered by mankind, and as gandhi said, a 'christian civilization' would still be a good idea - but you'd have to overcome some mighty brutal forces (haliburton, the gop, the fbi, cia, kkk, foxcnn, nytimes, your local radio and the mediawhores etc)