The Da Vinci Code and the Jews

[davidfcooper]

> Da Vinci Code" and the Jews
> by Rabbi Benjamin Blech
> It's commonly called "the runaway best seller of the 21st century."
> The numbers are staggering. Forty million copies sold round the world.
> Translated into 44 languages. Soon to be released as a movie starring
> Tom Hanks. Critics agree: There hasn't been anything like Dan Brown's/
> The Da Vinci Code/ in publishing history.
> And that, truth be told, hasn't made the Catholic Church very happy.
> This, after all, isn't just an exciting mystery novel. Woven into a
> story of the aftermath of a murder in the Louvre Museum is a tale of
> Christian conspiracies, high level cover-ups, and ancient secret
> societies that the author repeatedly hints is more fact than fiction.
> Written in breezy/ roman-a-clef/ style, the reader is introduced to
> Catholic orders that really exist, prominent holy sites that can
> readily be visited, and famous people of past and present -- all of
> whom share in what is presented as the greatest theological
> falsification of history.
> "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false,"
> laments one of Brown's characters. "Faith," he has one of his heroes
> tell us, "is based on fabrication."
> Mingling fact with fiction in a combustible mixture that leaves
> readers perplexed by the boundaries between one and the other, Brown
> leads us to believe -- with more than an author's wink -- that an
> incredible hoax has been played on millions of pious Christians who've
> never been told the truth about the Holy Grail.
> For centuries, pious Christians have been taught that the Holy Grail
> is the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper. But for Brown's
> all-knowing art critic and alter-ego Robert Langdon, that isn't true.
> "The Grail," Langdon tells us in a scholarly voice that appears to
> echo the author's personal conviction, "is symbolic of the lost
> goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not
> die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in
> fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine.
> Knights who claimed to be 'searching for the chalice' were speaking in
> code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated
> women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the
> pagan reverence for the sacred feminine." (/The Da Vinci Code/, pages
> 238-239)
> And there is more. A woman's body is symbolically a container, and the
> most famous of these has a name every Christian will immediately
> recognize. Brown claims that the Holy Grail was actually Mary
> Magdalene. She was married to Jesus and was the vessel that bore his
> children.
> The secret that could not be revealed since the birth of Christianity
> is that Jesus' bloodline continues to flourish to this day. The Grand
> Masters of the Priory of Sion (an actual Christian organization),
> among whom Brown lists Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Victor
> Hugo, have -- according to the book's premise -- kept to their oath
> never to reveal any of this to the public and the Roman Catholic
> church is committed to suppressing this information. Brown strongly
> hints that only the fortunate readers of this "documentary disguised
> as fiction" may at last share in this incredible revelation.
> Small wonder the Church is profoundly disturbed. Brown's book is for
> the Vatican blasphemy masquerading as history. If the/ Da Vinci Code/
> premise is true -- and the entire book is replete with suggestions
> that the reader is permitted entree to secret truths merely couched in
> a fictionalized framework -- Rome needs to revise its faith and its
> past, its beliefs as well as the story of its beginnings.
> *Chilling Effects*
> But what strikes me, as a rabbi, is the remarkable irony that the very
> theories about Jesus presented by Brown that make the book blasphemous
> to Christians are concepts that make Jesus far more comprehensible to
> Jews.
> So Jesus was married! Well why shouldn't he have been? Reared as a
> Jew, celibacy would have almost certainly been an idea totally foreign
> to him. "Be fruitful and multiply" was the biblical creed that all
> Jews considered sacred. Celibacy as a Christian ideal wouldn't become
> law until the Council of Elvira (300-306) decreed (Canon 33):/ It is
> decided that marriage be altogether prohibited to bishops, priests,
> and deacons, or to all clerics placed in the ministry, and that they
> keep away from their wives and not beget children; whoever does this,
> shall be deprived of the honor of the clerical office./
> Christian scholars explain the reason: The Church wanted to insure
> that the wealth of its leadership would not be dissipated by way of
> family inheritance. A non-married clergy would always return their
> possessions to Rome.
> Historians have pointed out the chilling effects of this doctrine. The
> "best and the brightest" were invariably encouraged to enter the
> prestigious life of the priesthood. That effectively condemned their
> genes to hereditary oblivion. Jews, on the other hand, turned those
> with the greatest intellectual potential to rabbinic lives of learning
> and teaching combined with an emphasis on large families. That, claims
> Will Durant in his classic/ The Lessons of History/, is what in all
> probability accounts for the statistically unbelievable preponderance
> of Jewish Nobel Prize winners and achievements.
> More troubling for Christians, a married Jesus is far too much a human
> figure instead of a god to be worshipped. Christianity can't conceive
> of their object of divine reverance as a sexual being -- or even as
> one conceived by the sexual act. It is a troublesome relationship with
> physical pleasure that turned Christian teachings away from their
> Jewish biblical source. But Jews have no problem with a married Moses.
> It is the Torah that Moses brought to us that not only commands
> marriage but calls it/ Kiddushin/ -- an ideal state of holiness.
> Here is the crux of a crucial concept that has separated Judaism from
> Christianity throughout the centuries. Jews spared no effort to insure
> that their greatest leader never be confused with God; Moses was
> always to be viewed as human, mortal, less than divine, even capable
> of sin for which he was punished and denied entry into the Promised
> Land. His very burial site was to remain hidden so that it not become
> revered beyond measure. The greatness of Moses rests precisely on his/
> human/ qualities. He represents mankind's potential. In him we see
> what we fellow human beings are capable of becoming.
> Christians, on the other hand, insisted that Jesus be viewed not as
> man but as god; his human form could never be allowed to overshadow
> his divinity. Jesus was not elevated man but a god descended to earth.
> Physical frailties and human weaknesses couldn't possibly be part of
> his makeup.
> And that is what Brown has breached in revealing, albeit in an
> ostensibly fictionalized account, a "human" truth about Christianity's
> founder. A married Jesus with children is, for the Church, nothing
> less than a diminished god.
> That's why Jews shouldn't be upset about the success of/ The Da Vinci
> Code/. After all, it's responsible for making more than 40 million
> people question what Jews have long recognized about Christianity's
> founder: Jesus was not God; he was human.
> And perhaps the day will come when the world will acknowledge what
> Judaism teaches: It isn't God who became man, but man who must strive
> to become more like God.
>
>
> *Author Biography:*
> Rabbi Benjamin Blech is the author of seven highly acclaimed books,
> including Understanding Judaism: The basics of Deed and Creed. He is a
> professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University and the Rabbi Emeritus of
> Young Israel of Oceanside which he served for 37 years and from which
> he retired to pursue his interests in writing and lecturing around the
> globe. He is also the author of "If God is Good, Why is the World So Bad?"