The DaVinci Code, Part 2

28 March 2004

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

How deeply has the fearful and suspicious spirit of the times we’re living in invaded our own hearts and minds? The distressed spirit of our times makes its presence felt everywhere.

– Consider the invasion of Iraq, with its hundreds of American deaths and thousands of Iraqi deaths.

– Or the outright deceptions of our government to justify the invasion of Iraq.

– Or the rise of a vicious underbelly of religious fervor, with its hatred of gays and lesbians, its vendetta against women’s rights, its indifference to the poor.

– Or the establishment of an economy so greedy and brutal that this proud nation now boasts the highest percentage of old people in poverty, the highest murder and youth suicide rates in the developed world, with public monies given to the rich at the greatest rate in the past century.

All those troubling and uncivil spirits of our times – how much have they taken possession of our thoughts, our feelings, and our dreams?

Let us pray for the exorcism of these dark spirits from our hearts and minds.

Let us pray for their exorcism from the hearts and minds of those leading our nation.

Let us pray for their exorcism from the spirit of America, even from the face of the earth.

Let us pray for the exorcism of these spirits. Let us pray.

But not only pray.

Amen.

SERMON: The DaVinci Code, Part 2

It has been months since I did the first sermon on Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code. Since then, I’ve read some more in some of the many areas of study involved in the many theories he weaves together. I’ve also read several critiques of his book, mostly by religion scholars trying to protect orthodoxy from this sudden public interest in what Dan Brown presents as twenty centuries of schemes and lies by the churches to keep believers from understanding the real message of the man Jesus.

There is a whole industry around some of these theories, with books of all kinds appearing. The industry began over twenty years ago with the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but there are wild and wooly theories on every aspect of this complex story.

I want to grant the critics their due, and identify some other theories which, though very intriguing, simply cannot be proven either way.

But even after eliminating all these things, including some fascinating theories which may well be true but can’t be proven, enough remains to justify a best-selling book. So I’ll want to talk about those things which are clearly true, are the real center of Brown’s message, and which all by themselves justify the charges of two thousand years of misleading and flat-out dishonest misrepresentation of the religion of the man Jesus.

Theories that can’t be proven

Probably the most colorful of the theories that can’t be proven even though they may be true are those saying that a child of Jesus and Mary Magdalen survived in France where Mary came around the year 44, and that their bloodline continues to this day. A lot has been written about this. The stories are wonderful and intricate. But there is no way ever to prove this. So we’ll set it aside here.

Another colorful story, closely related, is that Mary Magdalen was the wife of Jesus, and the mother of two or three of his children, including the one brought to France. I know the scholar who has championed this theory. She is a world-renowned biblical scholar in her 70s who has read nearly everything there is on the subjects, and I think she is probably right. Still, it can’t be proven, so we’ll let that go too.

Still related is the weaker claim that Jesus and Mary had at least a sexual relationship. This was believed well into the middle ages, and resulted in the Catholic Church slaughtering thousands and thousands of Cathari in the Albigensian Crusades. So the fact of the belief is well established. But again, it seems impossible to prove the truth of the belief.

Then there is the theory of all those secret societies, committed to preserving these secrets through the centuries. These include the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, Freemasons, Rosicrucians and a small slew of others. It includes the theory that Leonardo DaVinci was among the enlightened members of this conspiracy, as were Isaac Newton, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau. DaVinci, this theory says, included coded clues in some of his most famous paintings, including The Last Supper, portraying himself as a non-believer, and picturing Mary to the right of Jesus as that extremely feminine-looking person in the Last Supper, wearing clothing with a complementary color scheme to Jesus’ clothing. Personally, I like a lot of this, and think there is enough information to insist that there is something to it, and that the theory must at least be left on the table for further discussion. But for here, that too can be left aside.

That is most of the major sensational theories in Dan Brown’s book, and I’m willing to let them all go for now, because what is left is really more important, and much easier to prove. These theories include the following:

– That Mary Magdalen was Jesus’ favorite; he ranked her above the other apostles, and trusted her more. Some of the Gnostic Gospels discovered in 1945 show this clearly. The Gospel of Philip says Jesus loved Mary the best, and was often seen kissing her on the mouth. The Gospel of Mary relates a bitter power struggle between Mary and Peter, a power struggle that Peter won. It shows the hatred Peter had for her, indeed for all women, and that the other apostles were clear that Mary understood Jesus’ intended message better than they did, and that he ranked her above them. She was called the Apostle of the Apostles. All of this is well enough documented that I think it has to stand.

– A second is that many or most of the Cathedrals of Notre Dame in France, including the most famous Cathedral at Chartres, were dedicated not to the Virgin Mary, but to Mary Magdalen. This alone is enough to support the claim that Mary was far more important than history has allowed. And its truth seems well established.

– A third, an odd one, is that in many of these cathedrals in Southern France, a cult of Mary Magdalen is mixed, oddly, with cults of the Egyptian goddess Isis and cults of the Black Madonna. I think the theory tying these three together is one of the most fascinating of all, though probably impossible to prove.

– Finally, and most importantly, it is absolutely true and easy to show that the religion of Jesus is diametrically opposed to the religion about Jesus that became Christianity. That alone justifies a best-selling book and a serious and widespread investigation into the teachings of Jesus and the origins of Christianity.

There are still some parts of these theories that are very complicated and vague, especially the odd coincidence of the cults of Mary, Isis and the Black Madonna. But let’s start just with the last point, which is that the religion Jesus taught is diametrically opposed to the religion Peter began as Christianity.

The evidence for this comes directly from Jesus’ teachings in the gospels, and also from many of the Gnostic Gospels. In sayings from some of the other gospels found in 1945, his message is very clearly about as far as you can get from traditional Christian teachings.

Take the Gospel of Thomas, for instance, which is the best known and most highly regarded of the additional gospels. Many scholars believe it was written down in the 50s, about twenty years before the first gospel appeared. In it, Jesus says some very surprising things. For instance, he says, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (Gospel of Thomas #70, translated by Elaine Pagels). As the scholar Elaine Pagels puts it, the Jesus of these texts “speaks of illusion and enlightenment, not of sin and repentance. Instead of coming to save us from sin, he comes as a guide who opens access to spiritual understanding. But when the disciple attains enlightenment, Jesus no longer serves as his spiritual master: the two have become equal – even identical.” (Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels).

Jesus says, for instance, “Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.” (Thomas #108). Jesus’ teachings were about becoming aware and enlightened, and showing it through the way in which we treat others. It wasn’t about belief. He never threatened with hell or promised heaven. He never talked about another world at all, just this one, though those who wrote the gospels added those other supernatural parts in changing the religion of Jesus into the religion about Jesus.

Biblical scholars have known and said for centuries that the religion of Jesus was very different from the religion about Jesus. A Roman Catholic scholar I know wrote all this up in thorough detail back in 1986, in what is still one of the best books on the subject. The book is called The First Coming, by Thomas Sheehan. Thomas taught at DePaul University in Chicago for years, a Catholic university. Now he is at Stanford.

He shows how throughout the gospels, Jesus is complaining that his own disciples don’t get it, don’t understand what he is saying. And none of them seemed duller than Peter. Remember, it was Peter to whom Jesus said, “Get behind me, Satan.” He said it when Peter kept completely misunderstanding Jesus’ teachings. Peter kept wanting to make Jesus a kind of supernatural savior. Peter, you may remember, was a simple fisherman, not a philosopher, and he just didn’t understand.

Peter was also not courageous. He is the one who denied Jesus three times after his arrest, to save his own skin. And in one of Thomas Sheehan’s most memorable lines, he added that “Peter continued his denial of Jesus by inventing Christianity.” That’s a first-rate Roman Catholic scholar, not a religion-hating atheist.

This is really a key part of Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code, that Jesus’ real message has been distorted and hidden by the Church. I think it is true and clear that Jesus preached a religion of self-awareness, of understanding our own direct relationship to God, saying the kingdom of God was within and among us, or that it was “spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.” (Gospel of Thomas, #113) There was no sin or repentance in his teachings, no priests or popes, no sacraments, no creeds, no required beliefs, none of the things that have been used to empower the officials of the churches and set them above ordinary believers. Jesus spoke to ordinary believers and had no mediator in his religion. Christianity has insisted that the priests, the churches and the creeds are the mediators that define people’s relation to God and state of salvation, and that all those things are controlled by, as they were invented by, the churches. Jesus would have detested that.

Another book you can read on this is Elaine Pagels’ newest book. She describes herself as a religion scholar who long ago lost any belief in the religion as it has been taught, and she has devoted her career to showing how the teachings that won, that became Christianity, were victories of politics and power, but not truth.

This was the sub-theme of her monumental 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels. It is also the theme of her newest book Beyond Belief, the account of the political fights to put the Gospel of John into the New Testament canon, and keep the Gospel of Thomas out. The reason is because these two books show a completely different religion. The Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas teaches to empower people, to tell them that the salvation they need is available to any of them, unmediated, as soon as they are ready to do the work of gaining insight into themselves: to bring forth what is within them, which can save them.

The Gospel of John, on the other hand, is completely authoritarian and hierarchical, with Jesus no longer as teacher but as supernatural savior and son of God, whose authority comes only through the one Church. As civil and military leaders throughout history have also found, it fits well with the idea of one king, one ruler, and gives rulers a bible that can easily be used, and has continuously been used, to keep people obedient to their ruler. Even St. Paul taught this religion of obedience, writing that the civil authorities have been placed over people by God. Nothing could be farther from the teachings of the man Jesus. Again, he would have detested them.

These findings are easy to establish, I think, in any open scholarly debate, and they undermine the religion about Jesus taught by the churches for twenty centuries. That’s enough to justify a best seller, and to get millions of people interested in saying No to the nonsense and finding out the truth for themselves.

I want to back way off and ask a very different kind of question about Dan Brown’s book and the interest in the real teachings of Jesus in a few minutes. But first, in order to offer you some of the lascivious titillation I know you came for, I want to tell you about some other theories connecting the odd coincidence that in southern France, the cult of Mary Magdalen overlaps with a cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis and cults of the Black Madonna. I don’t think this can be definitively proven, but I think there may eventually be enough information to make it at least plausible if not likely. At any rate, it is intricate and interesting, and reads like The DaVinci Code.

One criticism of Dan Brown’s book concerns his linking Mary Magdalene with Jesus in southern France, even though the Magdalen cults don’t mention Jesus at all. Instead, they link Mary with John the Baptist. There were religious groups in the first century who regarded John the Baptist as their teacher, and regarded Jesus as the Man of Lies, even accusing Jesus’ people of having John the Baptist murdered.

In fact, the only remaining Gnostic sect today, the Mandeans, still teach these things: that John was the Teacher of Righteousness and Jesus was the Man of Lies, whose people murdered John.

So after John’s murder, this theory goes, Mary then took up with Jesus and had at least a sexual relationship with him, if they weren’t in fact married.

Now the obvious objection to all this is to ask what possible sense it makes to say that Mary would take up with the man who had had her man killed.

Good question, you think. But ah, no, say others, it makes perfect sense. For remember the guiding story of the Isis cult. I’m sure you’re all up on your ancient Egyptian mythology. Isis was married to her brother Osiris. The evil Set murdered Osiris. And Isis later took up a sexual liaison with Set, in order to destroy him. So this, they say, is why Mary, as a priestess in the Isis cult, was also paired with Jesus – and, perhaps, why she was so close to him at his crucifixion.

Oh yes, and some scholars say that Mary Magdalen was also Egyptian, and also black. That she came from the town of Magdala, in Egypt.

This might explain another odd thing about the Magdalen cults in southern France: the fact that these cults seem to overlap not only with Isis cults, but also with cults of the Black Madonna. If Mary Magdalen was a priestess in the Isis cult and a black Egyptian, it would explain the existence of all three religious cults existing together: Mary Magdalen, the Isis priestess, and the Black Madonna were all the same person.

So far, I don’t think these theories can be either proven or disproven. They lie in that area of interesting possibilities to keep you awake at night.

What is still near the center of all these stories is the idea that the goal of spirituality was a union of opposites, a combination of male and female, perhaps symbolized or enacted through a rite of sexual union, which was a common feature of the Isis cults of the time.

The notion of uniting male and female also harmonizes with a saying of Jesus (Thomas 106): “When you make the two into one you will become children of Adam and when you say “Mountain, move from here, it will move.”

There is your dose of titillation.

Now finally, I want to leave you with a quite different question that takes all these stories out of novels, and into current events and our daily lives in the year 2004. In its own way, it’s as intriguing as Dan Brown’s book, though it’s not as complex. The question is a very simple one: Why is this particular fight surfacing so much and so often since 1980? So much that one list of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century listed Elaine Pagels’ 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels as #2? Why would a country like the United States, especially since 1980, want a close tie to a religion of obedience like the repressive versions of Christianity that came into office with the Bush administration?

Perhaps it’s because a religion of empowerment like the religion of Jesus may be the spiritual voice most desperately needed now as a corrective to the spirit of our times, the strident religious voices that want to disempower women, gays and lesbians, and a government declaring unending war, removing civil liberties, and working to turn America into a country of desperate, poor and obedient serfs rather than an educated and empowered citizenry.

It’s just a thought. I could be wrong.