I know I ought to see The Da Vinci Code movie before I say anything about it, but I don’t want to. I’m not boycotting. I’m just bored.
Let’s face it. Gnosticism, whether of the second-century systematic kind or of the twenty-first century commercial kind, is not just evil but dull too. Dan Brown takes an already absurd conspiracy theology and makes it even dumber and even duller. One wonders whether Irenaeus would have bothered to pen Against Heresies if Dan Brown were the Gnostic guru of his day.
In an article on the Slate magazine website, Christian scholar Larry Hurtado argues that The Da Vinci Code is even more inaccurate than most Christians claim. It’s not just historically inaccurate in its portrayal of orthodox Christianity, Hurtado argues, but it’s also unfair to Gnosticism. Writes Hurtado:
Curiously, The Da Vinci Code presents the so-called Gnostics, who regarded other Christians as lesser beings than they and were in turn treated as heretics, as the heroic defenders of a thoroughly human Jesus. But actually the historic Gnostics and the gospels often linked with their circles did not emphasize Jesus’ human nature at all–quite the opposite. Typically, Gnostic Christians portrayed Christ as a heavenly being who came down to earth to awaken them from their spiritual slumber by disclosing their own divine inner nature. Regarding the physical world as a source of delusion and place of confinement, Gnostics were deeply negative about bodily existence, including their own. So, they tended to treat Jesus’ body as simply the temporary vehicle for his revelatory mission, believing that he discarded it before returning to his heavenly status in the realm of pure light. It was actually the Orthodox Christians who made much of Jesus’ full human nature and the reality of his death as the essential redemptive act.
In Brown’s scheme, the Gnostics are also the suppressed source of the true account of Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene. In reality, the Gnostics’ negativity about the body includes a dim view of procreation and the sexual activity that went with it. Usually in their writings Jesus is the ideal ascetic who models for his followers a disdain for bodily appetites. So, the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene isn’t just antithetical to Orthodox accounts. It goes against the Gnostic grain, too–if anything more so.
All right. Maybe I’ll go see the thing eventually. If I do, I doubt I’ll find picketing Gnostic League members outside the theater. But I do expect that I’ll be bored. Maybe the antidote will be to carry a flashlight to read a really interesting anti-Gnostic bestseller about a really interesting cosmic conspiracy: the Gospel of John.
