Last year Chang and Halliday mesmerized the western world with their book Mao: The Unknown Story; though within a few months of publication, the book was almost universally condemned by professional historians. Jonathan Spence, of Yale, damned the book as bad history in a contribution to the New York Review of Books; Andrew Nathan, of Columbia, and more anti-communist than Spence, concluded that many of the claims the authors made were based on distorted and far-fetching use of evidence. Stripped of its more shocking bits, The Unknown Story tells little which is not already known and knowable from standard works on Mao. Of which Spence himself has written one. So one must wonder whether the "unknown" of the story comes entirely from an unsubstantiated shock.
The Da Vinci Code makes, in my view, a perfect parallel to The Unknown Story: What can be well substantiated in the book, is already known among serious historians; what cannot be so substantiated, remans entirely the authors' own fancy. The book, and a fortiori the film, improves little upon our historical knowledge, even though it might deserve the credit of bringing the question of the historical formation of Christianity to the limelight. Left to the serious historians, this question would never arouse so much attention, and polemic passion, among the wider public; now given to the likes of JK Rowling, the question has become the talk of the town.
It is understandable, that Christians are infuriated by some of the claims the authors made: but the same Christians would probably not be troubled by the historians' desert cry some years ago, that Mel Gibson had no less abused History. In pretending to present the Gospel account of certain events in the first century of the common era, Gibson neglected, in deliberately good faith no doubt, to remind the spectators that the Gospels did not represent the most accurate historical knowledge we now have of those eventful years. To depict a wonderfully innocent Pilatus, even to the point of being interested in a yet-to-be-born Christian Faith, for instance, is like, on most historians' understanding, to learn the events of the Reformation solely through the seeing eyes of the Roman Pontiff. Gibson would not tell you, how cruel Pilatus was, and how the Gospel writers, living in an environment where any hint of hostility towards Rome would mean persecution, had clearly loaded the blame onto the Jews, an act for which the Jews were to suffer for the next two thousand years.
If The Da Vinci Code has made a joke of the Christian Faith - and in that measure I would certainly counsel the reader not to indulge in that work except perhaps for fun - we are left, upon this cinematic fever, with the question: How the Christian Faith was formed historically. Historical research has uncovered many a beautiful misunderstanding which, for one reason or another, are still propagated among good-intentioned Christians (and non-Christians). It is, for instance, widely believed that the Virgin Birth (not the same thing as the Immaculate Conception, which refers to the theory that Mary was born sinless, with nothing to do with the birth of Jesus) was prophesied in Isaiah, and, as a sign of Jesus's Messiahship, the belief must therefore be defended at all cost. But the Hebrew word used in Isaiah does not, in fact, carry any connotation of virginity; it means only maiden, in the plain sense of a girl. It was the Greek translators who later rendered the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek - which comes to be known as the Septuagint (LXX) - who chose the more specific word "virgin," and it was in reference to this translated version, that the Gospel writers put so much emphasis on the Virgin Birth. If, therefore, one takes the Hebrew original seriously, it simply does not matter whether Mary conceived Jesus in the most natural manner, viz, by intercourse.
This little trivia lost in translation certainly does not quite answer our question, How the Christian Faith was formed historically. But other kinds of trivia might, perhaps, shed a better light. Many Christians have no doubt read the Gospel according to Mark many times over, and many non-Christians have at least heard of it. Mark is believed to be the earliest Gospel, among the Canonical Four. Matthew and Luke are deemed to have derived a great deal from Mark, with additions from some other source which has come to be known by scholars as Q (for Quelle, meaning Source in German). But what is most interesting with Mark, as the earliest Gospel account of the life and death of Jesus, is that in its original version the story ends at the Empty Tomb. No Christophany - appearing of Jesus to the women and the apostles - and no Ascension. It is not until the third century of the common era, that, in light of the later accounts (Paul, Matthew, Luke), a section about Christophany was added. Scholars have long speculated, on this hint, that the earliest version of the life and death of Jesus contained in fact nothing mysterious: Jesus died, body hastily buried in a cave (hastily because Passover was coming), removed equally hastily by somebody (probably the women themselves). If this were true, then the first proclamation of Christophany came actually not from the Gospels, but from Paul, who, we all know, had never been a contemporary of Jesus.
Bits and pieces of this kind abound. And serious historians have tried to put them in better perspective. Over the decades, if not centuries, this kind of work has actually made a lot of progress, to the extent that historians can now largely agree on quite a few propositions concerning the historical Jesus; which, sadly, are not always in accord with the Gospel picture. Gibson knew of all this: A group of serious historians, including figures like Paula Fredriksen, had submitted a joint report on the historical veracity of the picture Gibson meant to put to the spectators; report ignored. Then, leagues of Christians and non-Christians found themselves deeply touched by a film; now, no less will leagues of Christians and non-Christians (probably not the same leagues) be fascinated, or infuriated, by The Da Vinci Code. From The Passion to The Unknown Story to The Code: what the ordinary public needs, in an age of collectivized entertainment and individualized spirituality, is but shock, fun, and sentimentality. History is too heavy for the commoner: Schindler's List is the limit; La Vita e Bella, the preferred option. Even Munich has to lavish so much blood and breast. The age of The Gladiator is, after all, no longer the age of Ben Hur...
Y.T.
May 17, 2006
Cambridge, MA