Some important Lenten questions:

What is the Triodion? This is a period of time in the Church including the four pre-Lenten Sundays of preparation for Lent, Great Lent and Holy Week.

How long is Great Lent? It is 40-days from Clean Monday (February 19 this year) to the Saturday of Lazarus, before Palm Sunday. This Saturday, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week are NOT technically a part of Great Lent. Nevertheless, our fast continues through these days, with a partial relaxation on Lazarus Saturday and Palm Sunday, picking up in its strictness on Palm Sunday Night through Holy Week to Pascha.

Why do we fast? We humans are psychosomatic. We have a soul and a body. The true fast is psychic – a spiritual or soul fast from sin. The psychology of the Church teaches us that to get to this spiritual fast, we must go through our body. Thus, we fast from food to help us in our self-discipline. If we can say no to simpler things, such as food, it helps us to say no to more difficult things such as gossip and judging others. Fasting also helps us to redirect our focus on God. When I’m hungry, I am in need. I recognize that I am not self-sufficient. I need basic food to live. Basic food is from God. Another element of fasting is doing without for ourselves, so we can help others. Charity or almsgiving then is a direct result of saving money spent on food or things for ourselves, and re-directing that money to help others in need.

How do we fast? The ultimate fast is a fast from sin. This is the goal of fasting. The prescribed Lenten food fast helping us to that goal begins on Meatfare Sunday, eight days before Great Lent with a fast from meat and begins on Clean Monday with a fast through Holy Saturday, from meat, fish, dairy products, oil and wine – with some exceptions: a lessening of the fast on weekends (oil is permitted); and on the Annunciation and Palm Sunday (fish, wine and oil permitted). There are variations to this fast for a variety of reasons including health, age, children, travel and living in a non-Orthodox country. For variation questions, speak with one of our clergy. But remember, it is better to eat meat than to devour your brother or sister.

What about prayer? Prayer is one main way of communicating with God. We praise God, we thank God, we ask for help for others and ourself. WE ask for forgiveness, for guidance, for strength. Great Lent is a time for heightened prayer life – both personal and corporate. Weekly throughout Lent we have Compline Services on Mondays, Pre-Sanctified Liturgies on Wednesdays and Salutation Services on Fridays. Additionally, we are challenged to be more regular and focused in our personal daily prayer life. The Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian sets the tone for our personal prayer approach to our Lord. Also, the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me a sinner,” is a formula for constant prayer.
What about almsgiving or charity? This is essential in helping us to turn to God directly and indirectly, by helping the “least of his brothers and sisters.” As was mentioned in “Why do we Fast?” turning to God involves turning away from ourselves, re-directing our attention to helping others. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving or charity are the three legs of the Lenten table.

What about Confession? Confession, or more appropriately, the Sacrament of Repentance, is simply knowing ourselves, recognizing the ways we miss the mark, acknowledging them and attempting to change. We can do this on our own, which can be helpful. Sacramentally, when we do this with a confessor, “two or more are gathered in Christ’s name” and the Grace of God is imparted in a healing and strengthening manner. Confession times are listed on the calendar. Take advantage of this healing sacrament utilizing honesty and humility as a garment of re-baptism and re-generation of our life in Christ.

May Great Lent be a time of re-focus in our life – away from ourselves and to God.
May we “die”
More to the un-Godly aspects of our life, in Christ’s death and live anew in His Glorious and life-giving
Resurrection.

Fr. Lou Christopulos

The Lenten Prayer of St. Ephraim (said daily in Great Lent)

Lord and Master of my life, deliver me from the spirit of laziness, despondency, desire for power over others, and useless talk. (Prostration) Give rather to me your servant, a spirit of purity, humility, patience and love. (Prostration) Yes Lord and King, allow me to see my own sins and faults and not to judge others. For you are blessed forever and to the age of ages. Amen. (Prostration)

St. John Chrysostom on Fasting

Do you fast? Give me proof of it by your works. If you see a poor man, take pity on him. If you see a friend being honored, do not envy him. Do not let only your mouth fast, but also the eyes and the ears and the feet and the hands and all the members of our bodies. Let the hands fast, by being free of avarice. Let the feet fast by ceasing to run after sin. Let the eyes fast, by disciplining them not to glare at that which is sinful. Let the ears fast, by not listening to evil talk and gossip. Let the mouth fast from foul words and unjust criticism. For what is it if we abstain from birds and fishes, but bite and devour our brothers? May He who came to the world to save sinners strengthen us to complete the fast with humility, have mercy on us and save us.

Sometimes when I sit down to write an article I can’t help but connect it to my life. When I was a child I was fortunate to have all of my grandparents. My Dad’s Dad, my Papou Sam was still alive. He was an interesting man, self-made by American standards, and an illegal alien who lived in the U.S. under a false name. He married, opened a business, and had kids all without a formal education. He loved his adopted country, America, and when Christmas came around he liked to remind each of us, that in America it was Christmas everyday.

Of course his perspective was in this regard, educated. He had come from a poor village, where one’s daily meal was far from certain. He had lived in poverty, and in America he had found the Promised Land.

I have thought a lot about him and his favorite saying these last few weeks. And I hope you will excuse me when I borrow his phrase and apply it in a different manner.

Before I do that, however, I had to ask myself, what made my Grandfather’s statement true? The answer I came up with is pretty simple. America to him was a land of plenty. It was an extraordinary country in many ways. He experienced freedoms that were rare in his part of the world, he lived at a level that would have been considered extravagant to those in his home village, and he found out that through hard work he could transform his life. Now, I know that none of the statements I just made were absolute and true for everyone who has come to America. Yet for my Grandfather who had lived through a famine, and experienced hunger, America was truly an amazing place and Christmas came everyday.

Christmas represented many things for my Grandfather. And for us Christmas is a word that also brings to mind many things. In fact when I say, that in America Christmas is everyday, I would bet that most of you have an idea of what I mean. You immediately understand that what I am saying is that living in America is a gift in itself, it is a place where the most average among us lives like a King. Where luxuries like a car, a telephone, a computer, or an extra pair of shoes are considered commonplace, and we are literally swimming in material wealth.

Nevertheless, extolling and praising the attributes of America is not the purpose of my article. What I hope to instill in you is a similar appreciation for a similar statement. The way I would change my Grandfather’s saying is pretty simple, I’d say, Christmas comes everyday in the Church. As my Grandfather left his native country and traveled abroad, he literally went from darkness to light, from hunger to satisfaction, from without to plenty. His world was transformed, and his life made a one hundred and eighty degree turn, where sorrow turned into rejoicing, and life which had been a battle for survival, became a joy.

These same truths, these same realities are found in Christ’s coming to earth, His nativity. Even our Church architecture speaks of this joy, this story for the ages. Our Sanctuary depicts the nativity vividly. We see Christ our Creator depicted for us in the dome of our Church, our Lord sitting high above us in the heavens surveying the earth below with His all-seeing eye, but the story does not end there. No, we see Christ sitting in the lap of His mother Mary, on the apse behind the altar. This reminds us that through Mary Christ enters His creation as one of us, but the story does not end there. Still the story continues, for we see Christ standing alongside His creatures, and on our icon stand Christ is shown shoulder to shoulder with His saints, but the story does not end there. If we are attentive we know that the story still continues to this day. For we receive our Risen Lord every time we approach for Communion, our Lord continues to be with us and in us, Emmanuel. We receive Him into our hearts each time we receive Holy Communion and the story still does not end, because after receiving Christ we share His life and love with the world, we become our own Nativity.

Christ’s coming to the world, His bending of the heavens, has transformed reality. Like America, the Church is a gift where darkness is now light, sorrow is now joy, emptiness is fullness, we are transformed, our lives can do a one eighty, hope abounds, joy is possible, love is victorious, and death is life.

Christmas is everyday in the Church, this fact is inescapable.

Unfortunately, it is not forgettable. Just this week I forgot that Christmas was everyday. I became overwhelmed by my work, my responsibilities, and my problems. I caved inwards, and lost my perspective. I saw things negatively, and I became troubled. What is worse is that I live at times untransformed, being transfixed by my shortcomings and stuck in my tendency to sin. I forget joy, hope, and even love. Today I am reminded that Christmas is everyday. Christmas is today, Christ is born and Him I glorify!

Funny, but Christmas will be forgotten on December 26. We will take down our trees, take out the trash, and stand in line to return the sweater that does not fit, and the presents we do not like. We will forget Christmas, and we will look to the New Year, and the making of resolutions. But these too we will soon forget, and we will press on towards Valentine’s Day, etcetera.

Yet, shouldn’t we remember Christmas today and tomorrow and the next day, and the day after that, because Christmas is everyday for us Christians. I hope the joy of Christmas stays with me, and I pray it stays with you, let’s try.

God Bless you all, Merry Christmas, Christ is Born, Glorify Him!

Obviously, the Orthodox Church opposes such a position 100%. Certainly, we can find direct scriptural evidence for baptism in the Bible (see Matthew 28.19, John 3.5, Mark 1.9, Acts 8.36, and Acts 9.18). In fact, the very word baptism comes from the Greek verb, baptizo, which means to immerse, it would appear that the Baptist have forgotten the origin of their own name! Yet, the decision of Henderson Hills raises the broader question of whether or not all Christians are the same. To put this question a different way we can ask; do all Christians believe the same thing and therefore worship the same God?

It is not unusual for Christians of various denominations to reach the conclusion that ultimately we all believe the same things. However, when you survey the wide range of differences between Christians you quickly realize we don’t share the same faith. For example, some believe baptism is unnecessary while others think you can’t do without it. Some say that once you have been saved you can never lose your spot in heaven and other Christians caution that your salvation is in question up to your last moment on earth. Certain Christians dismiss any and all sacraments including the Eucharist, while others believe it to be the real Body and Blood of Christ. Of course, the list goes on. . .

Such a situation is not new to the Church. From the beginning there have been differences in teaching between people claiming to follow Christ. The great Apostle Paul struggled with this very problem and wrote to two communities urging them to stay faithful to the one true Gospel, see 2 Corinthians 11:4, and Galatians 1:6. For St. Paul there were not many Gospels but one.

It appears as if we have not moved very far from this ancient problem. So what should we do? Obviously, the Church reacted against the heresies of old by defining what was and was not appropriate teaching and dogma. For example, the Church defended the person of Jesus Christ claiming that he was truly God and man against the heretical claims of various first century groups. Later, the Church would develop creeds that gave the faithful a laundry list of what was acceptable to believe. Our situation today has not changed. Churches continue to emerge seemingly out of nowhere to preach new and different gospels. These gospels turn out to be very different from the one that we have received and if we are not careful we too will be carried away and forsake the true Gospel of Jesus Christ. St. Paul cautioned Christians against such a drift from true faith when he wrote in Hebrews 13.8-9a, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings.”

Against all of this we can resolve to follow the advice of St. Vincent of Lérins who lived in what is now France. He came up with a formula that was very useful in determining whether or not something was true to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He said that any teaching by Christians must meet three criteria: universality, antiquity, and consent. Or in other words, it would have to be believed everywhere in the world, not just in one geographic area; it would have to have been believed from the beginning, not just in the past two hundred years; and it would have to be believed by everyone, not just one group. Obviously, Henderson Hills’ new teaching on baptism doesn’t appear to meet even one of these criteria.

It is time for each of us to be sober minded and serious about our faith and careful in what we profess. St. Peter wrote, “always be prepared to make a defense to any one who calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and reverence,” (1 Peter 3:15b). We need to be sure of what we believe and careful that we are following the true Gospel of Jesus Christ and not another. It is important that we search out the true teachings of the faith and that we live according to the soul saving message of the Church. Remember the words of St. Paul, “O Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you. Avoid the godless chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have missed the mark as regards the faith (1Timothy 6.21-22).” My brothers and sisters in Christ we do not wage war against phantoms of the air therefore be vigilant and stand fast in the faith, for your very soul depends upon it.

“Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons,” 1 Timothy 4.1

When I first arrived at the Seminary, I was quite lost and to be honest uneducated about my faith. I remember my first trip to the school’s chapel, how I arrived in shorts and flip flops, for a service about which I knew nothing: Vespers. I registered for classes that made no sense to me: Liturgics, Dogmatics, and Patristics. I also encountered names for the first time that were new, unusual, and unknown to me. One name was Cleopas, I had never heard the name before and I was uncertain of its origin.

Fr. Cleopas was the Registrar at the school, and so he was one of the first priests I met at Holy Cross. He was a beautiful man, kind, educated, and a bit young, his beard had no grey. He was from Greece, but he had studied for his doctorate in America, and so his English was perfect. In time, I got to know him fairly well, and on one afternoon while visiting his office, I asked him where he got his name.

Cleopas was not his name from birth. Father was a monk and when he had been tonsured, his name was changed, and the name he received was Cleopas. Picking a name is an important task; it can say so much about what we value. Father Cleopas had been disappointed when the bishop who had tonsured him changed his name to Cleopas. He had hoped for something “better.” He had hoped for a name people would easily recognize like Matthew or John. Or perhaps a name that could easily be associated with an event in the life of the church like Evangelos or Anastasios.

He told me how his disappointment grew and that he often thought of having a different name. He felt that Cleopas, the actual man, was obscure at best and his role in the life of the church unimportant. Finally, he expressed his disappointment to his spiritual father who was surprised to hear of Fr. Cleopas’ feelings about his name. His spiritual father wondered how Fr. Cleopas could feel this way about his name. Not only was Cleopas a recognizable figure in the New Testament, but his actions brought to mind an important event in the life of the church. Cleopas after all was an important name, an important person, why he was one of the first to see the Risen Lord!

How silly I felt when Fr. Cleopas began to relate the story about his namesake found in the Gospel of St. Luke, Luke 24.13-35. I had never heard of Cleopas, and the story was unfamiliar to me. Cleopas was one of the first to see the Risen Lord. On Sunday, the day Christ had risen from the tomb, Cleopas and another disciple were journeying from Jerusalem to Emmaus a small village a day’s walk from the city. During their journey Christ joined them and he opened Cleopas’ heart and interpreted all of the scriptures related to Himself. He explained to Cleopas and his companion why it was that the Christ had to suffer and die. Towards evening when they drew near to the village of Emmaus, Christ entered the inn they were staying at, and took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them. Up to that moment Cleopas and the other disciple had not recognized that it had been Christ Himself who had spent the day with them. However, the scriptures tell us that the second they received the blessed bread from Christ’s hands, “. . .their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” They immediately left Emmaus and journeyed back to Jerusalem finding the eleven disciples, “. . .they told [them] what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

So the other day when I read in the Church’s list of Saints to be commemorated the name Cleopas, I stopped, thought, and prayed. It was powerful to bring to mind this great Saint, a man who walked with the Risen Christ and had been counted as one of the 70 apostles of Christ. He had proclaimed to the eleven disciples that the Lord was indeed Risen and how He was known in the breaking of the bread. He had been one of the first to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, on Sunday. This mystical event, this mystical supper we still participate in every Sunday and our Risen Lord is still known to each of us in the breaking of the bread. We are fortunate to inherit a faith that does not forget those who have walked before us in Christ. Their lives serve as examples for each of us and their prayers along with ours are still offered up to Christ.

St. Cleopas, Apostle, One of the 70, Feast Day, October 30

Given the number of problems contained in the work it would seem logical therefore to see if there might be a way to answer all of the questions this book raised by discussing one facet of the author’s book. Specifically, behind everything in The Da Vinci Code is the basic premise that what the Church and its leadership has proclaimed and taught about Jesus is not true or only part of the truth. The Da Vinci Code argues that the Church has deliberately or otherwise lied in its teaching about Jesus by falsifying certain documents, like the Gospels, and omitting certain pertinent material contained in other accounts about Jesus’ life. Such a statement raises the basic question of whether or not the Church has corrupted the message and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

In this first article we will examine a couple of scriptural passages that question such a claim. The first passage comes from the Epistle of Jude, in its only chapter we read in verse 3, “Beloved, being very eager to write to you of our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” In this passage we find a very specific and important point. Namely, that the faith (that is the Christian faith with all of its traditions and teachings) was once and for all delivered intact/whole to the Church. This means that what the Church teaches today about Christ is the same thing it taught 2000 years ago.

Saint Paul puts it another way in Hebrews when he writes in 13.7-8, “Remember your leaders those who spoke to you the word of God; consider the outcome of their life, and imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever.“ In these two short verses the Apostle Paul asks the faithful to look to their leaders, to those who have been entrusted by the Church to teach the truth and to imitate their faith in Christ. Also embedded in these short two verses is a promise. Saint Paul appeals to those searching to know Christ to consider the lives of the leaders of the Church. That is the numerous Saints and pious men and women who perfected their faith in the Church. By searching the outcome of their lives we see how the teachings of the Church concerning Jesus Christ have changed them and better yet saved them, rich learned to serve the poor, murderers repented, drunks reformed their lives, etc. We see how the Church has brought them to the knowledge of the truth and gained them entrance into the Kingdom of God.

In the Scriptures we also learn how immediately after Jesus was resurrected he spent forty days with his disciples strengthening their faith and instructing them about the Kingdom of God, “To them [the apostles] he [Jesus] presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God (Acts 1.3).” After doing so, Jesus ascended into the heavens to be seated at the right hand of God the Father. Immediately after this the Apostles went into the streets of Jerusalem to proclaim that Jesus Christ, the man born in Bethlehem was God. It is a silly thing to ascribe, as The Da Vinci Code does, such a teaching to the 3rd century. Rather, Jesus called himself God and his Apostles likewise lost their lives defending His claim.

One last passage of scripture is important to our preliminary discussion regarding this book and it comes from the book of Acts. In the eighth chapter we read of Philip being sent by command of the Lord from Jerusalem to Gaza by foot. While on his journey he encounters an Ethiopian in a chariot reading a prophecy of Isaiah from the Old Testament. Overhearing him Philip approaches the Ethiopian and asks him if he understands the prophecy he is reading. The man replies, ‘how can I, unless someone guides me?” He then invites Philip into his chariot and Philip begins to instruct him, “Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus.” In this passage the Church recognizes an important principle. Instruction and guidance for the people in the faith and the proper interpretation of the Bible is the responsibility of those who have been entrusted by the Church to do so, i.e. Saints, Bishops, Priests, Monks, and Teachers. Moreover, those seeking to know Jesus Christ and what is known about Him must seek this knowledge from the Church. Thus the authority to preach and teach on Christ is not found in the individual or the odd fictional book but in the Church and again in its Saints, Bishops, Priests, Monks, Nuns, Teachers, and Evangelists. When teachings about Christ and speculation about Who He is and what He did are divorced from the authority and guidance of the Church all manner of heresies (false teachings) arise. To put it another way, separating Christ and separating teachings about Christ from the Church is impossible, to do so shows a complete lack of understanding of Who Christ is and what the Church is. The Bible tells us in 1 Colossians chapter 1 verse 18 that, “[Christ] is the head of the body, the Church.” We also learn from scripture that each of us, once baptized become, “. . .members of his body,” (Ephesians 5.30). This same point is made in 1 Corinthians 6.15, when the Apostle Paul writes, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” The Church, therefore, is Christ; He is its body, and each one of us are members of that body, the one body of Jesus Christ. Again, we can look to scripture for this exact definition, which can be found in 1 Corinthians 12.27, St. Paul writes, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” Thus to teach and promote teachings about Christ outside of His Body, the Church, makes no sense, for Christ can be discovered only within His Church, and to attempt to describe Jesus outside of His Church can only lead to false teachings about Him and not vice versa.

Part II

(This is the second part of a three part series examining the best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code. In the first article we looked at some of the scriptural claims of the Church and in this article we will examine a portion of Church history).

In looking at the number of questions raised in this book, we must admit that it does not help when churches and church leaders (here I mean the leaders of various Christian denominations) across the globe have been discredited by public scandals of child molestation and financial misappropriations. All of this, along with the steady march of secularism and the results of the Enlightenment have placed the authority of the Church into serious question. In addition, the Orthodox Church in particular is further hampered by the historical realities of time. Having rejected much of the theological direction Western Christianity has taken in the past 1000 years, and having been absent from much of the historical developments the West faced, we view the discussion of certain issues from an almost fundamentally different location. That is to say, that many of the questions raised in this book and many of the theological definitions that are questioned are foreign to us.

Moreover, often the West is asking the wrong questions and therefore no matter how well thought out the answer is, the premise is flawed from the beginning and so the answer cannot shed any light or speak the truth of revelation. For example, in The Da Vinci Code the main focus is on whether or not a cover up has occurred with regards to Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene. In the West such a discussion has captivated many for a long period of time. This book is only a recent manifestation of a long-held opinion. What this belief and the discussion surrounding it displays, is a deep and rather troublesome fact: people are no longer acquainted with the teachings of the Church, its message concerning Jesus Christ, and how this message came to be.

To begin to answer this question and others let us set aside the witness of the Church and of her millions of Saints, and pious believers through the centuries, and focus just on the scholastic world and the work of historians. When we do so we see that the majority of modern scholarship holds such a view of Christ, that he was married to Mary Magdalene, and other non-traditional teachings about Jesus, in a very low opinion. These are ideas that exist on the fringe of scholarship and they are ideas that are very hard to prove. Scholars admit that the best evidence we have concerning Jesus Christ comes to us from the canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Alternative views on the person of Christ such as those contained in this book, or in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, come later in the historical record, after the Canonical Gospels were written, and were not held by a majority of the faithful.

Further, the claim that the Church suppressed and destroyed “secret” and various other documents in the first centuries as the book argues is difficult to prove. Yet, such a claim looks at the question from the wrong perspective. The Church was not and is not interested in promoting anything false, even if doing so, as is argued in this book, would present a more unified set of theological ideas. Such a claim is preposterous the belief in the Trinity (one God in essence but three in Persons), promoted by the Church, is and was a cross for human thought. Rather, Her mission has been to proclaim the truth about Jesus Christ as it received it, regardless of how difficult or confusing the facts are. If documents and teachings existed that were “more correct” than the Gospels why were they not preserved or promoted? Men and women, however, died by the thousands and some say the millions in the first few centuries promoting a faith that was considered dangerous and criminal. Such people were only willing to die for a faith they thought was the truth. More to the point, if they were willing to die for what they believed, if they were willing to forsake everything for their faith, would they not also have been willing to die for the “so-called” secret and missing scriptures that contained their faith’s complete teachings?

When the most powerful institution on earth the Roman Empire could not destroy the faith of these poor and politically weak believers how or why would their successors, now free to worship without persecution, change their beliefs? Why would Christians of later centuries destroy the earlier testimony of Christ’s teachings? Why would Christians who had learned to honor the martyrs of the first centuries through elaborate feast-days and commemorations, desecrate their memory by throwing out their witness to Christ? Especially when Christianity had become legal and the previously persecuted Christians were now in places of power? Rather, it seems that a rather old myth has gained a new voice. Namely, that the Emperor Constantine and his court and his “institutionalizing” of the Christian faith corrupted the true faith and destroyed its purity.

In addition, the debate surrounding the suppression and destruction of earlier documents and teachings about Jesus Christ returns us to a question we considered earlier in this series: the place and role of Holy Scripture and the Church. This issue can be framed by the time old question, what came first the Chicken or the Egg? Today many Christians argue that Scripture came first. This stance, however, is impossible to defend. The clearest historical documents tell us that the Bible as we know it and specifically the New Testament did not reach its current form until the 4th century. This means that for over 200 years believers did without what we would call the Bible. In fact the Apostle Paul when writing to his disciple Timothy in 2 Timothy 3.15-17, refers to the Holy Scriptures and in doing so is referencing only the Old Testament. Thus in matters of faith and in teaching the people of God had to look to the Church, and the Church alone for direction. The Church was entrusted with preserving the authentic witness to Jesus Christ. Christ himself did not write a book but rather he established a community that bore His name.

We must also point out that the New Testament was not written in its entirety and its compilation would take a couple hundred years. Rather the faith was kept and taught as we have stated earlier by a community, the Church. The Church was responsible for teaching people about Jesus Christ, about Who He was and what He did. In fact, the reason an approved list of what could be classified as scripture was finally made had to do with the fact that so many dubious and questionable writings had begun to circulate. Writings and teachings that did not match up with the original witness of the Church, writings that this book and others claim provide a more complete and authoritative view than the canonical Gospels. Therefore, in order to protect the truth the Church classified certain books, of which she was certain of their authorship and correctness of teaching, as canonical. The others she called proto-canonical and deutero-canonical. What is interesting to note is that these other books, such as the Gospel of Thomas were not classified outright as heresy but rather they were excluded from the approved list of canonical sources. This meant that in matters of faith they were of second importance. The Saints of the Church decided that they were pious writings that believers could read but they could not supplant or contradict those writings that had been given primary importance, specifically, what we call the current canon of the New Testament. It is interesting that the ancient Church faced the same question that this book brings to the forefront: should the Canonical Scriptures hold first place or should other writings be of more importance? More so, they also answer the question of whether one could place writings, the canonical and the non-canonical, side-by-side. The Church answered these questions in the negative, only the canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John could be viewed as primary and the others could not.

When we consider the above what emerges is not a picture of a Church bent on destroying and wiping out the “real” story of Jesus in favor of a more politically powerful and unifying one, another argument found in The Da Vinci Code, but rather a community of faithful who carefully guarded and protected the truth. Think of the realities of history if this faith was to be such a powerful tool for uniting the Roman Empire why did the hierarchy and religious leadership of the Church find itself at odds with the Imperial Court time and time again, after the legalization of Christianity. The history of the Church is full of examples of Church opposition to Imperial decree. It is true that the Imperial throne did at times act to preserve the unity of the Church but the teachings of the Church were never subject to imperial decree. Rather, the faith was defended by the faithful against the incorrect teachings of heretics.

Part III

(This is the last article of a three part series on The Da Vinci Code).

Probably the most interesting question raised in The Da Vinci Code is whether or not Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene. This question has certainly captivated many of us and influenced the way we now view Jesus’ life and ministry. However, when we look at this question of Jesus marrying from a purely theological point of view a rather persuasive response presents itself. The short argument against such a notion goes something like this, the Church has taught and affirmed through the centuries that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine. This led to the Church’s dogmatic formulation, “Jesus Christ is perfect man and perfect God.” As perfect God and perfect man, Jesus Christ lived in a perfect communion of love and union with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. To a theologian then to discuss the marriage of Jesus is almost preposterous or at the very least irrelevant. Yet, to explain what we mean to the average layperson we will have to develop further what the Church’s teaching is about the person of Jesus Christ.

First as we mentioned above Jesus was both God and the complete and perfect human being. This teaching implies that Jesus existed in complete communion with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. Unlike Jesus Christ we are only human, however, we each bear the image and to some degree the likeness of God. Our faith goes on to teach us that this image of God can never be taken away no matter how we live or what we do in life. On the other hand, the likeness we have to God is to some degree attained only through the way we live our lives. A primary aspect of the likeness is the perfect communion and union of love that Christ experienced. For us this means that as we become more human, more Christ like, we naturally enter into and create relationships of love and communion that mirror Christ’s communion of love and union with His Father and the Holy Spirit. For Christ this reality, this striving to live in the likeness of God, was accomplished. He knew love perfectly and lived this love in His life. For us it is a daily process of growth and work to perfect the likeness of God in us.

Now, in marriage we attempt to imitate God’s perfect love of communion by yoking ourselves to a spouse. We attempt, through marriage to begin to understand God’s unselfish (agapitic) love. We experience how real love is self-emptying and never self-serving, and this experience brings us into a closer proximity of the likeness of God. Once again for Christ this was an already accomplished reality. He therefore did not need to seek out human companionship to complete Himself or to better understand the fact that God is love. Being God He had already experienced that truth and the image and more importantly the likeness of His humanity were already perfected.

Christ’s earthly mission was the natural outpouring of the love He had as God for His creation and of His desire that His creation understand and share this love. We must ask then why would Christ marry? What purpose would Christ’s earthly marriage serve? We see how a misunderstanding or an ignorance of the teachings of the Church can lead to the wrong question and a search for the wrong answer.

In closing, what is sad about the whole phenomenon surrounding this novel is how readily people have read this book but how hard it is to get them to apply themselves to the reading of Scripture. One person was so bold as to say to me that they were not much inclined to read Scripture and so they turned to The Da Vinci Code for a more simpler and truer rendering of the life of Christ! In opposition to such a sentiment I encourage each of you to take a more considered approach to your spiritual formation. Set aside time to read Scripture and to learn the teachings of our Faith. Take the time to clarify what it is that our Holy Tradition teaches and investigate the teachings our Faith professes. To do so is to find one’s salvation.

The Holy Grail is a favorite metaphor for a desirable but difficult-to-attain goal, from the map of the human genome to Lord Stanley’s Cup. While the original Grail—the cup Jesus allegedly used at the Last Supper—normally inhabits the pages of Arthurian romance, Dan Brown’s recent mega–best-seller, The Da Vinci Code, rips it away to the realm of esoteric history.

But his book is more than just the story of a quest for the Grail—he wholly reinterprets the Grail legend. In doing so, Brown inverts the insight that a woman’s body is symbolically a container and makes a container symbolically a woman’s body. And that container has a name every Christian will recognize, for Brown claims that the Holy Grail was actually Mary Magdalene. She was the vessel that held the blood of Jesus Christ in her womb while bearing his children.

Over the centuries, the Grail-keepers have been guarding the true (and continuing) bloodline of Christ and the relics of the Magdalen, not a material vessel. Therefore Brown claims that “the quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene,” a conclusion that would surely have surprised Sir Galahad and the other Grail knights who thought they were searching for the Chalice of the Last Supper.

The Da Vinci Code opens with the grisly murder of the Louvre’s curator inside the museum. The crime enmeshes hero Robert Langdon, a tweedy professor of symbolism from Harvard, and the victim’s granddaughter, burgundy-haired cryptologist Sophie Nevue. Together with crippled millionaire historian Leigh Teabing, they flee Paris for London one step ahead of the police and a mad albino Opus Dei “monk” named Silas who will stop at nothing to prevent them from finding the “Grail.”

But despite the frenetic pacing, at no point is action allowed to interfere with a good lecture. Before the story comes full circle back to the Louvre, readers face a barrage of codes, puzzles, mysteries, and conspiracies.

With his twice-stated principle, “Everybody loves a conspiracy,” Brown is reminiscent of the famous author who crafted her product by studying the features of ten earlier best-sellers. It would be too easy to criticize him for characters thin as plastic wrap, undistinguished prose, and improbable action. But Brown isn’t so much writing badly as writing in a particular way best calculated to attract a female audience. (Women, after all, buy most of the nation’s books.) He has married a thriller plot to a romance-novel technique. Notice how each character is an extreme type…effortlessly brilliant, smarmy, sinister, or psychotic as needed, moving against luxurious but curiously flat backdrops. Avoiding gore and bedroom gymnastics, he shows only one brief kiss and a sexual ritual performed by a married couple. The risqué allusions are fleeting although the text lingers over some bloody Opus Dei mortifications. In short, Brown has fabricated a novel perfect for a ladies’ book club.

Brown’s lack of seriousness shows in the games he plays with his character names—Robert Langdon, “bright fame long don” (distinguished and virile); Sophie Nevue, “wisdom New Eve”; the irascible taurine detective Bezu Fache, “zebu anger.” The servant who leads the police to them is Legaludec, “legal duce.” The murdered curator takes his surname, Saunière, from a real Catholic priest whose occult antics sparked interest in the Grail secret. As an inside joke, Brown even writes in his real-life editor (Faukman is Kaufman).

While his extensive use of fictional formulas may be the secret to Brown’s stardom, his anti-Christian message can’t have hurt him in publishing circles: The Da Vinci Code debuted atop the New York Times best-seller list. By manipulating his audience through the conventions of romance-writing, Brown invites readers to identify with his smart, glamorous characters who’ve seen through the impostures of the clerics who hide the “truth” about Jesus and his wife. Blasphemy is delivered in a soft voice with a knowing chuckle: “[E]very faith in the world is based on fabrication.”

But even Brown has his limits. To dodge charges of outright bigotry, he includes a climactic twist in the story that absolves the Church of assassination. And although he presents Christianity as a false root and branch, he’s willing to tolerate it for its charitable works.

(Of course, Catholic Christianity will become even more tolerable once the new liberal pope elected in Brown’s previous Langdon novel, Angels & Demons, abandons outmoded teachings. “Third-century laws cannot be applied to the modern followers of Christ,” says one of the book’s progressive cardinals.)

Where Is He Getting All of This?

Brown actually cites his principal sources within the text of his novel. One is a specimen of academic feminist scholarship: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels. The others are popular esoteric histories: The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince; Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln; The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine and The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, both by Margaret Starbird. (Starbird, a self-identified Catholic, has her books published by Matthew Fox’s outfit, Bear & Co.) Another influence, at least at second remove, is The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara G. Walker.

The use of such unreliable sources belies Brown’s pretensions to intellectuality. But the act has apparently fooled at least some of his readers—the New York Daily News book reviewer trumpeted, “His research is impeccable.”

But despite Brown’s scholarly airs, a writer who thinks the Merovingians founded Paris and forgets that the popes once lived in Avignon is hardly a model researcher. And for him to state that the Church burned five million women as witches shows a willful—and malicious—ignorance of the historical record. The latest figures for deaths during the European witch craze are between 30,000 to 50,000 victims. Not all were executed by the Church, not all were women, and not all were burned. Brown’s claim that educated women, priestesses, and midwives were singled out by witch-hunters is not only false, it betrays his goddess-friendly sources.

A Multitude of Errors

So error-laden is The Da Vinci Code that the educated reader actually applauds those rare occasions where Brown stumbles (despite himself) into the truth. A few examples of his “impeccable” research: He claims that the motions of the planet Venus trace a pentacle (the so-called Ishtar pentagram) symbolizing the goddess. But it isn’t a perfect figure and has nothing to do with the length of the Olympiad. The ancient Olympic games were celebrated in honor of Zeus Olympias, not Aphrodite, and occurred every four years.

Brown’s contention that the five linked rings of the modern Olympic Games are a secret tribute to the goddess is also wrong—each set of games was supposed to add a ring to the design but the organizers stopped at five. And his efforts to read goddess propaganda into art, literature, and even Disney cartoons are simply ridiculous.

No datum is too dubious for inclusion, and reality falls quickly by the wayside. For instance, the Opus Dei bishop encourages his albino assassin by telling him that Noah was also an albino (a notion drawn from the non-canonical 1 Enoch 106:2). Yet albinism somehow fails to interfere with the man’s eyesight as it physiologically would.

But a far more important example is Brown’s treatment of Gothic architecture as a style full of goddess-worshipping symbols and coded messages to confound the uninitiated. Building on Barbara Walker’s claim that “like a pagan temple, the Gothic cathedral represented the body of the Goddess,” The Templar Revelation asserts: “Sexual symbolism is found in the great Gothic cathedrals which were masterminded by the Knights Templar…both of which represent intimate female anatomy: the arch, which draws the worshipper into the body of Mother Church, evokes the vulva.” In The Da Vinci Code, these sentiments are transformed into a character’s description of “a cathedral’s long hollow nave as a secret tribute to a woman’s womb…complete with receding labial ridges and a nice little cinquefoil clitoris above the doorway.”

These remarks cannot be brushed aside as opinions of the villain; Langdon, the book’s hero, refers to his own lectures about goddess-symbolism at Chartres.

These bizarre interpretations betray no acquaintance with the actual development or construction of Gothic architecture, and correcting the countless errors becomes a tiresome exercise: The Templars had nothing to do with the cathedrals of their time, which were commissioned by bishops and their canons throughout Europe. They were unlettered men with no arcane knowledge of “sacred geometry” passed down from the pyramid builders. They did not wield tools themselves on their own projects, nor did they found masons’ guilds to build for others. Not all their churches were round, nor was roundness a defiant insult to the Church. Rather than being a tribute to the divine feminine, their round churches honored the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Actually looking at Gothic churches and their predecessors deflates the idea of female symbolism. Large medieval churches typically had three front doors on the west plus triple entrances to their transepts on the north and south. (What part of a woman’s anatomy does a transept represent? Or the kink in Chartres’s main aisle?) Romanesque churches—including ones that predate the founding of the Templars—have similar bands of decoration arching over their entrances. Both Gothic and Romanesque churches have the long, rectangular nave inherited from Late Antique basilicas, ultimately derived from Roman public buildings. Neither Brown nor his sources consider what symbolism medieval churchmen such as Suger of St.-Denis or William Durandus read in church design. It certainly wasn’t goddess-worship.

False Claims

If the above seems like a pile driver applied to a gnat, the blows are necessary to demonstrate the utter falseness of Brown’s material. His willful distortions of documented history are more than matched by his outlandish claims about controversial subjects. But to a postmodernist, one construct of reality is as good as any other.

Brown’s approach seems to consist of grabbing large chunks of his stated sources and tossing them together in a salad of a story. From Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Brown lifts the concept of the Grail as a metaphor for a sacred lineage by arbitrarily breaking a medieval French term, Sangraal (Holy Grail), into sang (blood) and raal (royal). This holy blood, according to Brown, descended from Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene, to the Merovingian dynasty in Dark Ages France, surviving its fall to persist in several modern French families, including that of Pierre Plantard, a leader of the mysterious Priory of Sion. The Priory—an actual organization officially registered with the French government in 1956—makes extraordinary claims of antiquity as the “real” power behind the Knights Templar. It most likely originated after World War II and was first brought to public notice in 1962. With the exception of filmmaker Jean Cocteau, its illustrious list of Grand Masters—which include Leonardo da Vinci, Issac Newton, and Victor Hugo—is not credible, although it’s presented as true by Brown.

Brown doesn’t accept a political motivation for the Priory’s activities. Instead he picks up The Templar Revelation’s view of the organization as a cult of secret goddess-worshippers who have preserved ancient Gnostic wisdom and records of Christ’s true mission, which would completely overturn Christianity if released. Significantly, Brown omits the rest of the book’s thesis that makes Christ and Mary Magdalene unmarried sex partners performing the erotic mysteries of Isis. Perhaps even a gullible mass-market audience has its limits.

From both Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation, Brown takes a negative view of the Bible and a grossly distorted image of Jesus. He’s neither the Messiah nor a humble carpenter but a wealthy, trained religious teacher bent on regaining the throne of David. His credentials are amplified by his relationship with the rich Magdalen who carries the royal blood of Benjamin: “Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false,” laments one of Brown’s characters.

Yet it’s Brown’s Christology that’s false—and blindingly so. He requires the present New Testament to be a post-Constantinian fabrication that displaced true accounts now represented only by surviving Gnostic texts. He claims that Christ wasn’t considered divine until the Council of Nicea voted him so in 325 at the behest of the emperor. Then Constantine—a lifelong sun worshipper—ordered all older scriptural texts destroyed, which is why no complete set of Gospels predates the fourth century. Christians somehow failed to notice the sudden and drastic change in their doctrine.

But by Brown’s specious reasoning, the Old Testament can’t be authentic either because complete Hebrew Scriptures are no more than a thousand years old. And yet the texts were transmitted so accurately that they do match well with the Dead Sea Scrolls from a thousand years earlier. Analysis of textual families, comparison with fragments and quotations, plus historical correlations securely date the orthodox Gospels to the first century and indicate that they’re earlier than the Gnostic forgeries. (The Epistles of St. Paul are, of course, even earlier than the Gospels.)
Primitive Church documents and the testimony of the ante-Nicean Fathers confirm that Christians have always believed Jesus to be Lord, God, and Savior—even when that faith meant death. The earliest partial canon of Scripture dates from the late second century and already rejected Gnostic writings. For Brown, it isn’t enough to credit Constantine with the divinization of Jesus. The emperor’s old adherence to the cult of the Invincible Sun also meant repackaging sun worship as the new faith. Brown drags out old (and long-discredited) charges by virulent anti-Catholics like Alexander Hislop who accused the Church of perpetuating Babylonian mysteries, as well as 19th-century rationalists who regarded Christ as just another dying savior-god.

Unsurprisingly, Brown misses no opportunity to criticize Christianity and its pitiable adherents. (The church in question is always the Catholic Church, though his villain does sneer once at Anglicans—for their grimness, of all things.) He routinely and anachronistically refers to the Church as “the Vatican,” even when popes weren’t in residence there. He systematically portrays it throughout history as deceitful, power-crazed, crafty, and murderous: “The Church may no longer employ crusades to slaughter, but their influence is no less persuasive. No less insidious.”

Goddess Worship and the Magdalen

Worst of all, in Brown’s eyes, is the fact that the pleasure-hating, sex-hating, woman-hating Church suppressed goddess worship and eliminated the divine feminine. He claims that goddess worship universally dominated pre-Christian paganism with the hieros gamos (sacred marriage) as its central rite. His enthusiasm for fertility rites is enthusiasm for sexuality, not procreation. What else would one expect of a Cathar sympathizer?

Astonishingly, Brown claims that Jews in Solomon’s Temple adored Yahweh and his feminine counterpart, the Shekinah, via the services of sacred prostitutes—possibly a twisted version of the Temple’s corruption after Solomon (1 Kings 14:24 and 2 Kings 23:4-15). Moreover, he says that the tetragrammaton YHWH derives from “Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah.”

But as any first-year Scripture student could tell you, Jehovah is actually a 16th-century rendering of Yahweh using the vowels of Adonai (“Lord”). In fact, goddesses did not dominate the pre-Christian world—not in the religions of Rome, her barbarian subjects, Egypt, or even Semitic lands where the hieros gamos was an ancient practice. Nor did the Hellenized cult of Isis appear to have included sex in its secret rites.

Contrary to yet another of Brown’s claims, Tarot cards do not teach goddess doctrine. They were invented for innocent gaming purposes in the 15th century and didn’t acquire occult associations until the late 18th. Playing-card suites carry no Grail symbolism. The notion of diamonds symbolizing pentacles is a deliberate misrepresentation by British occultist A. E. Waite. And the number five—so crucial to Brown’s puzzles—has some connections with the protective goddess but myriad others besides, including human life, the five senses, and the Five Wounds of Christ.

Brown’s treatment of Mary Magdalene is sheer delusion. In The Da Vinci Code, she’s no penitent whore but Christ’s royal consort and the intended head of His Church, supplanted by Peter and defamed by churchmen. She fled west with her offspring to Provence, where medieval Cathars would keep the original teachings of Jesus alive. The Priory of Sion still guards her relics and records, excavated by the Templars from the subterranean Holy of Holies. It also protects her descendants—including Brown’s heroine.

Although many people still picture the Magdalen as a sinful woman who anointed Jesus and equate her with Mary of Bethany, that conflation is actually the later work of Pope St. Gregory the Great. The East has always kept them separate and said that the Magdalen, “apostle to the apostles,” died in Ephesus. The legend of her voyage to Provence is no earlier than the ninth century, and her relics weren’t reported there until the 13th. Catholic critics, including the Bollandists, have been debunking the legend and distinguishing the three ladies since the 17th century.

Brown uses two Gnostic documents, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, to prove that the Magdalen was Christ’s “companion,” meaning sexual partner. The apostles were jealous that Jesus used to “kiss her on the mouth” and favored her over them. He cites exactly the same passages quoted in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation and even picks up the latter’s reference to The Last Temptation of Christ. What these books neglect to mention is the infamous final verse of the Gospel of Thomas. When Peter sneers that “women are not worthy of Life,” Jesus responds, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male…. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

That’s certainly an odd way to “honor” one’s spouse or exalt the status of women.

The Knights Templar

Brown likewise misrepresents the history of the Knights Templar. The oldest of the military-religious orders, the Knights were founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. Their rule, attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, was approved in 1128 and generous donors granted them numerous properties in Europe for support. Rendered redundant after the last Crusader stronghold fell in 1291, the Templars’ pride and wealth—they were also bankers—earned them keen hostility.

Brown maliciously ascribes the suppression of the Templars to “Machiavellian” Pope Clement V, whom they were blackmailing with the Grail secret. His “ingeniously planned sting operation” had his soldiers suddenly arrest all Templars. Charged with Satanism, sodomy, and blasphemy, they were tortured into confessing and burned as heretics, their ashes “tossed unceremoniously into the Tiber.”

But in reality, the initiative for crushing the Templars came from King Philip the Fair of France, whose royal officials did the arresting in 1307. About 120 Templars were burned by local Inquisitorial courts in France for not confessing or retracting a confession, as happened with Grand Master Jacques de Molay. Few Templars suffered death elsewhere although their order was abolished in 1312. Clement, a weak, sickly Frenchman manipulated by his king, burned no one in Rome inasmuch as he was the first pope to reign from Avignon (so much for the ashes in the Tiber).

Moreover, the mysterious stone idol that the Templars were accused of worshiping is associated with fertility in only one of more than a hundred confessions. Sodomy was the scandalous—and possibly true—charge against the order, not ritual fornication. The Templars have been darlings of occultism since their myth as masters of secret wisdom and fabulous treasure began to coalesce in the late 18th century. Freemasons and even Nazis have hailed them as brothers.

Now it’s the turn of neo-Gnostics.

Twisting da Vinci

Brown’s revisionist interpretations of da Vinci are as distorted as the rest of his information. He claims to have first run across these views “while I was studying art history in Seville,” but they correspond point for point to material in The Templar Revelation. A writer who sees a pointed finger as a throat-cutting gesture, who says the Madonna of the Rocks was painted for nuns instead of a lay confraternity of men, who claims that da Vinci received “hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions” (actually, it was just one…and it was never executed) is simply unreliable.

Brown’s analysis of da Vinci’s work is just as ridiculous. He presents the Mona Lisa as an androgynous self-portrait when it’s widely known to portray a real woman, Madonna Lisa, wife of Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo. The name is certainly not—as Brown claims—a mocking anagram of two Egyptian fertility deities Amon and L’Isa (Italian for Isis). How did he miss the theory, propounded by the authors of The Templar Revelation, that the Shroud of Turin is a photographed self-portrait of da Vinci?

Much of Brown’s argument centers around da Vinci’s Last Supper, a painting the author considers a coded message that reveals the truth about Jesus and the Grail. Brown points to the lack of a central chalice on the table as proof that the Grail isn’t a material vessel. But da Vinci’s painting specifically dramatizes the moment when Jesus warns, “One of you will betray me” (John 13:21). There is no Institution Narrative in St. John’s Gospel. The Eucharist is not shown there. And the person sitting next to Jesus is not Mary Magdalene (as Brown claims) but St. John, portrayed as the usual effeminate da Vinci youth, comparable to his St. John the Baptist. Jesus is in the exact center of the painting, with two pyramidal groups of three apostles on each side. Although da Vinci was a spiritually troubled homosexual, Brown’s contention that he coded his paintings with anti-Christian messages simply can’t be sustained.

Brown’s Mess

In the end, Dan Brown has penned a poorly written, atrociously researched mess. So, why bother with such a close reading of a worthless novel? The answer is simple: The Da Vinci Code takes esoterica mainstream. It may well do for Gnosticism what The Mists of Avalon did for paganism—gain it popular acceptance. After all, how many lay readers will see the blazing inaccuracies put forward as buried truths?

What’s more, in making phony claims of scholarship, Brown’s book infects readers with a virulent hostility toward Catholicism. Dozens of occult history books, conveniently cross-linked by Amazon.com, are following in its wake. And booksellers’ shelves now bulge with falsehoods few would be buying without The Da Vinci Code connection. While Brown’s assault on the Catholic Church may be a backhanded compliment, it’s one we would have happily done without.

Sandra Miesel is a veteran Catholic journalist.
© 2003 Morley Publishing Group, Inc., the publisher of CRISIS Magazine

What’s wrong with The Da Vinci Code?

Many people are reading author Dan Brown’s latest novel, a work of fiction, as if it accurately portrayed the facts about Christ, the New Testament, the Church and Christian history. But sadly, like one of my son’s roommates at Boston College, many people reading The Da Vinci Code come away from the book with their faith in Christ and the Church shaken.

The definition of fiction according to the American Heritage Dictionary:

1. An imaginative pretense. 2. A lie. 3. A literary work, such as a novel, whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.

The confusion about this book begins on the opening page where the author, prior to actually beginning his story, states that: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, there is so much that is historically false in this book that it’s hard to know where to begin.

One of the main characters in the book is an Englishman named Sir Leigh Teabing who is actually the bad guy, the mysterious “Teacher” responsible for ordering the murder of the curator of the Louvre with which the book opens. But Mr. Brown never lets the fast paced action of the book stand in the way of a good lecture and beginning with chapter 55, that’s exactly what the Teabing character delivers.

Let’s begin by looking at some of the things that are said there about the Bible and the 1st Ecumenical Council.

The Lord Jesus, the Bible and the 1st Ecumenical Council according to The Da Vinci Code

“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven” declares Teabing. “The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not magically fall from the clouds. The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. In 325 AD, he decided to unify Rome under a single religion: Christianity. Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition and held a famous gathering known as the Council of Nicea. Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet….a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal. Jesus’ establishment as the Son of God was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicea. A relatively close vote at that. Nonetheless, establishing Christ’s divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman Empire and to the new Vatican power base. Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned.”

First: “The Bible as we know it today was collated by….Constantine the Great [who] commissioned and financed a new Bible.” This leaves the impression that Constantine determined which books would constitute the New Testament. This is totally and completely false. As a matter of historical fact, although there was a great deal of consensus among the Churches as to what constituted the New Testament well before the Council of Nicea, the first person to list the 27 books that all Christians today accept as the New Testament was not Constantine the Great but Athanasius the Great, the bishop and patriarch of Alexandria in Egypt, in a circular letter to all the Churches in Egypt written in 367AD, 42 years after the 1st Ecumenical Council. It was not Constantine who determined the canon of the New Testament as part of a political power play, but the Church, in the persons of its bishops and teachers.

Second: We would agree that the New Testament “did not arrive by fax from heaven.” The books of the New Testament were written by the apostles in order to get the story about Jesus straight. This is made clear, for example, in the opening verses of the Gospel of Luke 1: 1-4, where Luke, a friend and disciple of the apostle Paul, states that he wrote his gospel as “an orderly account” of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus after having “carefully studied” and consulting “eyewitnesses.” Virtually all scholars agree that Luke’s gospel was written sometime between 80 and 90 AD at the latest. Some scholars theorize that his gospel was written even earlier. Mark’s gospel was certainly written earlier, no later than 65AD, probably in Rome, within only a few years of the execution of Peter and Paul during the persecution of Christians under Nero. All of the Gospels proclaim that Jesus was not “a mortal prophet” and the disciples understood that Jesus was far more than just a man. When the disciples are asked by Jesus, “Who do you say that I am?” the apostle Peter responds: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” (Matthew 16:16). Nathaniel, another one of the 12 apostles, declares to Jesus, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:49). After Jesus calms a storm and walks on water, the Gospel of Matthew records that the disciples “exclaimed: Truly you are the Son of God!” (Matthew14:33). In fact, Jesus is called “the Son of God” more than fifty times in the books of the New Testament! It would certainly be a surprise to the apostles (including Paul) to learn that they did not proclaim Jesus to be the Son of God and that this had to wait until the 1st Ecumenical Council. It is therefore utterly false to assert that “Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet….a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless” prior to the Council of Nicea. Just the opposite is true: the 1st Ecumenical Council was held in Nicea to uphold the New Testament teaching that Jesus is the Word and Son of God against the false teaching of an Egyptian man named Arius, a priest who taught that Jesus was more than a man but less than God – a kind of super angel. Athanasius, the future patriarch of Alexandria, attended the 1st Ecumenical Council as a young deacon. And, by the way, the vote was not “relatively close” at all. Of the 318 bishops who attended, all but 2 sided with the New Testament and the apostles and not Arius.

Third: In the 4th century, during the reign of Constantine, there was no such thing as “the new Vatican power base.” This is little more than an anti-Roman Catholic slur, one of many contained throughout the book. In fact, there was no such thing as the Vatican as we understand it today. For Mr. Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code, the only Church is the Roman Catholic Church and he reads back into the 4th century the medieval rise and development of the papacy in the West. This is anachronistic. The Vatican, as we understand it today, is the result of the fall of the Roman Empire in western Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries, the increasing civil responsibilities of the papacy during the early Middle Ages, the emergence of the papal states and a number of other historical processes stretching over many centuries, long after Constantine’s death. And finally, the modern Vatican state is a creation of the 19th century and the rise of Italian nationalism.

Jesus & Mary Magdelene

Perhaps the most outrageous and ludicrous assertion made in this novel is the character of Sir Leigh Teabing’s statement that “the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record.” Two reasons are then given for this amazing assertion. First, according to Robert Langdon, the novel’s main character, “Because Jesus was a Jew and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned.” Second, Teabing insists that the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is mentioned specifically in two ancient documents, The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which he calls, together with the Dead Sea Scrolls, “the earliest Christian records.”

There is not one shred of evidence accepted by any credible historian stating that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. First, while it is true that “Jewish custom” encouraged marriage, it was not at all unheard of for Jews to practice celibacy. Perhaps the two most famous cases are Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet of the 7th century B.C. who abstained from marriage as a sign to the Jewish people that the end of the kingdom of Judah was near (Jeremiah 16:1-9); and the Qumran community, a proto-monastic sect within Judaism at the time of Jesus responsible for producing and probably preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls so often mentioned in The Da Vinci Code as part of the “earliest Christian records.” Actually, the Dead Sea Scrolls, initially discovered in 1947, contain no “Christian records” whatsoever because they are the products of an ancient Jewish community. Rather, they contain – among other things – some of the oldest known manuscripts of the Old Testament. Ironically, the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced by a community of male Jewish celibates, precisely the kind of people Langdon asserts couldn’t have existed within Judaism at the time of Jesus.

Second, both The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene are commonly called “gnostic” gospels by New Testament scholars and historians today. They are pseudonymous works notoriously unreliable as historical documents and in fact contain no historical outline of events in the life of Christ whatsoever, in stark contrast to the canonical New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that clearly speak in historical terms of the birth, baptism, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

Gnosticism is an umbrella term that modern scholars use to describe a number of religious movements in the ancient Roman world, many of which were not at all related to Christianity, all of which had several common themes: that members of the various gnostic sects had a secret knowledge not available to others; that there were a series of lesser mediating divinities sometimes called Archons, sometimes called Aeons; and a dualistic outlook, an antithesis between matter and spirit, body and soul and a hatred of the physical world that was often believed to have been created not by God but by a lesser, evil demigod to imprison the souls of human beings. None of these beliefs is Christian.

To take only one example from The Da Vinci Code, The Gospel of Philip cited by Teabing as proof that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married was produced at the end of the 3rd century AD, almost two hundred years after the Gospel of John, the last of the four New Testament gospels to be written. It is hardly part of “the earliest Christian records.” Scholars today agree that it was produced within circles faithful to the teaching of a man named Valentinus, an Egyptian gnostic teacher who taught in Rome between 135 and 168AD and who is one of the few gnostic teachers whose subsequent disciples – Ptolemaeus and Markus – and theological views we know anything about. Their Christian contemporaries in the ancient world, like St. Irenaeus, the bishop of the city of Lyons in what was then the Roman province of Gaul but is today France, wrote a series of books refuting the teachings of Valentinus, his disciples and other gnostic teachers, as well. These books, like The Gospel of Philip, have survived to this day and I, as a seminarian, had to read both these Gnostic documents and the response to these documents by various bishops and teachers of the Church like Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria.

The days of the week

“Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans,” the Teabing character declares. “Originally,” Langdon adds, “Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration of the sun. To this day, most churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning with no idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun god’s weekly tribute – Sunday.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of pure and simple fact, the New Testament records quite clearly that Christians gathered for worship on the day of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the day after the Sabbath (Mark 16:2) or the Lord’s Day (“Kyriake” in the original Greek) as it is described in Revelation 1:10. This ancient practice is also referred to in Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 16:2. Furthermore, a number of post-New Testament writers like St. Ignatius of Antioch (executed in 115AD) and St. Justin the Martyr (executed in 155AD) to name only two, confirm the practice of Christians gathering for worship on Sunday. Constantine “shifted” nothing. All that Constantine did in the year 321AD was grant legal status as a holiday within the Empire to a centuries-old apostolic practice of the Church.

But we also need to look at the question of language. It is true, as the Langdon character asserts, that Sunday is indeed the “Day of the Sun” in English. And Saturday, by the way, is “Saturn’s Day” and not the Jewish Sabbath. Thursday is “Thor’s Day.” It is true that the names for the days of the week in modern English have all been adapted from ancient mythologies. But in Greek, things are very different. Only three days have names in Greek: Paraskevi, the Day of Preparation for the Sabbath; Savvato, the Sabbath day; and Kyriake, the Lord’s Day. After the Lord’s Day, the days of the week are merely numbered: Deutera, the Second Day (Monday); Trete, the Third Day (Tuesday) and so on. In the Greek of the New Testament as well as in modern Greek to this day, there is no confusion regarding the Judeo-Christian origins of the names for the days of the week.

YHWH

“The Jewish tetragramaton YHWH – the sacred name of God – derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Havah.”

This is completely false! As any first year seminary student can tell you, Jehovah is actually a 16th century rendering for the King James Version of the Hebrew YHWH using the vowels for the word “Adonai” or “Lord,” the word which was read by devout Jews whenever they came across God’s name in the text of the Old Testament because they felt the actual name of God was too awesome to be pronounced by human lips.

Witch Hunts

“During 300 years of witch hunts the Church burned at the stake an astounding 5,000,000 women” Langdon, the Harvard professor, says to his French love interest, Sophie. In fact, even non-Christian historians now agree that the number of people – both men and women – executed between 1400-1800 for suspected witchcraft was somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000. Modern scholars suggest that perhaps 100,000 such trials were held between 1450 and 1750, with somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000 executions, of which 25% – 7,500 to 12,500 – were men. It is also clear that despite the involvement of Church authorities, the vast majority of those condemned as witches were in fact condemned by local secular courts. Of course, here, as throughout the book, whenever Mr. Brown uses the word “church” he is always referring to the Roman Catholic Church and this book contains a clear anti-Roman Catholic bias. But it is a simple fact that many witch-hunts took place in Protestant countries like England and her colonies (for example, one need only recall the infamous witch trials in Salem, MA). Interestingly enough, in the Orthodox Church, there never developed an Office of the Inquisition as in the Roman Catholic Church; nor were there ever any witch-hunts or trials.

A Conspiracy?

“Everyone loves a conspiracy,” thinks Langdon and indeed, this is perhaps one reason why The Da Vinci Code fascinates so many people and still dominates The New York Times bestseller list. Brown’s conspirators in this two millennia long cover-up include the Roman Catholic Church, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei (a Roman Catholic organization that in fact does not have monks nor do its members wear a monastic habit of any kind, much less go around murdering people) the Masons, Interpol and a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, (that is an actual organization officially registered with the French government in 1956 that most likely originated after WW II and first came to public notice in 1962). So much for being a “secret” society! With the exception of French film maker Jean Cocteau, its illustrious list of Grand Masters as presented in the novel – Leonardo, Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo – is simply not credible and no historian takes such claims seriously.

The Relics of Mary Magdalene

But perhaps the most fantastic claim of all is that the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend and popular movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is not the chalice that Christ drank from at the Last Supper but Mary Magdalene herself and a tomb that contains her remains. The main character in the novel, Robert Langdon, cracks the mysterious code left behind by Sauniere, the murdered curator of the Louvre and discovers that the bones of Mary Magdalene are buried in the Louvre. Where are the relics of Mary Magdalene today? Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians know that they are certainly not buried in the Louvre! According to the historical tradition of the Church, Mary Magdalene died in the city of Ephesus and was buried there. Her body, an object of veneration by Christians, was transferred to Constantinople in the 9th century by the Byzantine emperor Leo the Wise, an event that is still commemorated on our liturgical calendar each year on May 4th. Following the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, most of her relics were carried back to Rome and placed under the altar in the Lateran Palace (the papal chapel). Some of her relics are located in Vezelay, a small town near Marseilles in France, and are housed in St. Maximin’s Basilica. Her arm is kept at the Monastery of Simonos Petra on Mt. Athos.

The Da Vinci Code is a fast paced but poorly written murder mystery full of ridiculous errors of fact. It is, after all, a work of fiction. Whatever the claims concerning his research in preparation for writing this novel, the simple fact is that author Dan Brown knows little about Leonardo, little about art and virtually nothing about Jesus, the Bible and Christian history.

© 2003 Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
www.goarch.org

The fact that the Gospel of Judas has been authenticated as belonging to the third century, the original written about a century earlier, does not of course mean what it says is true. St. Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 180 AD) knew about it and denounced it as heresy. Many other Church Fathers and theologians have, before and after Irenaeus, refuted the same kind of thinking found in dozens of similar documents which distorted the apostolic faith. Scholars have called that religious ideology Gnosticism, a phenomenon that flourished mainly in the second century and created serious problems for the Church. Since the late 1940’s, when a slew of them were found buried in the dry sands of Egypt, scholars have been able to study these document first hand.

In the National Geographic documentary featuring the Gospel of Judas, biblical scholar Craig Evans, near the end of the film, bluntly stated that nothing new and nothing historically authentic is to be found in the document. Although the documentary leaned to the opposite view, most scholars will probably agree with Evans. The Gospel of Judas is but another small window to Gnosticism, a hodgepodge of religious speculations that exploded on the scene during the second century. At that time, individual intellectuals or small and elitist groups around them, bothered by the basic story of the Bible, especially the “violent” God of the Old Testament and the “scandalous” death and resurrection of Jesus, generated their own religious philosophy. They combined Jewish, Christian and pagan elements to construct literally fantastic systems of speculation including astrology and magic. The core theme, found in the Gospel of Judas, is secret knowledge (gnosis) that leads to salvation.

What was that secret knowledge about? It was essentially about the Gnostic system itself that roughly runs as follows: A higher god, infinitely superior to the God of the Old Testament, sends periodic illuminators to earth with a secret message to draw back to heaven the inner divine sparks of receptive human beings hopelessly caught in utter darkness. According to this worldview, the Old Testament God is an inferior and ignorant God, responsible for creating the lowest sphere of existence, the earth, where all the evil of the cosmos had dredged. Material things, including human bodies, if not evil, are the seat of evil, and to be escaped from. So in Gnostic thinking the eternal Christ, who was the son of the higher god and not the Son of the God of the Old Testament, could not truly have taken human flesh. Instead, he temporarily entered into Jesus at his baptism and later, at some point during his arrest and suffering, left the material body and returned to the sphere of light.

In the Gnostic system, the saving death and resurrection of Christ play no role and they are usually entirely omitted. The one killed is not the Son of God, but only the human Jesus, whose body presumably decayed to dust. What is decisive for the Gnostic view is not the person of Jesus the Christ, crucified and risen, but the Gnostic “gospel” itself, that is, the message of the secret Gnostic system. This system was thought to provide the key to a kind of self-salvation through self-knowledge and self-realization in the discovery of the inner divine self.

What’s wrong with all this? The whole thing. That Jesus passed on a single secret to a single intimate collaborator is immensely absurd. Jesus conducted an open ministry addressing his message to all and publicly conflicting with religious leaders over such issues as the Sabbath observance, the ritual washing of hands, and the temple activities. Not even radical critics would deny essential truth in these words of Jesus: “I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together; I have said noting secretly” (John 18:20). The events of the early Church and its astonishing mission, reported in the Book of Acts, were “not done in a corner,” St. Paul pointedly observed (Acts 26:26). Against the Gospel of Judas, none of the New Testament books, all written in the first century, give any hint that early Christianity was all about elites conveying secrets to elites. The “mysteries” of God’s kingdom proclaimed by Jesus (Matthew 13:11) were not about objective teachings, such as “love your enemies” and many others like it in the Sermon on the Mount. These were taught to all, disciples and the crowds. Rather, the mystery of God’s kingdom, both then and today, is the same: it is the personal experience of grace and forgiveness arising in human hearts from hearing about God’s rule and living by the gospel.

The Gospel of Judas turns Christianity on its head. Long ago St. Irenaeus accused the Gnostics of using the Bible as a mosaic from which they extracted selected tiles and created a wholly different portrait of Christ, turning, as he said, the portrait of the king into that of a fox! The Christian gospel puts Christ at the center of the message salvation and proclaims a true incarnation, a true death, and true resurrection by which of sinners are redeemed from the power of sin and enjoy a new life of grace in obedience to Christ. Contrary to the Gnostic message, the Christian gospel is rooted in the Old Testament as part of the saving plan of the only true God and Father of Jesus Christ. St. Paul declares that there is only one Gospel (Gal. 1:6-9) and that he and all the numerous eye-witnesses to the risen Christ preach the same Gospel of the crucified, buried and risen Lord (1 Cor. 15:1-11). In view of the testimony of these eyewitnesses, many of whom had actually walked with Jesus, only a fool would attribute any credibility to a strange document written one hundred fifty years later.

Let readers be aware that there can be no compromise here. One cannot choose parts from the traditional Gospels and parts from the Gospel of Judas. The two versions of salvation by their very nature negate each other. They are not two alternative, more or less acceptable, takes on what authentic Christianity was and is. The Gnostic gospel proclaims Christ as a kind of disembodied messenger who opposes the work of the Old Testament God. The Christian gospel proclaims an incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ in complete harmony with the same God who is his Father. The Gnostic message views the human body as virtually evil, something to discard. The Christian message holds the human body as holy, redeemable, destined for glorious transformation through resurrection. The Gnostic way of salvation is one of inward meditation toward self-realization. The Christian way of salvation is taking up the cross in obedience to Christ and in communion with his body, the Church, which has a vital mission in part to work for justice and peace in this world that God loves. When the two interpretative perspectives are assessed as wholes, the historical and theological evidence clearly favors the Christian option as being the most faithful to the message of the Bible and worthy of life-long commitment.

What about Judas’ betrayal? The betrayal was not as decisive for Jesus’ death as one might think. Jesus’ enemies would have gotten to him one way or another. Jesus did not, of course, need Judas’ help to die, if Jesus’ wanted to do that, because he could have surrendered to the authorities himself. The idea that Jesus was looking to die is totally refuted by the experience of Gethsemane in which Jesus with distress and tears prayed three times to be spared the cross.

The betrayal of Judas is significant in its moral (rather immoral) immensity. Yet, why did Judas betray Jesus? Was it envy, greed, an attempt to force Jesus’ hand toward revolution against the Romans, or even an attempt at a reconciliation meeting with the religious leaders for the common national good? No little attention in print and film has been given to such questions, and it is no sin. The vilification of Judas in Christian history is lamentable. For Christians, the right response to all sinners, including ourselves, is sorrow and prayer in the spirit of Christ’s love who forgave his crucifiers. What a magnificent testimony to God’s forgiveness, if Judas, like Peter, had repented of his misdeed and run up to Jesus as he stumbled up the hill to Golgotha and asked for mercy! Forgiveness would have been certain. But it was not to be. Falling into despair on account of his betrayal, Judas killed himself, an act that would otherwise have no reasonable explanation, unless one is prepared to adopt the Gnostic system and see Judas as committing suicide to release his own soul to astral regions.

Who has the story right? The second-century Gnostics with their new-fangled speculations, or the earliest Christians who provided the traditions behind the four Gospels? If it were not a culpable betrayal, why would early Christians want to create and perpetuate an embarrassing story about one of the twelve disciples handing over his Master to the enemies? To reverse morally the betrayal into an act of friendship seems utterly ludicrous.

The crux of the fuss has to do with the value wars in the second as well as the twenty-first centuries. Over recent centuries, the failings of Christians and institutional Christianity, wars and all, have caused offense to many intellectuals who have consequently looked elsewhere for answers. Out of frustration and sometimes hatred, some have even proposed and have actively sought either radically to revise or even wholly to destroy traditional Christianity. They have wanted to throw out the proverbial baby with the water. This sort of thing is both regrettable and unacceptable. The institutional Church ought to be fully transparent and get its act together for an effective mission in the world. However, a radically revised Christianity is no Christianity at all, but only a fake shadow of it, unworthy of support. One must also consider that the despisers of Christianity have not come up with some viable communal alternative that works.

The ancient Gnostics seem to have been gripped by similar frustrations and anger. The pain of an unjust and violent world led the Gnostics to the dreamy ideal of escaping from reality instead of facing it. They thought to find self-redemption in meditative self-absorption and the construction of ethereal speculative systems, rather than by following the way of the cross and martyrdom as adherents of apostolic Christianity did. Part of the spiritual revolt of the Gnostics, so it seems, was to attack basic teachings of the Bible and the Church. And what crazy stuff it was that some came up with. The Naassenes or Ophites (the respective words in Hebrew and Greek mean “snake”) venerated the deceiving serpent of Genesis thought to have the wisdom of the superior god against the plan of the Old Testament God! Other Gnostics advocated three, seven, nine, thirty or thirty-three levels of divinity. Marcion, an extreme ascetic who saw evil in matter, allowed only single people in his communities. He prohibited marriage and childbearing because, in his view, such practices aided the work of the inferior creator god. And so Marcion condemned his own congregations to eventual extinction.

These examples may show that it is not the case, as some loudly claim today, that oppressive bishops and a rigid Church suppressed the Gnostics. For centuries the Church was under persecution and had no social or political power to oppress anyone. Naturally the leaders and theologians of the Church were concerned to maintain the apostolic traditions and therefore they disciplined their own communicants. However, any person or group outside the Church, or cast out of the Church, had the same opportunity to flourish in their choices. The decline of Gnostic groups was chiefly due to the inability of their own message and practice to draw and keep adherents. Christianity triumphed not because of its rigid administrative or theological systems, but because it served the needs and hopes of many who were willing to make the costly commitment to the apostolic gospel.

In modern democratic societies, individuals and groups have equal opportunity to promote their ideologies and practices. The promise of success is open to all. Let God’s truth be served in providing real solutions for the real problems of humanity by means of example and persuasion. In the cauldron of the current cultural war, it is no surprise that people would differ as radically as people did in the second century and still regard themselves as Christians. Some continue to teach that Jesus’ transformed bodily resurrection is an unnecessary myth, despite the protestations of St. Paul (1 Corinthians, chapter 15). Others advocate same gender marriage despite the witness of the Scriptures, all of the historical wisdom and the drastic social implications. Still others have supported almost limitless destruction of the unborn as if only the will and convenience of the potential parent really counts. And many caught up in the spirit of the age, whether consciously or unconsciously, follow the post-modern message of looking for the “real” self, finding one’s way, creating one’s own truth, and doing one’s own thing—while still claiming to follow Christ. For such persons, the Gospel of Judas may perhaps be of considerable value. For many others, however, it is no “gospel” at all.

Rev. Dr. Theodore G. Stylianopoulos,
Archbishop Iakovos Professor of Orthodox Theology and Professor of New Testament
Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology
Brookline, Ma 02445

Beloved in the Lord,

Recent news reports and a television “special” have informed us about the discovery and translation of a fourth-century Gnostic manuscript known as the “Gospel of Judas.” There is nothing new in this finding, since the existence of that text was well known within the early Church. Its discovery is interesting only from an academic, archeological point of view insofar as it corroborates references made about it in other early documents.

From the first days of the Church there have been, and continue to be, many diverse writings about our Lord Jesus Christ. Christ did not write His teachings down Himself; others did so by the power of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord Himself validates which writings are accurate, through His mystical Body, the Church, which must in every age make this determination. The ultimate expression of His Body is an Ecumenical Council guided by the Holy Spirit. There have been seven such Ecumenical Councils held during the first millennium of the Church.

Of the many writings in circulation during the early centuries, some have been regarded as essential to the Christian faith. These are the four Gospels and the Epistles which are read to this very day in our Church services.

Other writings were determined to be inaccurate, or inconsistent, or expressing ideas at odds with the mind of the Church. Some individuals believe that this implies early Christianity was not “monolithic” but very diverse. This is nonsense, since Jesus is the Truth, and the Divine Truth does not contradict Himself.

The “Gospel of Judas” is one of many writings written within, and maintained by, certain groups of people regarded as Gnostics. It was rejected by the early shepherds of the Church as being both historically inaccurate and also inconsistent with Christian revelation and understanding.

Gnosticism was one of the first heresies (alternate teachings) addressed by the early Church. The term “gnostic” comes from the Greek word gnosis (knowledge). The Gnostics were neo-Platonists, grounded in pre-Christian Greek philosophy which regarded the physical world as lesser than the spiritual. Gnostic heretics intellectualized Christianity, rejecting the body while exalting the spirit or soul. This same error later afflicted Western Christianity during the Protestant Reformation, and is evident even today in Calvinism.

The Gnostics maintained that the material world was flawed, having been the w ork of an inferior creator (a demi-god) rather than of the one all-good God. The Gnostics further believed that the divine mind was an ultimate source of
goodness which existed outside the physical universe. They speculated that each man possesses a portion of that divine power, and that the awakening of this spark could lead to salvation through union with the divine mind.

For a Gnostic, secret “higher knowledge” was the key to unlocking the path to divine awakening and was attained through the guidance of a teacher. Clearly this sort of religion, from within which the “Gospel of Judas” was written, is completely contrary to Christian thought. It actually has more in common with the contemporary quest for gurus and eastern religions than with Orthodox Christianity.

Gnosticism was a problem in the Apostolic age, and Saint John the Evangelist dealt with the matter in his Gospel and three Epistles. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. AD 130-202) addressed the background and content of the “Gospel of Judas” and also numerous other heretical writings in his foundational discourse regarding Christian doctrine, On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis (normally referred to by its Latin title Adversus Haereses, or Against Heresies. Another early Church father, Saint Athanasios (ca. AD 298-372), wrote in his Paschal Letter that the “secret and illegitimate books” of the Gno stics were to be totally rejected as outside the Christian tradition.

Orthodox Christianity maintains that there is a single Creator, Who brought all things into existence and looked upon His creation declaring it to be “good.” The fallen condition of creation, both in the physical and in the spiritual realm, results not from its deficiency at creation but as a consequence of human failure to live up to the expectation of the all-good God.

The incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity within the womb of the Virgin Mary attests to the fundamental goodness of physical creation, for Jesus Christ took on a material human body as well as an immaterial human soul. Moreover, His third-day resurrection, of both His body and soul, attests to the potential redemption of the entire human person, not merely of his intellectual, mental, or spiritual component.

The Gnostic context of the “Gospel of Judas” is thus completely outside the doctrinal Christian context. Furthermore, its premise, that Christ directed Judas Iscariot to betray Him so as to effect His necessary death for the world, is entirely illogical for Jesus Christ as the all-good and all-holy Son of God. This would have essentially meant that Jesus, the “only sinless One,” sinned by directing Judas to cause His own murder. More seriously, if the Lord directed Judas to betray Him, the inference is that He did not die willingly for the salvation of the world. He would have created the scenario of a betrayal, which would have negated His willing sacrifice on the Cross by using the assistance of a second party.

We Christians, of course, completely reject such a possibility as irrational, but it can make sense to a Gnostic who platonically believes that salvation rests in the liberation of the soul from the body and its awakening to divine gnosis. Gnosticism ultimately refutes and rejects the divine incarnation of the Son of God as Jesus Christ, and it ultimately leads to iconoclasm and to the denial of a bodily resurrection.

Finally, there is no “secret knowledge” in Christianity. This is an absurd notion. Our Lord Jesus Christ came for the salvation of all, without regard to persons or their intellectual capabilities. There was no private revelation that He imparted to His Apostles in which He entrusted to them alone the mystery of the Kingdom of God. The four gospels clearly and openly report the public and the private words of Jesus, which are accessible to all people. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32)

We Orthodox Christians can therefore regard the “Gospel of Judas” as an archeological discovery of an already known text that scholars may find useful for studying the concepts of the Gnostics. It adds nothing to our historical knowledge of events that took place 2,000 years ago. It also adds nothing to our understanding of Christian dogma and doctrine since it merely reflects the perspective of a particular group (the Gnostics) that was regarded even in the Holy Scriptures as outside of Christianity.

With Paternal Blessings,
+ Metropolitan Isaiah of Denver

When I first arrived at the Seminary, I was quite lost and to be honest uneducated about my faith. I remember my first trip to the school’s chapel, how I arrived in shorts and flip flops, for a service about which I knew nothing: Vespers. I registered for classes that made no sense to me: Liturgics, Dogmatics, and Patristics. I also encountered names for the first time that were new, unusual, and unknown to me. One name was Cleopas, I had never heard the name before and I was uncertain of its origin.

Fr. Cleopas was the Registrar at the school, and so he was one of the first priests I met at Holy Cross. He was a beautiful man, kind, educated, and a bit young, his beard had no grey. He was from Greece, but he had studied for his doctorate in America, and so his English was perfect. In time, I got to know him fairly well, and on one afternoon while visiting his office, I asked him where he got his name.

Cleopas was not his name from birth. Father was a monk and when he had been tonsured, his name was changed, and the name he received was Cleopas. Picking a name is an important task; it can say so much about what we value. Father Cleopas had been disappointed when the bishop who had tonsured him changed his name to Cleopas. He had hoped for something “better.” He had hoped for a name people would easily recognize like Matthew or John. Or perhaps a name that could easily be associated with an event in the life of the church like Evangelos or Anastasios.

He told me how his disappointment grew and that he often thought of having a different name. He felt that Cleopas, the actual man, was obscure at best and his role in the life of the church unimportant. Finally, he expressed his disappointment to his spiritual father who was surprised to hear of Fr. Cleopas’ feelings about his name. His spiritual father wondered how Fr. Cleopas could feel this way about his name. Not only was Cleopas a recognizable figure in the New Testament, but his actions brought to mind an important event in the life of the church. Cleopas after all was an important name, an important person, why he was one of the first to see the Risen Lord!

How silly I felt when Fr. Cleopas began to relate the story about his namesake found in the Gospel of St. Luke, Luke 24.13-35. I had never heard of Cleopas, and the story was unfamiliar to me. Cleopas was one of the first to see the Risen Lord. On Sunday, the day Christ had risen from the tomb, Cleopas and another disciple were journeying from Jerusalem to Emmaus a small village a day’s walk from the city. During their journey Christ joined them and he opened Cleopas’ heart and interpreted all of the scriptures related to Himself. He explained to Cleopas and his companion why it was that the Christ had to suffer and die. Towards evening when they drew near to the village of Emmaus, Christ entered the inn they were staying at, and took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them. Up to that moment Cleopas and the other disciple had not recognized that it had been Christ Himself who had spent the day with them. However, the scriptures tell us that the second they received the blessed bread from Christ’s hands, “. . .their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” They immediately left Emmaus and journeyed back to Jerusalem finding the eleven disciples, “. . .they told [them] what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

So the other day when I read in the Church’s list of Saints to be commemorated the name Cleopas, I stopped, thought, and prayed. It was powerful to bring to mind this great Saint, a man who walked with the Risen Christ and had been counted as one of the 70 apostles of Christ. He had proclaimed to the eleven disciples that the Lord was indeed Risen and how He was known in the breaking of the bread. He had been one of the first to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, on Sunday. This mystical event, this mystical supper we still participate in every Sunday and our Risen Lord is still known to each of us in the breaking of the bread. We are fortunate to inherit a faith that does not forget those who have walked before us in Christ. Their lives serve as examples for each of us and their prayers along with ours are still offered up to Christ.

St. Cleopas, Apostle, One of the 70, Feast Day, October 30

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Today, many share my friend’s opinion, and it is not difficult to notice that there is a proliferation of churches in America that claim to be Bible-based. Many of those who attend such churches are extremely faithful and wonderful people who are truly seeking to know Jesus Christ. Their sincere desire to walk with our Lord has prompted them to join a certain congregation, and through it, connect with their Savior.

Many of our own parishes are full of similar people, men and women who want to follow Christ. In fact, many of our parishioners at one time belonged to another church or have family members who attend churches other than the Orthodox Church. Their journey to know Jesus just so happens to have brought them to the Orthodox Church, but we could argue that other peoples’ journeys have led them into the Methodist, Baptist, or Presbyterian churches.

Without a doubt, all of us have friends who are not Orthodox Christians but who love Jesus and want to live a Christian life. This reality raises another question that I know many of us have struggled to answer. Namely, does it matter whether or not someone is an Orthodox Christian? Surely, Christians of other denominations are being saved and the truth that all of us are children of God is firmly established, so does it really matter what church you belong to, or is it just important that you belong to a church?

To answer these questions, as well as the one raised by my friend, it is important that we first understand what the Church is. Scripture tells us in Colossians chapter 1 verse 18 that, “[Christ] is the head of the body, the Church.” We also learn from scripture that each of us, once baptized becomes, “. . .members of his body,” (Ephesians 5.30). This same point is made in 1 Corinthians 6.15, when the Apostle Paul writes, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” The Church, therefore, is Christ; He is its body, and each one of us are members of that body, the one body of Jesus Christ. Again, we can look to scripture for this exact definition, which can be found in 1 Corinthians 12.27, St. Paul writes, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” There is one last point, however, that comes from scripture that we must investigate, and once again, this point relates to how we understand what a Church is. St. Paul asks the Church of Corinth the following question in 1 Corinthians 1.13: “Is Christ divided?” The answer, of course, is no. Christ is not divided; His body is whole. So we have learned from Holy Scripture that the Church is made up of Christ, who is its head, as well as each of us, who are members of that one undivided body.

These statements St. Paul makes regarding the Church have enormous implications for those of us who live in the twenty-first century. For it is plain to see that the Christian faith is anything but whole; rather, it is splintered into thousands of expressions. In America alone, some estimate that the number of Christian traditions exceeds 5,000. Thus, the circumstance in which we find ourselves begs the question, “How did we get here?” How did Christianity become so fragmented, so divided, when Scripture tells us that there should be one Body? Even Jesus prayed that the Church would remain united. He said, “And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to thee. Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one, (John, 17.11).”

When Jesus died, he did not leave us a book. He didn’t even leave us the New Testament, and as far as we know, he never wrote down a single thing on paper. What he did leave us, however, is His Church, a Church that He promised would never fail, a Church that the very gates of Hades would not overcome, Matthew 16.18. This means that if the Church had ceased to exist even for one moment, as some people propose, Christ would be a liar! More importantly, since the Church is headed by Christ Himself it is, therefore, Christ. So, if the Church had become corrupt, or even ceased to exist, Christ Himself would be corrupt or non-existent. Thankfully, this is not the case. Rather, we know that Christ’s Church has continued to exist, and its existence can be traced to the Day of Pentecost in Jerusalem. An unbroken connection exists between the first Church in Jerusalem, which was headed by the Bishop James, and our own parishes here in the United States and our beloved Bishops.

Therefore, the unity of the Orthodox Church for 2000 years stands in stark contradiction to the fragmented Christianity of our modern century. It is interesting to note that the fragmentation of Christianity, the emergence of denominations and expressions, is rooted in my friend’s desire for us to return to just the Bible. In 1517, Martin Luther would post his thesis and set in motion the Protestant Reformation. At the center of Reformation was the concept of Sola Scriptura, only scripture (of course the concept of sola scriptura cannot be found anywhere in the Bible. In fact, the opposite argument is made by St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians, 2.15: “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter,”). St. Paul commands the Corinthians to hold to those things they were taught by word-of-mouth, and those things they were taught by the written word. Throughout the centuries, the Orthodox Church has faithfully kept these traditions. For example, the Orthodox Church still professes the belief that the Eucharist is indeed the Body and Blood of Christ. This tradition is confirmed by Scripture in 1 Corinthians 10.16, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not communion in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not communion in the Body of Christ?” Or Matthew, 26.26, where Christ commands his disciples to, “Take, eat; this is my body.”

In working against the developments of the Catholic Church, the Reformers believed that a return to the scriptures alone would return the Church to the true faith in Jesus Christ. Thus, a movement was started that eventually led to the proliferation of denominations and interpretations of Holy Scripture. Once Holy Scripture was divorced from the Church and her traditions, its exegesis, or explanation, was left up to the individual. Missing from the Protestant’s mindset was the concept that scripture was never to be taken out of the context of the worshiping community. St. Peter had warned against such an abuse of scripture in his second letter 1.20, when he wrote, “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.” Notice how St. Peter switches from the singular, man, to the plural, men, when speaking about proper interpretation. The community of the faithful was always the measure stick by which scripture was to be interpreted. Once this was removed, any one interpretation became valid.

Today, you’ll find hundreds of interpretations of the same passage of scripture, and as a result, you’ll find thousands of different churches teaching different things. The irony is that all of them point to the Bible as the sole source of their interpretation! Once again, contrary to this fact, the Orthodox Church stands united in her witness to the faith and in the teachings she professes. Whether you attend an Orthodox Church in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, or Cape Town, South Africa, the teaching and the worship of these parishes is the same. This does not mean that the Orthodox Church looks down on other Christian expressions, nor does it mean that the Orthodox Church teaches intolerance or that she passes judgment on people who are members of other churches. Rather, the Orthodox Church simply witnesses to what she is by grace: the Church of Christ, established by her Lord, Jesus Christ. Furthermore, the Orthodox Church does not deny the activity of the Holy Spirit (or even salvation) cannot be found elsewhere beyond her walls, for God is great, and His love endures forever. However, she is assured of the Holy Spirit’s activity within. Finally, the Church knows that elements of the Truth can be found everywhere, but she alone possesses the full deposit of the faith, the entire inheritance of the sons and daughters of the Lord, is found only within her embrace.

In the letter of Jude, we read in 1.3, “Beloved, being very eager to write to you of our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” This letter, which was written by St. Jude, the brother of St. James, the first Bishop of Jerusalem, appeals to Christians to hold onto their common faith—the faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints, a faith rooted in the teaching of the Apostles, and a faith that is not subject to development or change. As the Apostle Paul wrote in Hebrews 13.8, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

Unfortunately, my friend’s appeal is an appeal that leads to disaster, for it has resulted not in unity but disjointing. A simple return to the scriptures has resulted in the loss of the full deposit of faith for many. Our Protestant brothers and sisters are correct to encourage each Christian to learn scripture, to study God’s word, to commit their lives to Christ, and in a sense, to return to the Bible. However, each of us must do so under the guidance of the Church, which was established by Christ. Only then can we be assured that our own interpretation will be in line with that of the community established by Christ and cultivated by the Holy Apostles.

In the end, the most convincing aspect of our faithful witness to Jesus Christ will be found in our ability to love. This means our argument for the Lord will be measured by the amount of love we show one another and those outside of the Church. If we do not open our hearts and love, any measure of disrespect, intolerance, or hate will totally destroy all messages that the Church might express. May your love for our Lord provide an ample witness that you are indeed one of His children.

(For further study see, the website of the Greek Archdiocese of America, www.goarch.org, The Faith, understanding Orthodox Christianity, an Orthodox Catechism, by Clark Carlton, Regina Orthodox Press, Salisbury, MA, The Orthodox Way, revised edition by Bishop Kallistos Ware, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York, Introducing the Orthodox Church, its Faith and Life, by Anthony M. Coniaris, Light and Life Publishing Company, Minneapolis, MN).

(Father Evan can be reached at frevan@stcatherinechurch.org).