Breaking Codes

Earlier this year the New York Times published a critique of "The Da Vinci Code" by art critic and Renaissance expert Bruce Boucher, who observed that author Dan Brown's "shaky" understanding of his topic is revealed by his apparent ignorance of the fact that "Da Vinci" was not the artist's name. "Vinci" is simply where Leonardo was from.

Boucher mockingly suggested that "The Da Vinci Code" would make a better opera than a film. "If it's too silly to be said," he concluded, "it can always be sung." (Quoted in Peter J. Boyer, "Hollywood Heresy," in the New Yorker, 5/22/06.)

Because Brown's work is so transparently without factual foundation that it can be impeached just on the basis of surface analysis, we can safely dismiss his entire boatload of idle speculation, that Christianity is history's greatest con job, that "everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false," as one of the main characters says, that Jesus was a women's liberationist wed to Mary of Magdala, that he preached a message harmonious with goddess worship, that all this knowledge was deliberately hidden by an evil and counterfeit Church, using the secret order Opus Dei as its instrument of repression, and that the truth was handed down through the generations by a few illuminati only to be encoded centuries later in the work of the Renaissance artist Leonardo (from Vinci).

What debaters on both sides of "Da Vinci Code" frequently miss is that there is no evidence for any of this, except hypothesized and very questionable conclusions drawn from cryptic and vague symbols in a few five-century-old paintings. Lacking any evidence whatsoever, the only one of Brown's contentions that withstands scrutiny is the one that condemns Christianity as history's greatest con job, but no thanks to him.

Like Dan Brown, Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul) decided that Jesus's followers didn't understand the rabbi's true significance, which he saw as the redeeming and symbolic meaning of of his life and death, as a divine sacrifice "for us." God, said Paul, had sent Jesus to earth to save us (thereby founding Christianity). But what evidence did Paul have for such a claim? Jesus's disciples, the ones who knew him while he was alive, seem to have thought nothing of the sort.

Author and Talmudic scholar Hyam Maccoby observes that "We must remember that Jesus never knew Paul; the two men never once met...Paul claimed that his interpretations were not just his own invention, but had come to him by personal inspiration; he claimed that he had personal acquaintance with the resurrected Jesus, even though he had never met him during his lifetime. Such acquaintance, he claimed, gained through visions and transports, was actually superior to acquaintance with Jesus during his lifetime, when Jesus was much more reticent about his purposes." (Maccoby, "The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity," HarperSanFrancisco, 1986, pps. 3-4.)

Life would be a lot easier if Dan Brown would admit, and if St. Paul had admitted in his own time, that we really hardly know anything at all about Jesus. Speculation about his marital status and his own view of his mission are just that -- speculation. We have no idea whether he was married or not (although some evidence in the Gospel Mark suggests his contemporaries thought of him as a party animal). At one time he probably asked some of his disciples who they thought he was, but there is no reliable record of who he thought he was, or what he did for a living, or what his life was like before he began preaching. We have only a few sayings of his, the certainty that he lived and preached for a brief time in Judea, and the vague record of his death by execution in Jerusalem, under the provincial governor Pilate.

Through all this we miss the most important thing about him: that he told us to be kind to each other, and love the neighbor as we do our own selves, to avoid being judgmental. He took this philosophy to an extreme, and advised us that if someone breaks into your house and steals all your stuff, not to ask for it back.

If we wholeheartedly practiced that simple message (and I don't, nor do I know anyone who does) rather than looking for the secret code that will reveal the real meaning of something that really should be as obvious as a garbage can, we wouldn't have time for idle speculation.

Five hundred years before Jesus and considerably east of Judea, there was another preacher who lived, died, left only a few sayings, and gave rise to a great body of mythology concerning his life. Some of his sayings are so similar to what Jesus preached that, as inevitably happens, a gaggle of silly speculators has concluded that Jesus must have traveled to India and learned his philosophy there, from the spiritual heirs of the Buddha. Talk about missing the point.

The Buddha said: "Let us, then, abandon the heresy of worshiping (the gods) and of praying to (them); let us no longer lose ourselves in vain speculations of profitless subtleties; let us surrender self and all selfishness, and as all things are fixed by causation, let us practice good so that good may result from our actions."

What a concept! We can be good by doing good. Could this be the big secret "The Da Vinci Code" was looking for?