X-ians Pissed by Da Vinci Code Movie
The movie version of bestseller The Da Vinci Code has been shooting in Europe all summer. There’s a giant wall of secrecy around the flick, as Sony, the studio behind the film has put the screws on everybody to keep every aspect of the film hush hush.
Why’s that? Because the central premise of the fictional book is that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene, who was meant to be his true heir. It alleges an enormous cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church, which, according to the book, usurped Mary’s place in favor of a male-oriented hierarchy that has suppressed what Brown [the author] calls the “sacred feminine.”
“There’s no way you can take out the central point of the novel, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and the Catholic Church has done everything in its power, including murdering millions of people, to cover it up,” said Carl E. Olson, co-author of “The Da Vinci Hoax,” a book refuting the “The Da Vinci Code.” He predicted that many devout people would be offended “unless they make a movie that bears a pale resemblance to the book, in which case they’d have a lot of irritated fans.”
Oh no! Now we see the shoe on the other foot as we revisit the Passion of the Christ controversy except this time instead of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti Defamation League being all whiny, it’s Catholic groups like Opus Dei and evangelical Christians.
Read all about it here! In case you were wondering, the image on the right comes from that controversial Heeb Magazine Passion of the Christ pictorial. It’s supposed to be Mary Magdalene.
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The Catholic Church is not upset by the Da Vinci Code, some catholics are. The Catholic Church doesn’t get upset about anything. If something persists for 50 years they might take action, otherwise the Church justs waits it out. Protestanism, once believed that it was the true church and started as half a dozen movements has eroded into 5000 sects many who don’t claim Christ’s divinity.
Sam,
My point wasn’t to count the number of Christians out there or how there came to be so many. All I was trying to say was that you can’t argue for the truth of a faith based on rational argument.
Besides, there are 800+ million Hindus out there that don’t actively go out and convert people (though unlike Jews they don’t discourage them either).
AyubaNebAhsile: The only reason that Christianity and Islam have so many members is simply because they are the only two major religions who actively go out and convert people. If evangelization was a mitvah in Judaism, Buddhism or any other religion, then you’d see a lot more members of those religions.
Seems ridiculous to argue about the rationality of Christianity. I don’t think the Ramban knocked them out in 1263 with a rational punch (as evidenced by the 1 BILLION Christians in the world today). Religion is not rational. Any arguments you use against Christianity can ultimately be used against Judaism.
All the other stuff posted so far about flavians or Mary Magdalene are just speculation based on sketchy (and sometimes politically motivated) information. Read some letters to the editor of Biblical Archaelogy where all these guys who are supposed to be experts are calling one another names and acting like little children.
It’s called “faith” for a reason, people. You can’t “prove” that Paul didn’t have that vision on the road to Damascus, or that the angel Jibreel recited the Qu’ran to Muhamed. Just enjoy the book, or movie or whatever!
wow, my post got totally hosed haha…let me try that again and ill leave it up to ck to delete the other one…
Ok, so the Gospel of Phillip talks about Jesus entrusting Mary more than any other of his disciples, intimating to he things he didn’t to the others. Peter was not a fan of this, and there is a discourse in the Gospel of Mary magdelene. Anyhow, when the Catholic church was putting together its canon, they left this out because it wasn’t “christian enough”. Because, and here comes the punchline…as we know a woman dare not be more imporant than a man, unless by important you mean a good cook, or good with chores. Ba dum chii.
I remember seeing a history channel special about the Bible and they mentioned the Gospel of Phillip, which basically showed that Mary was nt than a man, unless by important you mean a good cook!Jesus’ closest disciple. In fact Jesus would often intimate things to Mary he wouldn’t to his other disciples including Peter. Peter didn’t like this so much. When the catholic church was putting together the canon, this book was left out for not being “christian enough”.
As literature goes, the New Testament’s far better. Or, for that matter, the Grand Inquisitor scene in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.
That Heeb spread– very cool. The Word was, after all, made Flesh, which gave the world Piero della Francesca, Giotto, El Greco, Caravaggio et al. . . . A rich tradition of biblical iconography (albeit lots of graven images).
Nice chiaroscuro touch in the photo.
Shouldn’t this be under Popalicious or something…this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with us.
Yo mobius – Can you hear Jerusalem moan?
btw, the woman in the photograph is tammy faye starlight, a jewish standup comic whose character consists of a frighteningly believable christian evangelcal country singer. you can hear one of her songs in “jew jockey” over at jewschool.
i’m holding by jospeh atwill’s version of events — that jesus was a fiction invented by the flavians to destroy judean revolutionaries who got their power from their messianic belief. the new testament is a satirical twist on the campaign of titus flavius and jesus himself is actually caesar. the whole “holy blood, holy grail”/”da vinci code” thing is just a falsehood created to give more weight to the myth. by making it seem that there was a historical jesus and that the church is taking part in a cover up, they force the discourse to begin with the acceptance that jesus existed. the reality is that he never did. by getting caught up on “who was the historical jesus” we’ve already pulled the wool over our eyes.
Mary Magdalene had highlights done at her hairdresser’s?
I heart conspiracy theories. (I think I’ve seen JFK at least fifteen times.) And conspiracies involving a plot by religious authorities to suppress the importance of women? Slap an FBI badge on my chest and call me Scully, because I’m in.
But seriously, one of the things I’ve always found interesting about fiction is that it gives us the opportunity to wonder “what if?” IMHO, which is not to be confused with the HO of the Catholic Church, this kind of book is in a genre similar to the “midrashic” approach to tackling stories in a more contemporary manner, giving voice to those who were originally denied expression (The Red Tent, etc)–or taking a sketchy skeleton of a story and adding flesh to make the bones live. And that’s why people get all riled up: in a way it’s a resurrection of the dead.
I did enjoy the inventiveness of the plot, but the action sequences were plodding and unbelievable, and the dialogue unnecessarily melodramatic. Angels & Demons (Dan Brown’s previous book, which takes place in the Vatican on the eve of electing a new pope) was much better, IMHO.
Sam: Of course it’s a work of fiction. Or is it… hmmmm
The controversy over The Da Vinci Code is so stupid. Someone forgot to tell the Catholic Church — as well as the book’s adoring readers — that it is a work of fiction. It’s not meant to be taken as historical fact.
Opus Dei Rabbi. Opus Dei, not rei. Read the article!
The conspiracy folks and catholic extremists have plenty of ammo. I read that the writer that adapted the book to a screenplay is Jewish. Especially that the book takes aim at opus rei, the anti- vatican II folks.
The Davinci Code has an
interesting but unnecessary way of disproving Christianity. The Ramban
knocked them out Christianity in 1263 with a rational punch. The most
famous of all Jewish-Christian debates was between the apostate Jew Pablo
Christiani and Moses Nachmanides (the
Ramban) in Barcelona, Spain, 1263.
Nachmanides argued that the central issue separating Christianity and Judaism was not the
issue of Jesus’ messiahship, but whether or not Jesus was divine. There was no
basis in Judaism, Nachmanides said, for believing in the divinity of the Messiah
or, indeed, of any man. To Nachmanides, it seemed most strange "that the
Creator of heaven and earth resorted to the womb of a certain Jewess and grew
there for nine months and was born as an infant, and afterwards grew up and was
betrayed into the hands of his enemies who sentenced him to death and executed
him, and that afterwards… he came to life and returned to his original place.
The mind of a Jew, or any other person, cannot tolerate this." Nachmanides told
the Spanish monarch, "You have listened all your life to priests who have filled
your brain and the marrow of your bones with this doctrine, and it has settled
with you because of that accustomed habit." Had King James heard these ideas
propounded for the first time when he was already an adult, Nachmanides implied,
he never would have accepted them." (excerpt from Jewish Literacy)
more here