What, like the stories of divine right of rule dream up by English kings? They both sound better then, “I have a sword and I am not afraid to use it. Now, I know what you are thinking, did he fire one shot from that cross-bow or two. Well it doesn’t matter because I have as many shots at you with my sword as I need. Now bow your knees, punk.”
p.s. Do you feel lucky, punk? Huh? Do you, Mango?
note: I had planned to post some really funny lines I had in my head combining Ellens meet up with the SNL Character Mango, but put Dirty Harry in the place of Ellen, but I couldn’t find a transcript of that skit at http://snltranscripts.jt.org/01/01i.phtml but believe me, it would have been funny. Really. Stop looking at me like that, it really would have been.
There’s nothing “fringe” about the Jesus Seminar. It represents pretty much mainstream scholarship. Their conclusions might have been shocking on a popular level but they are pretty much accepted as a matter of course within critical Biblical scholarship. The JS does not really belong in the same conversation with the Merovingian theory.
Biblical scholarship, like science, tends to be plagued by populist shadow industry of pseudo-scholarship and whack-a-doodle theories (Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Jesus Lived in India, The Passover Plot, etc.) but the Jesus Seminar is not in that category (and is also much more difficult to refute).
It’s an organization of Biblical scholars (about 200 of them, I think) whose stated mission is to determine what can be known for certain about historical Jesus.
They made headlines in the 80’s by concluding that Jesus probably said less a quarter of what is attributed to him in the gospels. They employed a voting system which uses color coded beads to denote the level of certainty in the authenticity of each given saying. there is a graded system of certainty. Red is the most certain, pink is “probably said it,” etc.
They have also done similar work on the deeds of Jesus )with a similarly low number of “red” votes.
As you might expect, the JS has come under considerable fire from traditionalists but their credentials and methodology is not as assailable as something like the Merovingian theory. For one thing, the JS does not try to argue FOR any particular theories, it only makes critiques on the reliability and authenticity of the NT, for another thing the members are the real deal in terms of credentials and background.
One of the professors here at school (and the one I’ve had the majority of my religion classes with) is a member of the Jesus Seminar (though I didn’t realize he was such a recent addition to the college faculty.) I’ve seen nothing to make me think that there is anything inherently flawed in his methodology. Actually, I’ve quite enjoyed taking his classes.
Friar Ted may or may not consider the Jesus Seminar to be fringe, but I did not take that meaning from his statement. Rather, it appeared that he noted the responses among some reactionary groups to the JS and compared them to some of the reactions of uninformed people regarding The Da Vinci Code.
Well, I was trying to use spoiler boxes, but since you let the cat out of the bag:
Actually I DO think it’s unreasonable to assume that it’s anything other than conjecture, or even fancy. I don’t believe Brown claims in the book that Da Vinci said it was a woman. Brown said the art is historical fact. He didn’t say the things that the fictional characters in the book say about the art is historical fact.
What’s debatable? Whether secret societies existed? Did he make up fictional secret societies and claim that they were real? Which ones? I’m asking sincerely, because I hadn’t heard that.
Been awhile since I read the book, but
Doesn’t the “conspiracy” involve one of the main characters in a direct way? And isn’t the evidence of the conspiracy hidden in an actual place that’s referred to in the book? I don’t understand how anyone would believe that the character is a real person who has knowledge of and visits the actual place where evidence that would probably destroy the Catholic Church is hidden.
UK television recently showed an excellent treatment of the book, presented by Baldrick from Blackadder. Its main conclusions were that Da Vinci liked his boys to look like girls, and that the Priory of Scion (which Dan Brown thinks is a real organisation) was a hoax by three French guys who faked some documents: one surrealist, one academic who liked a joke, and one nutjob who wanted to show he had a Merovingian bloodline.
It made a very good case that the Holy Grail literally had more to do with Monty Python than with Dan Brown’s book.
SentientMeat…that show also had a part about the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
There is evidence that the Church DID play down the fact that Jesus had a female disciple who was given equal standing with the men. There is evidence that several leaders of the early churches were female, and that at the beginning of the church there truly was no differentiation between male and female in the set-up of the church.
Obviously, at some point that changed, and 2000 years later the Catholic church refuses to have women priests and the Anglicans has women priests, but refuses to make them bishops.
Any evidence that THESE beliefs (rather than the rubbish about Jesus and Mary Magdalene having a sexual relationship and a child) are true could indeed pose a real threat to the church as it currently is.
Can you see the pope making a statement: “Oops, sorry, Jesus actually had no problem with women in positions of leadership, we’ve been wrong about that since the beginning”?
Yes - I believe he based much of his work on the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, whose authors were led a merry dance by Pierre Plantard’s fake documents and cloak-and-dagger phone calls.
Here is a summary of the entire sorry sham, as admitted explicitly by surrealist actor Philippe de Chérisey - one of those responsible for the hoax.
Yes - one of the things I found rather disappointing with the show was that at no point did they simply say that the Gospels themselves are essentially works of fiction, and that Mary Magdalene almost certainly did not even exist. If there was a historical Jesus, ie. the guy who thought up some of the parables and teachings in the Gospels, pretty much nothing about his actual life (save, perhaps, for his execution - and he certainly would not have been buried or his body handed over to anyone in that case) can really be said to be true.
My guess is - he doesn’t care and why should he? He’s a fiction writer who’s learned to tap into the X-Files paranoia market and has deliberately hit on a nerve. He might not be a great writer but he’s a good thriller writer. Good luck to him.
Giving the benefit of the doubt to Dan Brown, he may simply have been following the “Don’t believe everything you hear / define your own reality / fight the power / have fun” credo of various Surrealists, occultists etc. If so, this would definitely be an attack on the Church, who tend to present themselves as sole arbiters of Truth and Wisdom. On the other hand DB may be more along the lines of a passive vector for the manipulations of those who originally came up with these mind-bending mishmashes of fact and fantasy. Of course the “unintended consequences” may be to create a new set of True Believers instead of encouraging creative examination of the Nature of Truth and Revelation etc.
In any case, the defensive reactions can be explained by the sheer magnitude of DBs readership, despite the obvious weakness of the book.
Whereas the Church of England itself may not yet allow women bishops, the worldwide Anglican Communion as a whole has had several female bishops. The Anglican Church of New Zealand and the Episcopal Church in the US consecrated their first female bishops (Penny Jamieson and Barbara Harris respectively) in 1989, and the Anglican Churches in Canada and Polynesia have since joined them.
The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in Ireland have both recently voted to allow women to become bishops, but none have yet been elected. IMHO it’s only a matter of time before the CofE follows suit. Women have only been priests in the CofE since 1994 (compared to the first female Anglican priests in Hong Kong in 1971, then the US, Canada, and NZ in the mid-late 70’s), so it’s not surprising that the CofE lags behind in gender equality for bishops. I’d be willing to bet that it’ll come within the next decade or so, as the dinosaurs die off.
