The Jesus Seminar asserts a lot, but has proven nothing.
The same is true of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, and Josh McDowell- three men I regard as spiritual authorities.
One advantage TDVC has over the Jesus Seminar- the JSem gives us a severely truncated Jesus. Who the hell finds that inspiring? At least TDVC gives us a Jesus who is a New Age “God Within” Guide, a Sex-Magician, and a Dynastic Founder. Not the Biblical Jesus, but better than the bland Galilean riddler who said only 10% & did nothing miraculous of what’s attributed to him.
The JS is not trying to “inspire” anybody. They’re trying to apply disciplined, historical methodology to recover what can be known for certain about the origins of Christianity.
It’s also inaccurate to say that the JS “asserts” anything it can’t back up. A lot of what it does is vote on probabilities and levels of certainty and that gets distorted by opponents. The things it does assert as factual are indeed quite factual. The JS does not deal in a priori beliefs or religious agendas (and most of them are Christians, by the way). They are real scholars practicing genuine scholarship. They are not just making things up.
By contrast CS Lewis was a great fantacist but not a Bible scholar and only a mediocre apologist. McDowell is no Bible scholar either but a journalist turned evangelist and is pretty much cardboard as an apologist. His books are popular with the converted but I assure you they are easily and frequently shredded by knowledgable critics.
No offense, Friar but you can’t compare legitimate, credentialed scholars to evangelical lay apologists who presume their own conclusions. They are not in the same ballpark.
You’re not kidding. After hearing about Lewis over and over, I tried to read the book. I gave up after the first chapter; it had more holes than Swiss cheese.
I guess it’s rather a semantical merry-go-round asking whether an organisation comprising two or three guys and some faked documents is “real” or not. Dan Brown certainly comes across as ignoring the outright debunkings of the last two decades.
Feh. Since the book is fiction and not even “serious” fiction I don’t know why anybody would get all that worked up over it. It’s not like we’ve had systematic debunkings of claims in the Illuminatus trilogy on this board.
I see quite a few posts here harping on the fact that meny ida of browns were false. Many were. However the question is why is he making such a fuss is the topic, not the validity of his claims, and many of the issue he raises are valid. He let me list them.
Catholic church is big and sinister? Check.
Davincni’s painting looking suspicous? Check.
There are many more I could list, but I try not to “do cookies” and post, and I am on a serious sugar high.
The authors made no effort to pass off anything about the book as true, and it has a sense of humor about itself. It also takes on a less controversial topic (a secret society that may exist vs. a Church that does).
Anyway, I’m about halfway through this book right now, and I fear that some of the sentences have given me brain damage. But with whatever braincells I have left, I’ll say this much: anyone who interprets it as an attack on the Bible is loony. An attack on the Roman Catholic Church, Opus Dei, organized Christianity, and albinos? Sure. The Bible? No. The Bible hasn’t even come up very much. It’s a book, and a book written by people instead of god and twisted by various people and organizations. Not everybody believes that, but that’s hardly a revolutionary thing to say. Although I suppose the people who do believe the Bible is the literal word of god are pretty touchy.
I have a cousin who recently finished the Da Vinci Code, and he came to me (assuming that since I studied religion I would know everything Dan Brown was talking about) to find out which claims DB makes are true and which are false (and why). This book fascinates him very much. From what he has said about it, it seems that as a novel it is very, very well written. Everything holds up - and therein lies the fault when it comes to people believing it true or false. Sure, it’s fiction, but many people don’t treat it that way. DB’s claims make sense, they’re coherent and without contradictions, they may have been possible - therefore, they may be true. Given people’s tendency to mistrust large, hierarchical organizations and root for the underdog (in this case, the supressed truth) - especially when it sounds far better than what the big, bad hierarchical organization is saying - it’s easy to see why people tend to lean towards accepting it as fact. In other words, what is there in his claims - other than they may not be true - for which one should not accept them as fact?
People who read this book and believe it’s true - and it seems that there are many out there that do - will then have a distorted view (to put it kindly) of Christianity and the evolution thereof.
My cousin told me how the book inspired protests against Opus Dei in New York. I laughed quite hard at this. Quite ridiculous. Protesting Opus Dei, I can see. But doing it because of what’s written in a novel? Preposterous.
Plus, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory.
Although I must add that some of the arguments I have heard that he makes are nothing new. The Church supressing gospels, repressed feminism in the early Church, role of a female figure (Mary Magdalen, BVM, Sophia) - nothing new, these. The reason why they have captured the ordinary people’s imagination now is because they have been presented in such an entertaining manner that they will stick in people’s minds.
Consider: if a book were written of the Vatican freeing itself from New-Agey conspiracies claiming to be the truth, it would not sell as well (at least amongst the general populace). Write a book about New-Agey conspiracies freeing itself from the Vatican, and it sells well. Catholic-bashing has always been popular, sad as it may be.
I have to insist that it is not even close to well-written. It’s not really well-researched either; the word “symbologist” appears 100 times if it appears once. It doesn’t have characters, just people who explain what the author wants the reader to know. (Come to think of it, it explains a lot: it’s bad writing, but maybe more persuasive because there’s no subtlety at all.) Some of the passages are agonizing. The guy wrote an okay popcorn movie in the form of a bad book.
However, a lot of the things you say are true. And let’s not forget that most people don’t know anything about Leonardo, the Mona Lisa, Christianity, or secret societies. The things Brown says play into each other very well, and since he at least implies they’re all true, people think there really is a plot within the Church to hide the truth about these things and so on. I mean, doing research on this board showed me that it’s traditional to show John the Apostle as youthful and effeminate, that Renaissance standards of masculinity were different, and that Leonardo’s painting is absolutely normal in both respects. But millions of people have read this thing and they don’t know that; they’d have no way to. It’s preying on ignorance, just like a lot of other conspiracy theories have done.
I’m not convinced by these claims, nor was I convinced by The Da vinchi Code. However, the claims that he stole from “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” make alot of sense to me, while the debunking does not. I could have gone all my life without replying to this older topic, however, I felt I needed something on topic to frame the following quotes from a recent article :
The way the idea of Jesus having not died on the cross works with muslim theology, while the descrtions of “clues” found in painting works, as described, and the concept that the catholic churh is a bunch of liars works who steal other peoples land qorks with it’s sorrid history, and what I lnoow of the Merowvingian kings.
It might all be alot of nonsense, but it hangs together better than many fairy tails I have heard. When I first read it, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if it were true?”
Please note I am speaking of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” here, and not a popular rip-off I could name.
Which still places it a few light years away from the Land of Plausible. I’m familiar with all of these ideas; I don’t see why any of them are cooler than the standard Christian version, really. Jesus not dying in the first place seems less unbelievable than a resurrection, but there’s still no evidence from any of it. All that seems to exist is a story from a line of kings trying to justify their legitimacy.
I just explained why. That, plus the fact that the Merovingians haven’t really affected my family, whereas I can point to any number of ways that I believe that the world would have been better without the church. Note that I said, “believe”, not would be" It’s the fact that it is easy to admiire celebrites who have no effect on your life on one hand, and on the other hand, have never interfered with your life.
