Bart Ehrman, The Da Vinci Code, and the historical Jesus

This post marks the return to blogging of the fingers on my bruised left hand. They're not 100% yet but it seems that I can type today, more or less.

"If Dan Brown had gotten all his facts straight, there would have been no compelling reason for me to write this book. But he didn't... It would not have taken that much homework (a few hours, maybe) to learn that the Dead Sea Scrolls didn't contain any Christian documents, or that the Gospel of Philip is not in Aramaic, or that there were not thousands of documents from Jesus' own day recording his activities..."

I've been under a bit of pressure, the past few months, to read The Da Vinci Code. This kind of pressure: "So, James, you study religion, and stuff. What do you think of The Da Vinci Code?"

Eventually, months ago, I caved and borrowed a copy. My unfortunate injury gave me the perfect opportunity to finish reading it this weekend, and also to read Bart Ehrman's handy-dandy Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code. I was originally intending to blog my take on the novel itself, but what follows will probably end being more like a review of Ehrman's book about it.

Bart Ehrman's take on The Da Vinci Code is much like mine, although I gather he liked reading it more than I did ("I must say that I like it a lot and think... that it's a terrific page-turner"). Sadly, I think that two university degrees in English have destroyed my ability truly to enjoy prose this horrendous. ("Clockwork, Langdon thought. Leave it to the Swiss.")

Where Ehrman and I concur is that this novel has a whole lot of false history in it. By "false history" I don't mean, and Ehrman doesn't mean, the sort of poetic license or deliberate bending that one sees for aesthetic reasons in historical romances. We mean the stuff that is meant to be understood by the reader as a factual basis for the fictional action.

Cover page of Dan Brown's novel: "FACT... All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." Both Ehrman and I are quite concerned about the fact that the descriptions of documents in The Da Vinci Code are anything but accurate. It's a shame, really, that millions of people are going to end up with so many wrong impressions about the historical record.

Ehrman's top ten list of factual errors in The Da Vinci Code still lives online, but before I get to a couple of those specifics, I want to mention one of my favourite sections of his book... the final section of his introduction, subtitled "How Critical History Gets Done." History students, here's a nice little Ehrman quote for your fridge, also suitable for framing:

Some people are inclined simply to believe anything found in a canonical source... whereas others are inclined to believe anything that contradicts a canonical source. This latter approach is especially favoured by people who are attracted to conspiracy theories—but also by intellectually curious people who believe the maxim that "the winners write the history" and are therefore intrigued by the possibility of recovering the "other side" of the story. Critical historians can't approach sources in that way, automatically favouring one side against the other. Instead, every source has to be carefully weighed and evaluated.

That's the problem with the "history is written by the winners" maxim, which, by the way, is embraced without reservation by Dan Brown. It's a vulgarism, really. It's not terribly useful for anyone interested both in history and in accuracy. One problem is of course that neither winners nor losers ever have an exclusive copyright on the facts.

So, speaking of Dan Brown, and historical accuracy, here are just a couple of inaccuracies that made me laugh out loud in nerd-esque fashion:

quote:

"Fortunately for historians," Teabing said, "some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert."

fact:

The Dead Sea Scrolls are strictly Jewish documents. They have zero Christian content and zero Jesus content. They date back variously as far as 100 years before Jesus' crucifixion. (note to Dan Brown: Read them! They're interesting, for students of religious history. I hear you're into that kind of thing. For fun, go to Cleveland and take a look at one. I bet you can afford the trip.)

quote:

"Also rumored to be part of the [Sangreal] treasure is the legendary 'Q' Document—a manuscript that even the Vatican admits they believe exists."

fact:

Of course the Vatican believes that Q exists—it's in the Bible! (It's also online, by the way.) "Q" is shorthand for the German word Quelle or "source" and simply refers to the material that the gospels of Matthew and Luke have in common that they didn't crib from the gospel of Mark, or more precisely, the hypothetical document that they drew said material from. (The basic idea is that, since the common material didn't come from the gospel of Mark, it must have come from somewhere, as Matthew and Luke appear to have been working independently—though that can be credibly disputed. That and the fact that no one's ever claimed to see an actual copy of Q are what make it "hypothetical.")

quote continued:

"Allegedly, it is a book of Jesus' teachings, possibly written in his own hand."

"Writings by Christ Himself?"

"Of course," Teabing said. "Why wouldn't Jesus have kept a chronicle of His ministry? Most people did in those days."

fact:

Uh. Dude. No. Most people, the vast majority of people, almost certainly including the peasant Jesus, were illiterate.

I could go on but you get the idea. If the devil is in the details then maybe religious conservatives are right that that Devil is in this book. But what I like about Ehrman's review of the novel is that he takes pains to distance himself from those who have a religious bone to pick with Dan Brown and sticks to the historical problems with it.

Ehrman gives considerably attention to two fallacies of the novel that have wider implications.

The first is that Constantine created a Bible that superseded other testaments to Jesus' humanity with a fabrication—the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—of his divinity. Ehrman points out that one basic problem with this idea is that, of all the suriviving gospels, it is those four canonical ones that actually give the most weight to his humanity. The non-canonical gospels, contrary to the novel's presentation, put far more weight on Jesus' divinity than the canonical ones do. (Another basic problem is that Constantine had nothing to do with the formation of the Biblical canon.)

Another fallacy in the novel is that the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is a "matter of historical record." This is just plain wrong. There is no suggestion of this in any documents that survive from antiquity, period. None. Nada. Zip. Not in the Bible, not in non-Biblical gospels, not in any outside sources. Zero.

And what about Jesus himself? What sort of contemporary (to Jesus) documentation is there of his life? Ehrman has worse news, for you, really, if you didn't know it already. There's none.

There are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus, no birth or other official records, nothing of that sort.

The first mentions of Jesus in pagan sources come after the first century. The first non-Christian Jewish mention of Jesus (by the historian Josephus) comes near the end of the first century as well. That means that the oldest and best historical records that we have of Jesus' life are the canonical gospels themselves (uncool, to the Dan Browns of this world, but sadly true), and those were written in the last three decades of the first centuries, or at least 40 years after his death, roughly. And, as Ehrman says, "This is not simply the view of Christian historians who have a high opinion of the New Testament and its historical worth; it is the view of all serious historians of antiquity of every kind, from committed evangelical Christians to hardcore atheists."

The noncanonical gospels are interesting in all kinds of ways, but they have significantly less to add to our historical picture of Jesus than even the canonical gospels. Ehrman demonstrates this fact with a nice overview of some of the greatest non-canonical hits, so to speak: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (my personal favourite... the funniest Jesus text evah), the Gospel of Peter, the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas.

Ehrman goes on to argue that we are not left without methods for reconstructing the life of the historical Jesus, and gives a brief introduction to some of those methodologies. It is a well-written and clear section but suffice it to say that I am not quite as optimistic as he is that we can know very much about Jesus' historical life with great confidence. His historical existence and his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate constitute the extent of what cannot be seriously questioned, in my view. I'm all for advancing and arguing hypotheses about his life and ministry, but, in the end, our reach always exceeds our grasp, I think, in the historical Jesus game.

One more quote, neither Brown nor Ehrman this time, but Dale Allison (from his book Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet):

Modesty becomes us. We may well have our convictions... but whether our convictions constitute knowledge we can never discover. We simply do not know.

As historiographical principles go, that's not much of a unit shifter, is it.

For a more thorough Da Vinci debunking, see Laura Miller's Salon.com article "The Da Vinci crock".