The idea that Jesus was (in some sense) God in human form actually appeared fairly early - Christians would say its seen in all the gospels (ie within 30-90 years of his execution). Personally, I'd say it only really begins to emerge in the last and latest gospel: John (ie 90-100 years after Jesus). The 'Trinity' - as in the way in which Jesus-as-God fitted in with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit - took much longer to work out. Debates over the fine points of that relationship went well into the Fifth Century.
Well, there was no 'Church'
per se when the idea of Jesus being God developed, just a loose collection of small Christian communities scattered across the Mediterranean. People often use 'the Church' anachronistically in reference to this period, thinking there was some organised, hierarchical institution which somehow imposed ideas from above. That didn't come until centuries later.
Dan Brown's novel has perpetuated the idea that some Christians - the Gnostics - believed Jesus was 'simply a mortal prophet' and believed Jesus married Mary Magdalene and this 'bloodline'. That's pure modern fantasy. The Gnostics actually didn't believe Jesus was a man at all: they regarded him as a pure spirit who simply had the appearance of a man, so their view of Jesus was not more 'human', it wasn't human at all. Dan Brown actually manages to get their theology totally backwards.
As for Jesus marrying Mary and fathering children, there is precisely
nothing in any of the Gnostic texts or anything we know about them to indicate this. That is based on some modern, clumsy misreadings of Gnostic texts and some wildly kooky wishful thinking. The Gnostics actually thought sex was bad, took a dim view of marriage and their elite were celibate.
The 'bloodline' theory isn't ancient at all. In fact, it dates all the way back to 1982, when
Holy Blood Holy Grail (Brown's main source of 'information') was published by three amateur kooks. It never appeared before then and was wholly invented out of their active imaginations and their bizarre approach to connecting 'evidence'.
No. That's what Brown (following the HBHG authors) claims, but anyone who has studied the Gnostic gospels
in context knows that this is completely wrong. The Jesus of the Gnostics was
less human than the Jesus of the canonical gospels, not more. That's the main reason the Gnostic sects were marginalised and their 'gospels' were rejected. That and the fact that Gnosticism was a later, variant offshoot of Christianity and their texts were written up to 300 years after the fact.
The 'Dossiers Secret' are definitely fakes and the so-called 'Priory of Sion' was clearly a clumsy Twentieth Century hoax. So all of Brown's claims about them and about Leonardo promptly collapse in a heap. But there is also no evidence in the Gnostic gospels or anywhere else that Jesus married anyone, let alone Magdalene.
Brown tries to claim that the passage in the Gnostic
Gospel of Philip where it says Jesus used to kiss Mary 'often' means they were married. This ignores the Gnostics' ambivalent attitude to marriage. More importantly, it ignores what this kiss meant to the Gnostics - in an earlier passage in
Philip (which Brown doesn't bother to mention) Jesus explains the mystical and symbolic meaning of this kiss. It represented the passing and sharing of knowledge (the
gnosis that gave the Gnostics their name), not anything romantic or sexual.
Another Gnostic text has Jesus kissing his brother James on the mouth, embracing him and calling him 'My Beloved!'. If we're going to take Jesus kissing Mary at simplisitic face value and pretend he therefore married her, then we also have to conclude that he was having a homosexual and incestuous affair with his brother. Please don't tell Dan Brown about that passage; he might write another one of his crappy novels ...
Brown also claims that 'any Aramaic scholar can tell you' that the word 'companion' used about Mary Magdalene means 'spouse'. Except the opinion of 'any Aramaic scholar' would be irrelevant, because the
Gospel of Philip is written in Coptic. And the word in question -
koinonos - isn't Aramaic or Coptic - it's a Greek loan word. Greek had plenty of words for 'wife', 'spouse', 'sexual partner', 'betrothed' etc, but
koinonos wasn't one of them. It simply means 'travelling companion', 'associate' or 'business partner' with no sexual or romantic overtones at all.
Which is, like all Brown's second-hand pseudo theories, a muddle of nonsense.
There is some good evidence that these Celtic legends did influence or somehow inspire the Grail stories. But this is not a case of 'the Church' stealing anything. The Grail legends were simply medieval fantasy fiction. They were nothing to do with the Church, were never part of Church doctrine and were simply enteraining stories of a mystical nature which later took on some Christian significance. The Church had about as much to do with the Grail as MI6 has to do with James Bond.
Considering that we could write what we 'know' about the historical Arthur on the back of a large postage stamp, it's pretty hard to say what his religion was. Given when he probably existed, it's actually more likely he was a Christian. Even if he wasn't, the Grail stories didn't become part of the Arthurian Cycle until the Twelfth Century when the 'Graal' appeared in Chretien de Troyes' unfinished romance
Parceval. Chretien may have been influenced by earlier Celtic cup/cauldron stories via Brittany, but the 'Graal' (which he never explained and which had nothing to do with Christ or Arthur in his story) seems to have been his invention.
In other words, all this
Da Vinci Code-inspired Grail babble is a bit like people in 1000 years time looking at fragments of Tolkien, bits of Peter Jackson's movies and newpaper articles about those 'Hobbit' fossils they found in Indonesia and concluding that people in the Twenty-first Century were all three and a half feet tall.
There are many texts which were known to have been written very late by fringe sects of Christianity which actively rejected the traditions of Jesus' first followers and which were, therefore, not considered scriptural.
So says the 'Gospel according to Dan Brown'. See above for the real story.
Not that strange, considering there was a strong tradition of holy celibacy in Judaism in his time. The elite of the Essenes were celibate. All of the Theraputae were celibate. The famous holy men Bannus and John the Baptist were celibate. Paul, himself a rabbi and a student of the famous Pharisee Gamaliel, was celibate. Jesus is reported as praising those who choose celibacy 'for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven'. So it was not the usual path, but it was a choice holy men could and did make.
And 'Rabbi' wasn't a title or an office with any rules or expectations in Jesus' time - that came later. 'Rabbi' simply meant 'teacher'.
He
could have, there's just zero evidence he did.
This is more 'Gospel according to Dan Brown'. It's fantasy. Constantine had absolutely nothing to do with the choosing of which texts made up the Biblical canon and if those who did tried to erase 'the majority of bible sources that portrayed Jesus as human and wanted only the divine aspect of his personality' they did a really bad job. If they had wanted to do that, they should have included the Gnostic gospels (which make him totally divine) and left out Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which have him doing very human things like getting angry, weeping, using humour, playing with kids and getting violent.
This is more Da Vinci nonsense. The Church never said Magdalene was a prostitute - that was simply a folk belief that arose later. And there is no evidence that she was 'from an excellent lineage', in fact we know nothing about her family at all. Brown got that bit of fantasy from a New Age author called 'Margaret Starbird' and it's based on nothing but her fertile imagination.
Hint -
The Da Vinci Code is a cheap thriller written by a High School teacher. It isn't a history text book and Dan Brown is an appalling researcher who manages to get almost all of his history totally wrong.
The Holy Grail
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Shyam Popat
What I mean is that the symbol of a "grail" or chalice with magical properties was common in Pagan religions. This is a common theme in Christianity.
