That Da Vinci Thingy

     Okay, I give. The Da Vinci Code, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Christ the Lord, The Jesus Papers. I could fill this entire column just reciting the titles of books that have been published over the last few years with "revisionist" versions of Christian history.

    Take your pick as to the flavour that strikes your fancy. Brown, and Baigent and his coauthors, in Da Vinci, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and the Jesus Papers, are big on conspiracy theories. Conspiracies are always popular. We all know there just has to be some secret society somewhere that's mucking about with things. Everything from the Kennedy assassination to the missing scoop of raisins in my bran cereal is the result of someone's covert activity in the bowels of some ancient cathedral somewhere in Europe. And for those of you who like your conspiracy a little on the kinky side, Brown throws in guys who tie pointy bracelets around their legs and beat themselves with whips. Oh the pain of true faith!

     Anne Rice, whose previous claim to fame was writing vampire novels, writes an account of Jesus' childhood in Egypt, drawn from the infant gospel of Thomas among others; ancient manuscripts similar to the recently trumpeted Gospel of Judas. Ms. Rice spins it into a good yarn. Having Joseph tell Jesus to resurrect a playmate when the neighbours complain (Jesus killed him when he got in a snit you see) is priceless.

     But of course it’s the DA Vinci Code that's caught everyone's imagination. I should be so lucky as to have a publicist like Dan Brown's. A whole week of Da Vinci "Code" programming on the Discovery Channel the week that the movie opens. Sheesh.

     Yes, I've read the book. And yes I plan to see the movie. But folks. It's a novel. A murder mystery. Fiction. It isn't supposed to be true. I know that Brown mentions several "true" things in the opening pages. Like the existence of Opus Dei. But he doesn't claim that it has an albino zealot on staff. One who might be inclined to kill a few people to make sure we never find out that Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene. For heaven's sakes, we can't even agree on whether or not Jesus had brothers and sisters.

     Did the early church exclude a lot of stuff? Yes. Are we finding out more and more about the history of our faith? Yes.

     Are we likely to ever know the absolute and complete truth of the life of Jesus of Nazareth? Not this side of the Pearly Gates.

     Even the Bible acknowledges its limits. "I suppose that if every one of them (the things that Jesus did) were written down the world couldn't contain the books that would be written." So says John. At the very least, we would have to have the Holy Encyclopedia instead of just one book.

     What interest in the DA Vinci Code and the others underlines for me is that most of us don't find the Sunday School versions of faith history compelling anymore. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's not really a Sunday School kind of world.

     The world is complex, and we face lots of difficult moral and ethical questions. Perhaps if we understand the rich and complex nature of the faith we call Christianity, we can accept that it didn't survive for two thousand years because everyone agreed on what it meant and played nice together. Rather, it's because it took an eternal message of radical love and made it new in each age it passed through.

     How could a roll in the hay with Mary Magdalene top that?