Da Vinci Code, Mary & Jesus

How did a pulp fiction bestseller become a headache for the Vatican and a fascinating alternative for a public that has little connection to the Church?

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Rachael Kohn: One thing people are agreed on is that The Da Vinci Code is making history, but what kind of history? Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Spirit of Things on ABC Radio National.

Is it the history of Hollywood blockbusters, or the history of pulp fiction, or is it the history of Christianity? There's no doubt that some of the 40-million people reading the book were hoping to find out the Truth about the origins of the church that no one had revealed before.

Well that's what the author, Dan Brown, would have you believe. But it seems that there is not much about the book that's new, and not much about the book that's true. Why let that stand in the way of a good story, where Mary Magdalene marries Jerusalem's most available bachelor?

Elizabeth Fletcher is an author and specialist in Biblical women. She'll tell us what she thinks of The Da Vinci Code, and later we'll hear what today's leading scholar of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, Geza Vermes, has to say about it, and also about the recently discovered Gospel of Judas and The Jesus Papers.

Apart from anything else, The Da Vinci Code, which is now a film, has the effect of bringing people out of their corners, putting up their arguments in defence of the Bible and promoting their historical knowledge of the ancient world.

Elizabeth Fletcher is a Catholic educator, and decided she was going to do more than argue with friends, she'd put up a website called womeinthebible.net to help teachers and others who might be inclined to believe that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were really married.

They were companions, after all, in the gospels. Is it likely that they had a sexual relationship?

Elizabeth Fletcher: I'd like to say Yes, but I've got to say No.

I think it's most unlikely and I'd be very surprised if it was as Dan Brown has said it is, for a number of reasons. First of all, Jesus is a Jewish rabbi, he's not a Christian, if you know what I mean, and Jewish rabbis, they're expected to behave almost perfectly by the people around them who admire them and listen to what they say. They have to be a perfect example for the people around them.

Rachael Kohn: But wouldn't they have expected him to be married?

Elizabeth Fletcher: Yes, they would have. Or at least not necessarily expected him to be married, but certainly would have accepted it if he'd been married, because the first commandment in the whole of the Bible is to be fruitful and multiply, and that's from God to man, and Jews take that very seriously.

And in fact they've always endorsed marriage and sexuality, much more so than the Christian religion have done because of that first commandment. And it was expected that a young man marry, and in fact he wouldn't have seen himself as fulfilling God's plan for himself and for humanity if he had not married.

There were exceptions to this rule, and if you were going to devote your life to study, particularly the study of the Torah obviously, then an exception could be made for you, although people would hope that eventually you would marry and they'd certainly push their eligible daughters towards you in the hope that you would accept one of them.

Rachael Kohn: So did Jesus fall into the category of the one devoted to study?

Elizabeth Fletcher: I would say so, yes. Also he wasn't a rabbi who stayed in one place, he had a mission, and he was an itinerant rabbi. And just the practicality of it, how would you provide for a wife and children (and there would be children) if you were travelling around all the time? It wasn't a practical situation.

Rachael Kohn: And of course the gospels do not describe him as married. So people who think he was married are obviously suggesting that it was kept secret, or that he had a secret relationship with Mary Magdalene.

Elizabeth Fletcher: Yes. You can fantasise about that sort of thing, but given the situation in which people in the ancient world lived, it's extremely difficult for a person in the ancient world to keep anything secret, because they lived so closely together. Their living quarters were much smaller than ours. There were many more people crowded into a room. You could not just have an affair without a lot of people being aware of it.

Rachael Kohn: Well the gospels certainly describe things about Jesus' behaviour that did arouse some anger in the community, some concerns in the community. How do the gospels deal with those sorts of allegations about Jesus?

Elizabeth Fletcher: Well now that's one of the reasons that I think it's impossible that Mary Magdalene and Jesus did have some sort of intimate personal relationship, because if he had have, his enemies after his death would have accused him of it. And they never said a word.

They did accuse him of two main things, and the first was illegitimacy. They said there was something amiss in the circumstances of his birth, and this was much more serious then because a religious teacher had to have an impeccable family background and come from parents who were respected by the whole community. So that was a big problem.

The other thing they accused him of was of being too fond of eating and drinking with the wrong sort of people. So in the gospels you'll find in the first two Gospels, Luke and Matthew, they go to a great deal of trouble to explain the circumstances of his birth. So that it becomes respectable.

The second accusation, that he ate and drank with the wrong sort of people, the gospels emphasise his enjoyment of people and they're careful to place them in the context of a ministry towards the disadvantaged in society. So again it becomes respectable. But they never say a word about any sort of sexual misbehaviour, unless they hated him, and they certainly would have said that if there was the slightest chance that they were going to be believed.

Rachael Kohn: Now speaking of misbehaviour, Mary Magdalene herself doesn't escape these kinds of allegations. People have presented her as a prostitute because Jesus healed her from the seven demons, or delivered her from the seven demons. Was she in fact a prostitute?

Elizabeth Fletcher: No, she wasn't. There's no evidence at all to say that she was a prostitute.

It's part of popular mythology, but if you actually read the gospels, which is a very unfashionable thing to be these days, but if you actually read them, you find that all the information that you're given about her is that she's the leader of a group of women who follow Jesus around, that she is a financial patron, in the tradition of, that's very popular in Judaism, where if you've done well in business, then you become the patron of somebody who's doing some good work. And she's been seriously ill, we know that about her, we don't know what sort of illness it was, we know it's serious because the word 'seven' is used to describe the demons, and people in those days thought that illness was something that came from outside, into your body, and could be exorcised. But none of this suggests that she was a prostitute.

Rachael Kohn: How did people come around to that view? How were they reading the gospels that made them think she was a salacious woman?

Elizabeth Fletcher: First of all, if you read the Gospel of Luke, just after Mary Magdalene is mentioned, there's a story of the woman with the alabaster jar, and she has all the characteristics that were later transferred on to Mary Magdalene. She's got long flowing hair, she weeps and there's tears of repentance, and she's a woman with a past. And those two stories sort of got coalesced into one story, and poor Mary becomes the woman in the following story.

She's also confused with the woman who committed adultery, and the woman is stoned. But there's no connection, it's in a completely different part of the country, it's a completely different time in Jesus' life. But there's also the point now, in the ancient world of that time, there was Platonic Dualism, that was a very popular philosophy, where everything in the cosmos was supposed to have an opposite. So you would have good, bad; man, woman; light, dark, that sort of thing, and Mary Magdalene becomes the perfect foil for the Virgin Mary.

The Virgin Mary is completely blemish-free, and Mary as an ex-prostitute is the other end of the spectrum. And the idea sort of takes off I think particularly it takes off in the minds of the celibate male clergy. I think there are a few fantasies going on there, about Mary the repentant prostitute.

Rachael Kohn: So it seems the church itself may be responsible for some of this imagining of Mary Magdalene.

Elizabeth Fletcher: Yes, well it was Pope Gregory I, and I hate to speak badly about him, because we owe Gregorian chant to him, but he's the one who muddied the waters about Mary Magdalene.

Rachael Kohn: Now there is a remnant of a text which is called the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Is that an important source for present-day speculations?

Elizabeth Fletcher: It's one of the Gnostic gospels, and this is a point Dan Brown makes. He said the gospels portraying Jesus as being very human were rubbed out, erased from Christian consciousness, and that the gospels that portrayed Jesus as divine were kept. In fact it's the reverse. The Gnostic gospels portray Jesus as some sort of super man who is very non-human. I'll give you an example.

There's a story about him as a little boy, and another little boy bumps into him and knocks him and Jesus turns around and just kills him, just strikes him dead, like that. It's really Jesus as a magician, and the Gnostic gospels show him much more as a magician. But they mention Mary Magdalene, they're writing about 200 to 300 years after the events, and if you put that in our context, it would be like writing about the First Fleet and saying Well I know this about the members of the First Fleet. Well you don't. You're just imagining it.

Rachael Kohn: Well Elizabeth, you're an educator, and particularly interested in women in the bible. You've written a book about women in the bible. What's your kind of gut reaction to The Da Vinci Code?

Elizabeth Fletcher: At first I laughed when I read it because I thought this man's research is so poor, there were so many mistakes.

For example, he's saying that Constantine imposed the belief that Jesus was divine on the Christian church at that time. Or at least he was in cahoots with the church and imposed that belief on people. But that's so obviously wrong because all the early martyrs who are there right from the very start, just think of Quo Vadis for example, all those early martyrs died because they refused to say that Jesus was not God. That's why they died. So obviously they believed that Jesus was God and were saying it right from the start of the church.

Now Dan Brown blithely says a whole lot of things that you can see quite easily are not true. And I read it, and I thought, Is this man's research just so bad, or what's going on? Or is he in fact very clever, and he's deliberately inserted a whole lot of mistakes so that people will argue back and give him publicity? And I'm inclined to think that it's a bit of both, and I think he's researched at a very shallow level from books that are a bit shonky to start with, and then he's in an almost teasing way, putting deliberate mistakes just like bait on a hook.

Rachael Kohn: So you don't think he's out to deliberately sabotage Christianity?

Elizabeth Fletcher: Not deliberately. I think that he does it, he's sabotaging it, but he's also tapping in to people's needs. I mean they wouldn't read the book if it wasn't answering their own needs, and it is a very exciting read and it's a very good detective story, it's just full of historical mistakes.

But he's also addressing I think, the feeling in Christianity especially in Christianity in the last 50 years or so, where there is no major feminine presence. Up until about 50 years ago, the Virgin Mary was very big, certainly in Catholicism, but in all of Christianity. Now she's been sort of erased, air-brushed out of Christianity, and you think, Well, hang on, half the world's population are women, where's our focus in our own religious beliefs, and if you don't have a feminine presence, you're left hanging up in the air.

Rachael Kohn: So you think in some ways this could be a genuine attempt to put Mary Magdalene or woman back into the story?

Elizabeth Fletcher: I don't know if I'd dignify it with that much praise. It might almost be accidental. Maybe he's working at a subconscious level and he realises subconsciously that people yearn for something feminine in their religious practice and beliefs.

Rachael Kohn: What do you think about religious educators who assign this book as required reading, or as even optional reading?

Elizabeth Fletcher: I think very few of them would be aware of all the mistakes that are in it, and even if they were, a lot of their students would not take in, even if they told them, 'This is a mistake'. A lot of the students wouldn't take it in and would believe what they read. So I would not ever assign it to a religious studies class. I think few people are well enough versed in ancient history to see all the pitfalls that there are there.

Rachael Kohn: And I guess that's how your website womeninthebible might be a good resource for teachers.

Elizabeth Fletcher: Yes, I hope so. Womeninthebible.net, yes I hope it would be.

There's this other mistake in The Da Vinci Code that annoys me, and that is that the fertility rites that are mentioned in it, involve a post-menopausal woman and her husband and her elderly husband. The whole point of fertility rites was procreation, it wasn't sexuality, it was about fertility in either crops or people or animals, and a post-menopausal simply would never have taken part in a fertility rite. It doesn't make sense.

Rachael Kohn: I guess its fertility rite 2006 which becomes a sex rite.

Elizabeth Fletcher: Yes, yes.

Rachael Kohn: If Jesus had been married and did have children, just like he had siblings, would it make any difference to the point of Christianity, the message? That is, has Dan Brown and all the people who support or promote the version of events that he has which is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene went off and had children, have they sort of cottoned on to something that is ultimately irrelevant in the Christian story?

Elizabeth Fletcher: I don't know what you mean by irrelevant?

Rachael Kohn: Well Jesus had siblings.

Elizabeth Fletcher: Yes.

Rachael Kohn: So what if he had children? Would that have changed anything about the Christian message?

Elizabeth Fletcher: No, I don't think so. I don't think it would. It might have changed later church practice, there mightn't have been the focus on celibacy that there was. But the two things that Jesus, two core teachings of Jesus which are 'Love God', and 'Love the people around you', they wouldn't have changed. That's sort of a universal teaching, and I can't see that that would have been affected by his having children.

I was reading John's gospel yesterday, and I came across something that convinced me that Jesus could not have been married to Mary Magdalene. There's a scene after Jesus' death, he's died, he's been put inside the tomb, Mary Magdalene and the other women come back to the tomb, look inside, the body is gone, and they're distraught. They know he's dead because they've put his dead body into that tomb, so they know that he's dead, and they can't find him, they're absolutely beside themselves. They're inside this garden area outside the tomb, and somebody comes towards Mary, and she imagines, she doesn't look at this person, she's too distraught, she says, 'Where have they taken the body? It's gone.' and the person says to Mary, and as that person speaks, she realises it's Jesus.

Now if they had had a personal, intimate relationship, she would have responded with a name because she was past thinking logically, in that very moment, she would have responded with the name that she always called him. And the word she uses is rabbouni which is Aramaic for rabbi. Now you don't call a person that you have had an affair with, or whose child you're carrying, rabbi. You use their personal name. And when I read that, I thought, 'Ah, for me that's the clincher. You don't use a title to a person who you've had an affair with.'

Rachael Kohn: Sounds pretty convincing to me. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being on The Spirit of Things.

Elizabeth Fletcher: It's been a pleasure.

Rachael Kohn: Elizabeth Fletcher is an author in Sydney and a specialist in women in the bible, and that's the name of her websitewomeinthebible.net where you can look up all of them.

The Da Vinci Code and its rewriting of history is our topic, and coming up, one of the world's greatest scholars of Jesus and his time, Geza Vermes from Oxford University. And just a reminder that last year on May 1st 2005 to be precise, I spoke with a number of other scholars on the topic. You can look at the transcript on our website.

MUSIC

Rachael Kohn: Geza Vermes has been publishing on the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christianity for more than 50 years. In fact, he was the first person to release an English translation of the complete Dead Sea Scrolls in 1953. And when the Scrolls came to Australia in 2000, he came out from Oxford to lecture here.

He's published at least five books on Jesus, and many others besides. Geza Vermes was born in Hungary. He went to Paris after the war, and then to England, where now he's Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University. He's speaking to me from Oxford.

Geza Vermes, welcome to The Spirit of Things.

Geza Vermes: I'm delighted to be back.

Rachael Kohn: Geza you wrote an amusing article for The Times about The Da Vinci Code, which likened the Dan Brown phenomenon, and the saga in the courts to a kind of new bible, a very gripping narrative. Now I know that you had your tongue firmly in your cheek, but is his worldwide success, which I understand is about 40-million copies sold, is that a serious issue for Christianity?

Geza Vermes: Only for people who are ready to believe anything. The rewritten history of Jesus by Dan Brown is really pure fiction, and in my view not very good fiction either, and certainly not particularly original. So I don't think that Christianity needs to be greatly worried about the extraordinary success of this book.

Rachael Kohn: But how about the Vatican's reaction? I think it's quite concerned, is it not?

Geza Vermes: Well I think they have over-reacted, and that they are playing into the hands of the publishers of the book. In fact the best thing would have been to warn people that this is fiction, and this is not something they ought to take seriously.

Rachael Kohn: Haven't other writers tried to flesh out Jesus' life in popular ways before? I think of Ernest Renan, who wrote a most popular book about Jesus' life about a century ago.

Geza Vermes: Precisely, in 1863. And Ernest Renan published his Life of Jesus. But I don't think you can compare that kind of fiction that they produce today. Renan was an outstandingly good scholar, but what he did was to use his outstanding literary skill to produce a beautifully written and absolutely charming book about a charming Galilean whom he completely divested from supernatural qualities.

He wrote a book about a man, Jesus, and it was a beautifully written and highly enjoyable and 100 years ago, extremely successful book, translated also into all the languages of the creation.

Rachael Kohn: Divesting Jesus of his divinity might have concerned some people at the time.

Geza Vermes: Oh, indeed. I mean Renan got into trouble, and lost his chair at the College de France. Nevertheless, he remained a highly respected figure who was also a member of the French Academy, and whose name is surviving and will survive as long as the history of orientalism and the study of the historical Jesus continue.

Rachael Kohn: Well what about the liaison with Mary Magdalene? Who were the popularisers of that story?

Geza Vermes: That's a very funny business, because of course there is not one single trace of evidence in ancient literature which would suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were husband and wife. It is really a 20th century invention.

I think in the early 20th century there was quite a fashion in German-speaking countries to write about the marriage of Jesus and the Magdalene. In fact there was even a drama about the marriage. But more recently, the story began with Nikos Kazantzakis famous novel The Last Temptation of Christ.

It was published in the early 1950s, and then when in the 1980s it became an absolutely outstandingly successful film, made by Martin Scorsese, then of course this relationship added in Jesus and Mary Magdalene and became part of the popular imagination. This then was taken up by Baigent and Leigh in their successful story published in 1982, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and then once again by Dan Brown. And before him, closer to you in Australia, by Barbara Thiering.

Rachael Kohn: Yes indeed, she also perpetuated that story about Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene, and also of course that he didn't die on the cross. But many of those people have used Gnostic sources, Gnostic writings that were discovered in the 20th century, in the '40s. Were the Gnostics doing what Dan Brown is doing today? Were they also reinventing history?

Geza Vermes: Well they were certainly rewriting history. But really what the Gnostics did from this point of view was to insist a close relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Which of course is part of the New Testament story too.

Mary Magdalene appears close to Jesus during his lifetime and at the Cross, and in the stories about the Resurrection. However the Gnostics following their own philosophy, did not believe in the flesh, in the material world. They considered that the spiritual things were absolutely above earthly matters, and from this point of view, they would be the last people who would invent an ordinary marital relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It is never written in any of the Gnostic documents so far discovered, and deciphered. So this is once more a complete exaggeration.

Rachael Kohn: Well Michael Baigent has added another chapter to his amazing output, called The Jesus Papers. What are these papers?

Geza Vermes: Well The Jesus Papers, according to Baigent, are two large papyrus documents which were obtained somehow by an anonymous Israeli antique dealer who was a friend of Baigent. His identity is kept dark, he doesn't want to divulge who he is. And according to this antique dealer, he got hold of two papyri, quite large pieces, which according to him, can be dated to AD 34.

So shortly after the time of the apparent crucifixion of Jesus. According to Baigent, this friend showed these two documents which he obtained in the early 1960s to two of the leading Israeli archaeologists of the time, Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad, and apparently these two people declared that the documents were authentic and important. They were asked to be discreet. According to Baigent and his informant they were not discreet, they spoke about it. The news reached the Pope, then John XXIII, and John XXIII picked up his pen and immediately wrote a letter instructing the two archaeologists to destroy the documents. So they say.

But as a matter of fact we have no evidence other than Baigent who was apparently shown the two papyri, but then he had to admit that he doesn't know any ancient language. So he couldn't read them. So he realised only to the unsubstantiated information of an anonymous authority who says that somebody now dead, said that this was so. This is not much evidence.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. Now the content of these letters I understand are letters from Jesus to the Sanhedrin or the High Court, saying that he's not divine, he is a man. Now I guess this satisfies the secular humanist position?

Geza Vermes: Well it would satisfy the secular humanist position, but of course to any serious secular humanist I would say, Well what is the evidence to show that these documents exist? Today, nobody knows where they are, and whether they actually say this. Nobody who can read the document has been able to ascertain that there is a letter by Jesus to the Sanhedrin in which he says No, I am not God. All this is, in my view, until the proof to the contrary, must be treated as pure imagination.

Rachael Kohn: Well that won't stop it from being taken as another confirmation of The Da Vinci Code. That was Geza Vermes, whose latest book is Who's Who in the Age of Jesus, which we feature this week on The Ark.

Well you may be thinking, why all the fuss about an 'airport novel?' It seems it's one of many in a very popular genre. Still it gives us an opportunity to speak to eminent scholars like Geza Vermes, who probably enjoys being brought out of that Oxford ivory tower, and into the swim of popular culture. He's speaking to me from Oxford.

Now what about the other blockbuster, The Gospel of Judas? What are the ancient credentials of that document?

Geza Vermes: Well this is a totally different kettle of fish. The Gospel of Judas is a genuine ancient document, but when I say 'ancient', the document itself is probably from the 4th century. It is a Coptic translation of a document which was probably originally written in Greek in the latter part of the 2nd century. That is to say about 150 years after the time of Jesus and Judas.

It is not a contemporary document, it is a typically Gnostic text which informs us about the ideas of 2nd or 3rd century Gnostics, and has absolutely nothing to say about the historical Judas or the historical Jesus. In other words, this is a valid document for the study of Gnosticism, it is totally unsuitable for the reconstruction of 1st century AD Jewish history in which both Jesus and Judas play their part.

Rachael Kohn: In The Gospel of Judas, Judas comes off as a good guy, and certainly not someone who betrays Jesus, but someone who actually does what Jesus requests of him. And Gnosticism was famous for turning things on its head. Turning good into evil and that sort of thing. Is that one of the reasons why this kind of material is so popular today?

Geza Vermes: It is always interesting to hear something that is the complete opposite of what you are accustomed to. But really, to understand this situation, you have to bear in mind that Gnostics consider the world as we see it, the creation not of God, but of a sort of inferior being, compared to God, a Demiurge and the Demiurge is responsible for the creation of all the material things, for the body, for the word as it is, whereas the supreme being, the supreme being represented by Jesus, and the supreme being which according to The Gospel of Judas was worshipped by Judas, was responsible only for the spirit of things spiritual.

So for the Gnostics anything that is good from the point of view of those who worship the creator-God, the God of the Jews, the God of the Old Testament, are really mistaken, and they are worshipping what is in truth evil. Whereas those who follow the supreme being revered by Jesus, and as I say worshipped by Judas, take the opposite point of view. And consequently, for the Gnostics, Old Testament characters like Cain or New Testament characters like Judas, are the goodies, and the 11 apostles and the holy men of the Old Testament are the baddies. So this is how you get the story of The Gospel of Judas.

Rachael Kohn: So greatly attractive to people who want to subvert the church, subvert what is widely believed.

Geza, you are of all the people doing New Testament research, the person who has most focused on Jesus. So many of your books have filled out that picture of who Jesus was. How reliable are the Gospels as sources for building up your perception of who Jesus was?

Geza Vermes: Well I am the first person to accept that the gospels are not history books.

The purpose of the gospels was to convey the story of Jesus with a view to instructing their readers about what they were to believe. The fact that they opted for the biography form allows the historian to distinguish those elements which perfectly fit within the history of 1st century Judaism. And this allows one to list a certain number of basic elements, on which the story of the historical Jesus can be built.

We can be sure that he was a Galilean Jew. We can be sure that he was born roughly at the very end of the reign of Herod the Great who died in 4BC. You can be sure that his public activity happened during the time when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, that is to say between 26 and 36 AD. That the High Priest was Caiaphas, who was High Priest from 19 to 36 AD. And so consequently the Jesus story very nicely fits around the reign of the emperor Tiberius, who died in AD 37, and consequently what we generally believe, that Jesus roughly was active around AD 30, is a very likely assumption.

Finally, Jesus is described as a faith healer, and we know that such people existed in 1st century Judaism. He is described as one who announces the coming of the Kingdom of God, and decidedly was very popular in the 1st century. So we have got a great amount of parallel material which would roughly confirm the general ideas about the historical setting of the life of Jesus.

Rachael Kohn: But can we be sure he wasn't married?

Geza Vermes: Well we can't be sure that he was not married, although we certainly cannot be sure that he was married either. Because the matter is explicitly not mentioned.

Rachael Kohn: Geza, may I suggest to you that your several books on Jesus challenged a popular view that Jesus was not Jewish, he was kind of the antithesis of everything Jewish. You challenged that and showed in your first book, Jesus the Jew that was a wrong perception. I think you've had some impact. What do you think?

Geza Vermes: I believe, and I'm delighted to realise this, that the fact that one cannot understand Jesus, and certainly one cannot understand Jesus without realising that he was a Jew of his time, is today not only a generally accepted idea, it has become a clich� and that the phrase 'Jesus the Jew' which in 1973 when the book was first published, sounded truly shocking, is today a clich� which is accepted by everyone.

From this point of view, I think the battle has been won, but there are a great many other points on which we are still engaged in inquiry and in study, and I hope that during the 21st century, further large progress will be made from this point of view.

Rachael Kohn: Do you think Dan Brown's book, which has sold so far about 40-million copies, might send us backward? Has it undone so much of the scholarship that you and others have built up?

Geza Vermes: I do not think the Dan Brown story will be remembered in 50 years time. And don't forget that, Dan Brown has been sold in more than 40-million copies, the Bible has been sold in more than 6-billion copies. So it is still there winning the race.

Rachael Kohn: Dan Brown's got a long way to go. Geza Vermes, it's always a pleasure talking to you, thank you so much.

Geza Vermes: Delighted.

Rachael Kohn: Geza Vermes, who's been called the greatest Jesus scholar of his generation. He's Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University.

Well it's time for the one person I knew would have seen the movie, Julie Rigg, our Radio National movie critic.

Well Julie, thanks for coming on to The Spirit of Things.

Julie Rigg: Pleasure.

Rachael Kohn: We've spoken to scholars and Christians with a very special interest in the field of ancient history and Christianity, and now we're going to you, a film-goer, a film critic, you've read the book, you've seen the film. How do you think the director, Ron Howard, approached the text?

Julie Rigg: Far too reverently. I mean it's not such a great text, Rachael. When I read the book, I said this in Movietime, I found myself throwing it across the room, because it is so badly written, and kind of jerkily written.

It works efficiently as a page-turner because you know you're lured on with a series of riddles and clues to be cracked, and as soon as you get one answer, then two more present themselves. But after a while the kind of monotony of the jerky pace and these long slabs of exposition grated for me.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, but how did the film come across as reverential, was it sort of didactic?

Julie Rigg: Well it's didactic. But I think in approaching the best-seller, they stuck far too closely to it.

I think they must have taken the view that 40-million people around the world had read this book and therefore we can't muck about with it too much, and that's a great pity, because what you have is a film with a few bursts of action here and there, and then lots and lots of exposition, where people stand around, mostly poor Tom Hanks who looks bored out of his brain a lot of the time, and Audrey Tatou, as Sophie, explaining things to one another.

Rachael Kohn: Well I do recall in the book that Sophie is kind of a dumb young girl who has to have a lot of things explained to her.

Julie Rigg: Yes, in the book at least she had some quest for identity because of the secrecy about her own family, but this isn't really addressed even until near the end of the film. So as a film I think it's ponderous.

Rachael Kohn: Well how did they deal with the ancient history that the book purports to clear up, to address, particularly the famous Council of Nicea where Jesus' divinity is turned into doctrine, supposedly.

Julie Rigg: Well as a way of kind of pepping up these long passages of explanation one to the other, you get flashbacks.

The flashbacks are sometimes flashbacks of dreams, the main characters recalling their childhood, and indeed Silas the monk assassin also has these flashbacks. But there are also historical flashbacks, and they're all treated in this rather sort of fragmented bleached out way, but the historical flashbacks are rather funny actually.

I mean when someone's explaining the Knights Templar you get a rather dodgy snatch of the Siege of Jerusalem with a few digital fireballs being lobbed over the ramparts. And my favourite was the Council of Nicea where you get a glimpse of all the early founders and bishops of the church, and it looks like a sort of misplaced offcut from Fellini's Satyricon. There are all these people in togas sitting on tiers shouting and waving their arms. Really, I mean given the ponderousness of most Vatican Councils as we understand it, I can't believe that they spent all their time shouting at once.

So yes, these are some of the sillier.

Rachael Kohn: I wonder how many people will take that as a true fragment of a film found somewhere in Jerusalem?

Julie Rigg: I doubt very many would. I think in this case most of the audiences are more sophisticated than those segments of the film.

Rachael Kohn: Well tell me about the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Is that shown?

Julie Rigg: It's inferred. It's spoken about a lot, and it's unfurled as the great secret at the core. But you know, we're looking at paintings, we're looking again at reproductions of da Vinci's Last Supper, of the Mona Lisa. I'm not quite sure what the Mona Lisa has to say in the film, but then I was never sure in the novel either. The Madonna of the Rocks, and so on.

We're asked to see these paintings differently, as one rather feminised figure off to one side. I did think coming out of the cinema, Oh I must go and have a look at an art book and see whether that particular disciple could have been a sheila. But it's spoken of, and the whole thesis of the film is that Jesus had a partner, Mary Magdalene, that she was later cast out from the church 325 years later indeed at this very Council called by the Emperor Constantine who gets very bad press in this film, as a death-bed convert to Christianity. And that she indeed bore him a child, but that the notion of a human Christ, indeed a sexual one, had to be erased by the church. Indeed a lot of the feminine aspects of Christianity also had to be erased.

Rachael Kohn: Well the book makes an appeal to the whole contemporary trend towards pagan goddess worship. How does that theme appear in the film?

Julie Rigg: The film has a bet each way, is how it's handled.

Yes, it is appealing to that whole pagan goddess trend. I mean it is in a sense, fairly literally as I said, faithful to the book. Visually though, what we do see imaginings of visions if you like, of the tomb of Mary Magdalene lying in state and surrounded by white light. It's not particularly spectacular, any more so than the tombs of the Knights Templar that we see. But at the end of the film, what Hanks' character is saying over and over again to Sophie 'You must believe what you want to believe, what counts is what you believe'.

Rachael Kohn: Well that's very post-modern.

Julie Rigg: Yes, it is. It's one of the few jokes in the film, and I think is from the end of the book she does try walking on water, puts a toe in, and finds that doesn't really work, and says, 'Oh well, maybe I'll have better luck changing water into wine'.

Rachael Kohn: Well I guess that part of Jesus just did not get transmitted in the genetic code. But I wonder about humour in the film. I must say that I would have preferred to see The Da Vinci Code in a more Monty Pythonesque version. But was there any hint that the film was kind of laughing at itself at any time?

Julie Rigg: Not at all, sadly. And this was - the preview I attended, some of us were laughing. I gather it's happened elsewhere as well, but there's very little humour in the film. Apart from the character of Teabing who's played by Ian McKellan who relishes every moment, who really manages to get on top of his bits of exposition, and who brings a sense of mischief, otherwise sadly lacking.

Rachael Kohn: If you were laughing in the film, what do you think Christians would be doing?

Julie Rigg: I would imagine some of them would find it a little absurd.

I don't know, to be honest, Rachael. I can't see that anything as ploddingly literal as this would be offensive to Christians, but then some Christians are offended very easily and well in advance, and this has only fed into the kind of hype surrounding the film.

I think that it's been marketed quite deliberately a certain way. You've seen the billboards around on whatever it is - 'On May 18th, seek the truth', or 'know the truth'. It's been marketed as a great mystery. How you can have a great mystery about a novel that probably 3-million Australians at least have read, I don't know. But they've gone out on more cinema screens and more screenings, about 550 in Australia, more sessions, than anywhere else, and they're just hoping that the curiosity factor will bring them in millions of attendances in the first two weeks.

Rachael Kohn: Well Julie, I think I'll wait for the DVD.

Julie Rigg: I recommend the Name of the Rose myself, it's a very good novel about mad monks.

Rachael Kohn: Julie Rigg of Radio National's Movietime, on The Da Vinci Code.

If you think the film caused too much of a sensation, just remember all the seminars and televised discussions that Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ caused in the 1980s. And of course The Passion of the Christ, by Mel Gibson last year.

The question is, what's next? Jesus the Alien, probably.

The program was produced by me and Geoff Wood, with Andre Shabanov as our sound engineer this week.

Guests

Elizabeth Fletcher
is an author and Catholic educator. She has a comprehensive website called womeninthebible.net which gives an historical approach to many of the Biblical women.

Geza Vermes
was born in Hungary in 1924. He studied in Budapest and in Louvain where he read Oriental history and languages and in 1953 obtained a doctorate in theology with a dissertation on the historical framework of the Dead Sea Scrolls. From 1957 to 1991 he taught in England at the universities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1957-65) and Oxford (1965-91). He is now Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, but continues to teach at the Oriental Institute in Oxford. His many books include The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective (1977, 1981, 1982, 1994) and recently The Authentic Gospel of Jesus (2004) and The Passion (2005).

Julie Rigg
is Radio National's film reviewer and presenter of Movietime.

Further Information

Geza Vermes - Brief Biography
http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000017029, 00.html

Providential Accidents
One of the world's great scholars is Geza Vermes. In his 17th century cottage in Oxford, he tells his remarkable life story to Rachael Kohn. The Spirit of Things on ABC Radio National, 29/08/99.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s47729.htm

Dan Brown - The Official Website
http://www.danbrown.com/

Reassessing The Da Vinci Code: from novel to film
A one day course given by Ray Younis at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sydney, 10.30am - 4.30pm Saturday 15 July 2006.
http://www-secure.cce.usyd.edu.au/cgi-bin/WebObjects/CCE.woa /wa/Courses/course?ID=0634220

Elizabeth Fletcher's 'Women in the Bible'
This website looks at a range of women in the Bible, and asks the questions, what was their story and what did they think, do, and feel?
http://www.womeninthebible.net

The Essential Guide to The Da Vinci Code
Since a lot of what Dan Brown asserts as fact in The Da Vinci Code rewrites the history of early Christianity, we hear from three scholars who specialise in that field. The Spirit of Things on Radio National, Sunday 1 May 2005.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s1353832.htm

Publications

Title: The Da Vinci Code
Author : Dan Brown
Publisher: Corgi, 2004

Title: Who's Who in the Age of Jesus
Author : Geza Vermes
Publisher: Penguin, 2005