The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (15 page)

Chapter 5

CONSTANTINE’S CHRIST

The Development of Christology

O
ne of the gross historical errors in
The Da Vinci Code
is the claim that, in the interests of imperial propaganda, Constantine and his vest pocket bishops abruptly replaced the hitherto-prevailing understanding of Jesus as a simple mortal with the mythic view of Jesus as a god who only seemed to be human. Professor Teabing befogs his friends with great gusts of the most flagrant misinformation on this point. The emperor Constantine, he says,

was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest. In Constantine’s day, Rome’s official religion was sun worship—the cult of
Sol Invictus
, or the Invincible Sun—and Constantine was its head priest. Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome. Three centuries after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Christ’s followers had multiplied exponentially. Christians and pagans began warring, and the conflict grew to such proportions that it threatened to rend Rome in two. Constantine decided something had to be done. In 325 A.D., he decided to unify Rome under a single religion. Christianity. . . . By fusing pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into the growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties. . . . Nothing in Christianity is original. . . . During this fusion of religions, Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicea. . . . At this gathering . . . many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon [including] the divinity of Jesus. . . . [U]ntil
that
moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man, but a
man
nonetheless. A mortal . . . Jesus’ establishment as “the Son of God” was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicea. . . . By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world.
¹

Most of this is utter nonsense. Let me count the ways. For one thing, Constantine was indeed a Christian. In fact, there is reason to doubt the traditional, semilegendary story of his dramatic conversion before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, but that is not because he was no Christian. On the contrary, it now appears Constantine was born and raised a Christian.
²
True, he was baptized on his deathbed, but it was not against his will. He was merely hag-ridden with fear of forfeiting salvation through any postbaptismal slip-up. Many Christians were scared to death of this prospect, so it was actually pretty common, at least by no means unusual, to delay baptism till the deathbed. This anxiety would eventually lead to the separate sacraments of repeated penance and extreme unction (deathbed anointing). But this solution did not yet exist.

How could this Christian emperor have served as Pontifex Maximus of Sol Invictus? He did so serve but simply because it was incumbent upon him as emperor of Rome, since the state religion, as Brown/Teabing says, was that of the Unconquerable Sun. Constantine managed to declare Christianity a
religio licitas
, a legal cult like Judaism or many of the mystery cults. He certainly did not even try to unify Roman society under a single religious canopy. And this is why he had to wear both religions’ hats. It was his successor, Theodosius, who elevated Christianity to the position of the single state religion.

As for the assimilation of foreign, pagan elements into Christianity, this certainly did occur and on a scale pretty much comparable to that envisioned by Brown/Teabing. “Nothing in Christianity is original” is probably true. One can find all the maxims of Jesus in the literature of contemporary philosophy as well as among the rabbis. This fact should surprise no one except ultraorthodox Christians, who seem to imagine the world was under a blanket of moral darkness before Jesus. Beyond this, the notion of Jesus as a dying and rising savior god, the Gnostic idea of a heavenly being descending into this dark world to redeem his elect, the use of saving sacraments of bread and wine and baptism—all this was held in common with earlier mystery cults and was probably borrowed from them centuries before Constantine. The evidence is overwhelming, though conservative Christians remain stubborn in their refusal to admit it, at least publicly. How and why did such syncretism, such mixing of traditions and myths, take place? It is all part of the natural process of religious evolution in an environment, like that of the cosmopolitan world of antiquity, in which competing religions exist close together and trade adherents. An individual might belong to several of the current religions at the same time. That was common, and Constantine himself, as we have seen, was a prime example. In such a context, it would be impossible to stop each religion from rubbing off on the others. In the same way, we can trace, for example, Mithraic influence on the Attis cult. The cult of Sabazius seems to have been a fusion of Judaism and Dionysus worship.

Eventually (already in 1 Cor. 8-10) there is an attempt to prevent Christians from continuing easy participation in other religions’ sacraments. This restriction of Christians to a single religious membership resulted in a more dedicated (if also more intolerant) membership. But ironically, it also meant that now you had a single direction of influence: If there were only pagans becoming Christians, which way is the interreligious influence going to go? Pagan converts to Christianity are going to bring with them their favorite elements of their old faith. It is all natural, inevitable, inescapable. To imagine that Constantine sat down with a focus group and a panel of advertising executives to cook the whole thing up is fully as arbitrary as to say, with traditional Christians, that Christianity as we know it emerged full-blown from the teaching of the historical Jesus.

This is not to deny that there were later attempts to conquer paganism by seizing and co-opting some of their features. For instance, you can find saints’ healing shrines built over the healing shrines of Asclepius. You have to wonder if the bishops chose December 25 to celebrate Jesus’s birth (no one had kept any record of it) just because Romans already celebrated Brumalia, the nativity of Mithras, on that day. It was an easy way of getting the flock to stop attending a fun pagan party: rather like the First Night program to provide nonalcoholic diversions on New Year’s Eve. The widespread statues of Mary suckling or cradling the infant Jesus certainly owe something to the ubiquitous iconography of the Isis and Serapis faith. Things like this may well have been, as Brown intimates, cynical marketing decisions. But again, there is no reason at all to make it the fiendish scheming of a single mastermind.

Was there religious warfare in Constantine’s day? Before his time, Decius and Diocletian had persecuted Christians with state power, and before that there had been sporadic lynchings of Christians by suspicious neighbors. But Constantine faced no interreligious crisis as Teabing suggests, nor did he try to fuse paganism and Christianity. The convocation of the Council of Nicea had nothing to do with any such scenario.

Nor did Constantine initiate or preside over the transformation of a merely human Jesus into a superhuman, divine Christ as Brown claims. As any seminary freshman knows (or used to know, until Green politics and encounter groups took over the theological curriculum), Nicene orthodoxy stipulated that the Word that was made flesh (John 1:14) shared the same divine nature as the Father, but not that he was no longer to be considered simultaneously human. Subsequent councils sought only to iron out the theological wrinkles. Many of us feel uneasy with these ancient formulae, but at least let us not misrepresent them.

EARLY CHRISTIANS, EARLY CHRISTS

Some early Christians believed that Jesus Christ was a supremely righteous man who had been adopted by God either at his baptism (Mark 1:11, “You are my Son”) or at the resurrection. Acts 2:36 and Romans 1:3-4 certainly appear to preserve this understanding. The former has Peter proclaim: “Let all the house of Israel, then, know for certain that God has
made
him Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified,” that is, subsequent to his crucifixion. Likewise, the latter passage: “the message concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.” Mark’s gospel may be understood as implying this conception of Jesus. Notice that Mark has no miraculous birth narrative, but Jesus is simply shown appearing among the crowd of pilgrims to be baptized by John, and then he hears, apparently for the first time, the news from God that he is his Son. People who hold to this Christ concept are called
Adoptionists
.

This is the view closest to that which Dan Brown attributes to all early Christians before Constantine and the Council of Nicea. (Only he seems to imagine that people never called Jesus the Son of God in any sense at all until Constantine.) And it may indeed have been the earliest Christ concept, though there is no way to be sure. There is a kind of common sense to the idea that Adoptionism was first though. For instance, we find the Ebionite (“the poor”) Jewish Christians upholding this view in the second century, even rejecting the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus, once they heard about it, as a foreign pagan element. It is possible, on the other hand, that the Ebionites were rather a later Judaizing sect that thought Jesus was held in too high esteem by other Christians who thought him a divine being and that the Ebionites wanted to cut him down to size. But this runs against the current of what usually happens in religions where an initially mortal founder (Muhammad, the Buddha, Moses, Mahavira) is sooner or later exalted to a divine status formerly restricted to the God whom the founder had served as a “mere” prophet.

There are a couple of New Testament texts that seem to try to deflate exaggerated estimates of Jesus. For instance, Mark 10:17-18, “And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up to him and asked him, ‘Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? Surely no one is good, except only for God!’” Or John 12:44, “And Jesus cried out, saying, ‘Whoever believes in me, believes not in me, but in him who sent me!’” Again, in John 14:9-10, “Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you fail to recognize me? He who has seen me has seen the Father! . . . [Or] don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” Verse 10 sounds an awful lot like back-pedaling from verse 9, as if some scribe had decided to take the Christology of the text down a peg by a bit of theological sophistry. But where to plug these passages into the evolving history of Christology? Do they attest a scaling back of an originally high Christology? Or rather an attempt by partisans of an earlier, more modest view, to rein in what are perceived as emerging exaggerations?

A good depiction of an Adoptionist portrait of Jesus would be
Jesus Christ Superstar
by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. There we behold a very human, sometimes petulant, Jesus who chafes at the weight of his sacrifice. He does not waver in his purpose, yet half his resolve is bitter resignation. He finds himself swept up in a destiny he can neither fully understand nor escape. And yet he himself is an unfathomable mystery to his enemies as well as his disciples, a “carpenter-king” larger than life as we know it.

Other early Christians believed Christ was a divine Spirit or angel who only seemed to appear in human flesh: “sending his own Son
in the likeness of
sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3), “being born
in the likeness of
men” (Phil. 2:7). On the other hand, some passages oppose this view of Jesus: “By this [criterion] you will distinguish the Spirit of God [from its counterfeit]: every spirit [i.e., prophecy] which affirms that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not affirm Jesus [in this manner] is not from God. This is [instead] the spirit of Antichrist” (1 John 4:2-3). “Many deceivers have infiltrated the world, those who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh” (2 John 7). They are called
Docetists
(from the Greek δοκεω, “to seem”). The mildest form of Docetism merely denied that the dying Jesus suffered any pain, as in the Gospel of Peter: “And they brought two evildoers and crucified the Lord between them. But he remained silent as if he felt no pain.” Of course, this passage may mean only to depict the Stoic heroism of Jesus who would not give his foes the satisfaction of letting them see he was suffering, much like his silence in the face of interrogation (Mark 14:60-61, 15:5; Matt. 26:62-63, 27:12-14; Luke 23:9; John 19:9-10).

A stronger form of Docetism denied that Jesus died there at all, his place being taken by another man or even by a false vision of Jesus! The Koran says, “They denied the truth and uttered a monstrous falsehood against Mary. They declared: ‘We have put to death the Messiah Jesus the son of Mary, the apostle of Allah.’ They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but he was made to resemble another for him” (4:147). Islam seems to have inherited this version from Christian converts who might have read it in the Acts of John:

When I saw him suffering, even then I did not stand by him in his suffering. Instead, I fled to the Mount of Olives, weeping at what had come about. And when he was crucified, Friday, at the sixth hour of the day, darkness enveloped the whole earth. And at once my Lord stood in the midst of the cave, shining with radiance that lit up the whole interior, and he said, “John! To the masses of people below, I am being crucified and pierced with lances and reeds, and I am being offered gall and vinegar to drink. But to you, I am speaking, and you must listen to what I say. It was I who placed in your mind the suggestion to come up into this mountain, so you might hear those things which a disciple ought to learn from his teacher, and a man from his God!”