The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (16 page)

And having said this, he showed me a cross of light standing erect, with a crowd gathered round the cross, having no one appearance. But in the cross there was a lone form, a single likeness. And the Lord himself I saw above the cross, having no shape at all, but only a voice, nor was it the voice familiar to us, but one winsome and gentle and truly divine, saying to me, “John, it is necessary for someone to hear these things from me, for I will need one who will understand. I sometimes, for your sake, call this cross of light the Word, sometimes Mind, sometimes Jesus, sometimes Christ. . . . But this is not the cross of wood which you will see when you descend from here. Nor am I the one on the cross, I whom you do not see now but whose voice you hear. I was considered to be that which I am not, not being what I seemed to many others. But they will say of me something vile and unworthy.”

Pretty much the same thing occurs in the Nag Hammadi Apocalypse of Peter: “When he had said those things, I saw him seemingly being seized by them. And I said, ‘What do I see, O Lord, that it is you yourself whom they take, and that you are grasping me? Or, who is this one, glad and laughing on the tree? And is it another one whose feet and hands they are striking?’ The Savior said to me, ‘He whom you saw on the tree, glad and laughing, this is the living Jesus. But this one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshy part, which is the substitute, being put to shame, the one who came into being in his likeness.’”
³

We catch a hint of this version of Docetism in the Paul Schraeder/Martin Scorsese film
The Last Temptation of Christ
when, in the penultimate dream sequence, Jesus is freed from the cross and allowed to go his way. Even as the cursing, fuming, fist-shaking mob continues to behold him nailed helplessly above, the viewer sees Jesus walking away on tender, wounded feet from an empty cross. Another glimpse of Docetism may be found in Salvador Dali’s famous crucifixion painting, where the spread-eagled body of Jesus floats in midair some inches from the cross.

The strongest version of Docetism, also attested in the Acts of John, is that Jesus had no real human form at all, with different people simultaneously seeing him differently!

For once he had called Peter and Andrew, who were brothers, he came next to me and my brother James, saying, “I need you! Come to me!” And my brother, on hearing it, said, “John—this child standing on shore and calling us! What can he want?” And I said, “What child?” And he replied, “That one, motioning to us!” And I answered, “We have kept watch at sea too long, my brother! You are not seeing straight! Can’t you see it is a man standing there? Handsome, light-skinned, and smiling?” But he said to me, “Him I do not see, my brother. But let us go to shore, and we will learn what it is he wants of us.”

And so when we had docked the boat, we saw him helping us secure the boat. And when we left there, inclined to follow him, I saw him this time as largely bald but with a thick and curling beard, while James saw him as a youth with only fuzz on his cheeks! So we were both uneasy and confused. What we saw: what could it mean? Subsequently, as we followed him, we gradually became only more confused as we pondered the thing. But next something even more amazing appeared to me, for I would try to catch him off guard, and never once did I see his eyes blinking; they were constantly open! And often he would appear to me as short and ugly, and then again as a man tall as the sky! Also, another marvel about him: when I reclined next to him at mealtime and leaned back against him, sometimes I felt his breast as smooth and soft, but other times hard as stone! Thus I was inwardly troubled and reflected, “How can I be experiencing this?” And as I thought about this, he turned and said to me, “John, you see yourself in me: if your own heart is tender, then I am tender to your touch; but if your heart is stony, then thus also will you find me.”

The Acts of John is about as docetic as one can imagine any document being! It plainly denies that Jesus had a stable, corporeal form:

I will recount another glory, brothers. Sometimes when I would take hold of him, I encountered a solid, material body, while other times when I touched him, the substance was immaterial, as if it did not even exist! And on any occasion he was invited by one of the Pharisees and attended the dinner, we went with him, and our hosts set a roll before each one of us, and he received one as well, and he would bless his own and divide it between us, and everyone was satisfied with so small a morsel, and our own rolls were left over untouched, which amazed our hosts.

And often, as I walked beside him, I wanted to see the impression of his foot, whether his foot left any print on the ground, for it appeared to me that he walked just above the ground, and I never saw a footprint.

One regularly hears that the Gospel of John represents the first line of defense against Docetism, but actually the text is strikingly equivocal, seeming to lean both ways. For instance, no sooner does it say (1:14) that “The Word became flesh” than it adds, “and pitched a tent among us,” perhaps implying a nomadic, fleeting presence of dubious substantiality. In 4:6-7, Jesus is depicted as tired and thirsty, but by 4:31-32, he is refusing to eat; he has no need for physical food as long as he is nourished by doing the will of God! Here is the warrant for the ascetical saints of later centuries, ethereal souls who supposedly survived on nothing more than communion wafers. In chapter 6, verse 19, Jesus walks on water, which, as in Mark 6:48-49 and Matthew 14:26, naturally implies he is a bodiless phantom—or a god lacking physical density. On the cross he thirsts—or does he? It is all to fulfill the schedule laid out in scripture: “Jesus . . . said, to fulfill the scripture, ‘I thirst’” (John 19:28). He invites Thomas to touch his wounds (20:27)—but he doesn’t! It seems quite likely that the Johannine community was torn between Docetists and non-Docetists (who wrote the Epistles of John) and that each faction had its own version of the Gospel of John. Our cross-eyed text would be the result of later scribes combining readings from both!

It is possible for Docetism, or something like it, to have been the first version of Christology, but only if, as Paul Couchoud and others argued, Jesus began as a mythical deity and was only later imagined to have existed on earth sometime in the remote or recent past.
⁴
The Greeks vaguely imagined that Hercules, Asclepius, and others had lived fleshly lives on earth, though evidence indicates that originally both had been heavenly sun gods.
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It may conceivably have been the same with the Jesus figure.

Still others believed that the Christ Spirit/angel entered into the man Jesus at the latter’s baptism (Mark 1:10, literally, “descended into him”) and departed at his crucifixion (Mark 15:34: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”), and in the meantime, Jesus was the channeler for the Christ. We call this
Separationism
.
⁶
It would sure make sense of the exceedingly puzzling verse 1 Corinthians 12:31 (“Nobody can be speaking from the Spirit of God if he says, ‘Jesus be damned!’”) if it were aimed at Separationism. In view here would have been people who, like the Cainite Gnostics whom Origen describes, esteemed the Christ highly but reviled the earthly Jesus, his channeler, because they thought other Christians had made an idol of him. Similarly, 1 John 2:22 (“Who makes a habit of lying but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the Antichrist, he who denies the Father and the Son”) would make a lot of sense if it meant to condemn those who believe Jesus was just the channeler for the Christ and not the Christ in his own right.

All these views were eventually condemned as heresies, which, however, by no means stopped people from believing them! A couple of centuries later, the evolving establishment church of Constantine took up the matter in a series of debates and councils, which we will survey. In all of them, the pendulum kept trying to settle in the middle between Jesus as a man and Jesus as divine.

CONTROVERSIES AND COUNCILS

The Nicene Creed was drafted to resolve the Christological controversy between the Arians (Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter or priest, Asterius, Eusebius of Nicomedia) and the faction favoring bishops Alexander and Athanasius, also of Alexandria. Neither of their Christological positions was identical with what would later emerge as “orthodoxy,” nor was the debate simply over Jesus being either a mortal or an immortal, as Brown would have it. Both positions already took for granted that Jesus Christ was much more than a mortal man.

Athanasius held that Jesus Christ was the Word made flesh (John 1:14). The Word (Logos, the creative reason of God, a notion derived from Heraclitus, the Stoics, and Philo) was a separate person sharing the divine nature. The Word is also the Son. The Father begat or generated the Son, but this is a logical, not a chronological, priority. They have always been in a relationship of loving interdependence: The Son is “eternally begotten” by the Father, as Origen said. The Word is God’s own wisdom through which he created all things. (Prov. 8:22-31, “From everlasting I was established, from the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth. . . . When he established the heavens, I was there. . . . Then I was beside him, a master workman.” John 1:3, “All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing came into being.”) The Son took on human flesh (not yet understood as a full human nature, just a human body, which will later be considered heresy) in order to save humanity.

Arius held that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of a heavenly being who had been the very first creature and through whom as an agent or assistant God had made the rest of the creation. (Ws. 7:24-27, “Wisdom . . . is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty. . . . For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness”; Sir. 1:4, “Wisdom was created before all things”; Col. 1:15-16, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created.”) But, like the angels, he did not share divine nature, the nature of the Father. Both before and during his earthly sojourn, he learned wisdom and virtue through discipline and suffering. At the resurrection, he was given divine honor and dignity. He was adopted
by grace
as “Son,” “Word,” “Lord,” “Wisdom,” even “God,” because by his perfection in virtue he had come to participate in these qualities, which
by nature
belong to God alone. God’s foreknowledge told him from the beginning that Christ would successfully attain this perfection, and so scripture calls Christ “Son,” “Word,” “God,” and so on by anticipation even before his earthly life (e.g., John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word.” Gal. 4:4, “But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son”). Technically, he wouldn’t have been known as “the Son” at the time described; the writers are merely taking into account the fact that the readers now know him as “the Son.”

There were two essential Arian arguments. The first focused on three
scriptural
points. The outline of this schema of Christ being preexistent in heaven, yet later receiving even greater glory as a reward, is certainly to be found in Philippians 2:5-11 and in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The idea that the preexistent Word was an agent of creation, and was himself created, can easily be inferred from John 1:1 (“and the Word was divine” or “the Word was a god”) since the created status of Wisdom is explicit in the texts from the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach that form the background of John 1. The notions of Christ’s being perfected through endurance and suffering and of growing in wisdom are certainly found in Luke 2:52 (“And Jesus kept on increasing in wisdom”) and in Hebrews 2:10 (“For it was entirely appropriate for him . . . to perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings”).

Second, the Arians made three
theological
points. The idea of the Father begetting the Word smacked of Gnostic emanationism, a complicated scenario that envisioned God like the sun emitting a great number of derivative but still divine “rays.” But, on the other hand, if the Word were
eternal
, he must be unbegotten, and this would seem to make Christ into God’s
brother
, not his Son! Arians felt that to say the Son was in a relationship of “eternal generation” from the Father is a piece of incoherent sophistry, like a “square circle.” And if God is Father
by nature
, and if the Son is Son
by nature
, then God must have been
forced
to beget the Son, and this is to reject God’s sovereignty and freedom.

The central issue in the debate was undoubtedly the question of
soteriology
, the doctrine of salvation. The two sides began from a common presupposition about the nature of salvation. Both saw salvation as
theosis
, divinization or deification. Christ had made it possible for us to “become God.” (Athanasius said, “God became man so that man might become God.”) We could become immortal. By grace, that is, by adoption, we could become what God is by nature. In order to attain this, we must live a life of faith and good works. This remains the Eastern Orthodox view, which preaches unabashedly the doctrine of
synergism
: We must work with God for our salvation.

But as to the precise role of Christ in all this, the two views diverged. Athanasius held that Christ must be identified with God in order to make our deification possible. Human nature is mortal, therefore corruptible, because it is subject to change and decay (including moral decay, or sin).
Theosis
, deification of human nature, is made possible because, in Christ’s incarnation, the unchanging eternal, divine nature unites with human nature and transforms it essentially. In Christ we experience this transformation. Christ must have been God incarnate, since otherwise the savior could not bring to humanity what humanity needs for deification: genuine deity. If he himself hadn’t had it, how could he convey it to us? So Athanasius’s key technical term for the relation of Christ to the Father was
Homoousias
, “of the same nature.”