Rabbi puts ‘Da Vinci Code’ under the microscope

The movie is “such a dud” it might just bring the curtain down on the seemingly inexhaustible fanfare of Dan Brown’s pseudo-historical tale, “The Da Vinci Code.” Such is the hope of Peter T. Chattaway, movie reviewer for Christianity Today. The sooner, the better, he says. I say, don’t hang your hat on it.

On film, as in print, Brown’s story feigns to raze the foundations of the Christian faith with deceptive earnestness, all the while winking, flashing a smile and contending it’s just kidding. Problem is, rather than taking the book and the spin-off movie as a lark, many have taken it quite to heart.

Small wonder.

Publishers Weekly made it sound as though the novel were a highly vetted account of church history. Writing for an audience of publishers; public, college and university librarians; booksellers; authors; print, film and broadcast media; and literary agents, it called the book “an exhaustively researched page-turner about secret religious societies, ancient cover-ups and savage vengeance.”

Complaints? Only two. One, the story’s chief protagonist was found to be in “desperate need of more chutzpah.” The other, “Brown sometimes ladles out too much religious history,” which puts a drag on his otherwise snappy saga.

One need only look as far as the reader reviews on Amazon.com to see how seriously many have taken the book’s claims. Research by the Barna Group shows that one in five, or 45 million, adults in the United States have read “The Da Vinci Code.” Of them, roughly 2 million said they changed their religious beliefs because of it.

Those are numbers many a pastor or evangelist might envy.

The influence of Brown’s literary hit has caused at least one rabbi to think. Rabbi Michael Mayersohn, president of the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council and director of Alliance for Christian and Jewish Studies, will give a lecture this evening at Temple Beth David about why Christians object to many of the ideas in “The Da Vinci Code.”

It’s not enough, he says, to cast aside their concerns and say, “It’s just a novel [or it’s just a] movie.” To illustrate why, he makes an analogy.

In the late 19th Century, a document called “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” put forth the claim that a conference of Jews had met to draw up plans to bring down Christianity by any means possible in order to rule the world. Many, including Henry Ford who in 1920 published it in the Dearborn Independent, embraced the document and its alleged plot as genuine. Though long since proven to be a forgery ? a work of plagiarism drawn on an 1864 French political satire that had nothing at all to do with the Jews ? an English translation of the originally Russian work can still be easily purchased. Published in its entirety on the Internet, some would still have us believe it is true.

“We would be very disturbed if someone took [this] inauthentic book, [with] its premise of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to control the world, and made it into a popular book and movie,” Mayersohn said. “We would be protesting vehemently.”

But that is not unlike what “The Da Vinci Code” has done to Christians, and in particular Roman Catholics, he reasons. He believes the book and the movie have unfairly attacked the Church.

“If something as clearly anti-Semitic as a dramatization of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ were written with the suggestion they were authentic, many in the Christian community would join us in protest,” Mayersohn said. “We need to be empathetic toward Christians and especially Catholics who are upset about ‘The Da Vinci Code.’”

Tonight his talk will center on the two issues he finds most controversial in its film adaptation: the idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a sexual relationship, and the claim that the Church has concealed that fact for more than 2,000 years.

“[That] is a powerful charge ? one worth our considering and, I believe, rejecting as unfounded,” said Mayersohn, who has for years studied Christian writings, from the New Testament to Augustine to contemporary theologians. He has taught about the Jewish context for the foundations of Christianity in many churches.

The idea that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child challenges, he says, a central Christian belief: that Jesus was human but did not have an active sex life. As he sees it, that introduces the questions “of a connection ? made in Judaism and Christianity in some contexts ? between sexuality and sinfulness” and “the sinful nature of humans and how that applies to Jesus.”

“Many Christians are disturbed by the idea that Jesus could have had the same urges and responses to those urges as the rest of us,” Mayersohn said. He was, in their minds, “above all that, [and] the idea that Jesus could be as ‘sinful,’ meaning as sexual, as the rest of us troubles [them].”

To tackle these matters, Mayersohn will explore what he sees as “the real meaning of the [Christian] concept of original sin and how it differs from the Jewish concept of yetzer hara, or evil inclination, found in rabbinic literature such as the Talmud and Midrash.

“The doctrine of original sin holds that sin was introduced to humanity from the outside, from the acts of Adam and Eve. [As] for Judaism, we believe that God created us this way, with the evil inclination,” he said.

Either way, he observes, humans are born prone to sin. But as he sees it, there are misconceptions, especially among Jews but also among Christians, about what this means. There’s a tendency, he thinks, to believe the doctrine of original sin means being trapped by a character “that is inherently sinful rather than free to choose.”

And while he doesn’t believe any one human can avoid sinning outright, in reality he says, “we are not destined in any single choice we make to sin.” This idea is a focal point for his lecture as well as for a book he is writing about Christian and Jewish views on our sinful disposition.

Why we sin, together with the nature of our character as God created us, are chief concerns for both Judaism and Christianity, Mayersohn said. His hope is to further the understanding about where their perspectives run in parallel or part.

Tonight, in the process, he’ll let some hot air out of “The Da Vinci Code.” You can hang your hat on that.