The Da Vinci Code film by Oppie.
Yesterday I went to see the film when it came out even
though the reviews I read described it as dull and
uninspired. I suppose it depends on what one was
expecting (and I was expecting to be bored).
It's not the most exciting film ever made, that's
certainly the case. I suspect the point was that the
authors had a religious theory they wanted to advance
but did not have the academic (religious) credentials
to present it as a formal thesis--and it's easy to see
why, since most of it is pure unfounded invention.
There's plenty of historical material on the origins
and the dissolution of the Knights Templar to make the
conspiratorial suggestions of the film laughable. Too,
someone suggests the Church was somehow inimical about
Isaac Newton's thoughts on gravity (which is nonsense,
Newton was himself a churchman with the Catholic-like
English Church and always remained in good standing).
There IS some historical evidence that Newton came to
regard the assertion of Jesus as God (or part of God)
to be heresy (since the First Commandment specifically
forbids this). "Thou shall have no other gods before
ME" (period) does not allow for 'thou can have as many
gods as Thou liketh as long as you say they are
manifestations of ME.'
But Newton kept this "doubt" to himself and was, as I
said, in good standing as a churchman throughout his
entire life.
However, that is the one claim of this film that has
some merit. Namely: That the notion of Jesus as God
was something added to Christianity long after the
time of the Apostles (who were all faithful and
observant Jews) by a mainly still pagan-influenced
segment of the Christian converts.
There is no difference whatsoever between the early
Jewish Christians and other Jews with the singular
exception that they accepted Jesus to be the Messiah.
But for non-Jews I imagine the subtleties of exactly
what/who the Jewish Messiah was/was supposed to be...
must have been a little too much for them. The new
recently pagan Christian converts could hardly have
distinguished the Jewish claims that Jesus was their
"redeemer" from the notion that Jesus was somehow the
"savior" of mankind.
But should we complain about this? After all, the
confusion was very probably the very reason so many
pagans opted to convert to Christianity in the first
place. [There's a very interesting question here about
whether Saint Paul made the decision to not require
that converts to Christianity first convert to
Judaism, or whether the original Christian Jews were
simply overwhelmed/outvoted by the hordes of pagan
Christian converts... but by the time Christianity had
become the religion of the Roman Empire, the
Jesus-as-God heresy was canon for the most part: the
accepted doctrine of the Christian Church, as it
remains to this day. And this is really THE greatest
"secret" in the history of Christianity.] NOTE:
There had been a great weight on the Jewish people
since the Egyptian Exodus: The Tenth Plague demands
that the first born of every household in Egypt be
killed, and there is no exception for the Jews. Except
that Moses (their great savior) contrives a way out
involving marking the Jew's doors with lambs' blood.
The Angel of Death thus "p***** over" the Jews, but
this does not discharge the Jews from the curse of the
Tenth Plague, as we see from God's ordering of the
Passover ceremonies. The Passover observance is not
something some "man" (Rabbi) dreams up like a city
official might order some public ceremony but is in
fact specifically dictated by God to Moses (Exodus):
On the observance of Passover every Jewish household
must kill its first born (including even the first
born of their cattle and other animals) as a sacrifice
to God. It is God who demands this. With only one
possible way left out of having to obey this terrible
command: each & every family must perform the "lamb of
God" sacrifice.
That is, you can't just buy a lamb and tie it up in
the yard and fatten it up for the Seder Passover meal,
no: The family has to bring it into the house and
treat as their beloved pet, so that it eventually
becomes a true sacrifice to butcher it. Thus sparing
the family from the terror of the Tenth Plague which
followed the Jews out of Egypt.
This is really what the Messiah was about: the
redeeming "once and for all" of the Jewish people from
the terrible sin/curse of the Tenth Plague. Jesus was
not God but the Messiah, the one & only Lamb of God
(beloved of God) who is butchered to redeem the Jewish
people.
Thus I'm sure that when, after the destruction of the
Temple, even the Rabbis who did not acknowledge Jesus
as The Redeemer (the true "once and for all" Lamb of
God) changed the Passover ritual and STOPPED the "lamb
of God" sacrifice ... it could only have strengthened
the early Jewish Christians' belief that Jesus had
indeed been the prophesied Lamb of God "redeemer." (It
is probably this, and not the dead Jesus coming back
to chastise him that probably turned even so committed
an anti-Christian Jew as Saint Paul into a Jewish
Christian himself... being himself, unlike most other
Jews, so thoroughly familiar with the arguments of the
Christians he was persecuting.) To this day
non-Christian Jews no longer "feel" they need to
observe the lamb-of-god sacrifice even though they do
not acknowledge having been redeemed from the
requirement!
However it does not diminish the message of love that
Jesus embodies (the wisdom of forgiveness and
self-sacrifice), that he was not God walking among us.
But it is something other than what the so recently
pagan Christian converts required in the person of
Jesus back then: The Romans were used to wor****ping
real people as gods (practically all the Emperors
themselves were wor****pped as gods even while still
alive) and the pagan emperor Constantine required a
Christianity which was in harmony with the rest of the
Romans' religions.
There were many Christians who objected to making
Jesus co-God, of course, but Constantine basically
annihilated them when he established the "Catholic"
Christian Church with a trinity at the top (and
where/why they got the pigeon I'll never know).
It is true that Constantine "became" a Christian on
his deathbed. But this was a kind of last political
act for the benefit of the empire he had created and
was leaving his heirs. I seriously doubt it had any
real personal meaning to him, religiously. His
"creation" of the Christianity we know and love, with
Jesus as its God, was always a political creation, and
has nothing to do with Judaism (which is what
Christianity is, or should be... and would be had not
the Roman pagans distorted it the way they did).
And this the film got pretty much right. Unlike trying
to see the Apostle John as a woman in da Vinci's Last
Supper: Anybody who is even remotely familiar with the
artistic attitudes of the painters of da Vinci's time
knows that young "virgin" men were usually painted to
seem almost women-like; which is not only the case
with da Vinci, of course, but every other painter back
then.
Perhaps the line the movie SHOULD have pursued was the
less Christian Jewish awaiting of their "true Messiah"
(who must be from the house of David). But, of course,
all records of the Jewish lineages are lost, so there
is no longer any way for any modern claimant to prove
he/she descends from the House of David... unless...
he/she were to be descendants of Jesus, who was the
last historically-known claimant of the House of
David, of whom we know). But this is another movie.
But, of course, the film (as the novel, I imagine)
"are" meant to be entertainment. And it firm is mildly
entertaining as a murder mystery (it suffers greatly
from the fact that the murder mystery aspect of it is
an excuse for presenting at the religious hubla):
It only has three or four "main" characters, and the
"writer" must choose his heroes and his villains from
them alone. So the identity of the "mysterious"
villain is painfully obvious from the start (there is
even the horrific shopworn cliche of the villain
talking out of camera sight, only to be revealed at
last... and I was hoping it'd be George Bush, The
Pope, or at least Paul Reubens--not the painter,
Peewee Herman). If Hanks had been the villain behind
it all, at least it might have been interesting. Has
Hank ever been a villain?
Same thing with the identity of "Jesus's last
surviving descendant" ... it they had said it was
Mother Teresa! I would have been impressed, and it
might have been believable (even though she's been
dead these many years). But, of course, this is a
terribly-written mystery, and you know from the
instant they say they are looking for this person who
it HAS to be because, basically, you know it can't be
the flagellating albino! [A note, while he was beating
the crap out of himself, for some reason, I kept
thinking that Jack Nicholson's masochist performance
in the 1961 classic comedy The Little Shop of Horrors
was much, much funnier.] In fact, that 1961 black &
white film is a much better film than Oppie's The Da
Vinci Code. But there you have it.
In spite of it all, even though this is no Agatha
Christie here... I still think the movie had its
moments, and that it's not as uninteresting as the
critics think it is.
S D Rodrian
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