Sex It Up (the Gospel)?...Why Not??

That word "overdetermined" is much too mild to describe the huge furore over Ron Howard's Da Vinci Code movie. Three long-time supporters of my organization, all of whom I previously thought were compos mentis, expressed to me their private outrage that we are sponsoring a special weekend screening of the movie with progressive commentary to follow. Their view echoes that of the Vatican, Nigeria's Cardinal Francis Arinze, and recently deposed Silvio Berlusconi's culture minister, who said that the Da Vinci novel-cum-film shows contempt for "the primacy of truth."

Primacy of truth? The phrase has a nice ring to it, but it cannot be applied in this case. To quote the master of London's Temple Church (Rev. Robin Griffith-Jones), which is one of the key sites featured in the film, "The novel's characters say that Jesus was a married man and father. We conservative Christians say that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, raised people from the dead, and came out of his own grave. Which of these accounts, to a neutral observer, seems more fantastical?"

More to the point -- and pace Griffith-Jones -- I believe there are all kinds of perfectly orthodox reasons to want to see a fleshier Jesus than the one esteemed by conservatives and Fundamentalists whose feet barely touch the ground. After all, John's Gospel begins with the memorable declaration that the eternal Word "became flesh, full of grace and truth." And, in fact, each of the of the four canonical gospels -- the ones that made the cut -- emphasizes the fleshiness of the Founder: that he wept at the death of a friend, that he doubted and suffered as we sometimes doubt and suffer, that he enjoyed raucous parties (less water, more wine) and physical indulgences (like having his feet bathed in expensive ointment), that he was tempted as we are, that he could get really angry, that he needed his solitude from time to time, that he knew how to make a good breakfast for his buds, and that he experienced a miserable and lonely death by state execution. It's the gospels that didn't make the final cut -- Gospel of Judas, Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, etc. -- that are eager to valorize the spiritual Jesus and trivialize his fleshiness.

The "married with children" part is what sets off Dan Brown's attackers. But if they had their way Jesus wouldn't have siblings or a kvetching Jewish mother, either. The attackers can't avoid those realities, because they are clearly attested scripturally, as is the fact that Peter (that "rock upon which I will build my Church") was most definitely married -- unlike most (but by no means all) of the successors to Peter's bishopric in Rome. I could work up a neat little essay on how, despite their Jewish roots and despite their approved gospels' affirmation of bodiliness, the Christians became increasingly sex-phobic as the western Church grew more powerful, but others have already done the work. Suffice it to say that at least three factors played into this: first, the late-Hellenic world's strong attachment to neo-Platonism and Stoicism, both of which emphasized the superiority of mind over body; second, a perverse and persistent misreading of what the apostle Paul meant by the opposition of pneuma (spirit) to sarx (flesh -- by which Paul did not mean literal flesh); and third, the baleful influence of misogyny among the "doctors" and "fathers" of the Church, most notably Augustine and Aquinas, who associated carnality with the legacy of Eve and who (quite notoriously in the case of Augustine) believed that Original Sin was transmitted from one generation to the next through the transmission of semen. You can look it up.

Lest the Protestants be let off the hook, it should be added that the renegade German monk named Luther simply carried over, and in some ways intensified, Augustine's misogyny, while Geneva's cerebral Jean Calvin left behind a way of being Christian that soon became known as Puritanism -- a mindset later defined by H.L. Mencken as the suspicion that somewhere, people are enjoying themselves.

Ideas have consequences, and nowhere is this truism better illustrated than in the trajectory of Christian thought and practice in which raging sex phobia was and is a repellent form of anti-humanism. Millions who are drawn to the resolute nonviolence and compassion and truth-telling of Jesus of Nazareth remain profoundly put off by the sex phobia of those who claim to speak for his church. If these seekers are now fascinated by the iconoclastic portrait drawn by Dan Brown and Ron Howard, it may well be because the church has foolishly and dangerously downplayed the full humanity of Jesus for millennia and not because the seekers are simply "ignorant" as today's Defenders of the Faith allege.

There can be no primacy of truth respecting so protean a symbol as Christ. A very wise, and thus much despised, New Testament scholar named Burton Mack has written that despite continuing monumental efforts to pin down an actual historical Jesus, there is finally no way to penetrate the veil of church-created myth surrounding him. Accordingly, says Mack, Christians and others who can see all the damage being done by propagators of an un-human or anti-human or violence-embracing Christ (Mel Gibson's comes to mind) had better start making their own liberatory myths. If that is what the throngs who will see The Da Vinci Code this weekend are about, more power to them.