(Jerusalem Post / San Francisco Chronicle)

What both of these stories omit is that one of the “experts” who claimed “the inscription on the ossuary cut through the ancient limestone box’s patina, a thin coating acquired with age, proving the writing was not ancient.” (quote from JP story) had to admit under oath that indeed there was original patina in the inscription after all. (Hat Tip: Ben Witherington)

(Full Release from Biblical Archeology Society)

As believers these sort of stories should serve to remind us of the burden we bear. We know we’re far from perfect. We know we’ll do things that offend others, sometimes egregiously, and even sometimes intentionally. There’s always that possibility; it comes from being human. And the burden is that when we do so, the world around us will blame our church, our faith, our Lord, rather than put the blame where it belongs — on us.

It’s the fallen nature of humanity that wants to do this. We know that, but there’s no easy way past the world’s refusal to accept this. Instead the world rejoices in the knowledge that we’re no better than everyone else. Missing the point, of course, that the entire premise of Christianity is, in fact, that Christians aren’t any better than anyone else.

And we know we aren’t. The sad truth is that, since we aren’t, some of us also behave contrary to this realization. Just as others, some of us act as if our religion has somehow elevated us, the admonitions of Paul to the contrary, making us better than the rest. And why? Simply because we’ve been forgiven?

We have to realize that just as glory may come to Jesus through our actions, so may opprobrium. The door we open with one hand may get slammed shut by the other. While we pray to bring glory through our actions, we often omit to pray that our actions also not bring shame to our Leader. For, in the last analysis, the Jesus the world sees is the Jesus we put on display in our lives. That is our responsibility and our privilege. Please God, let us not abuse it.

There is also the conundrum on the other side of this. How does the non-Christian separate the actions of the follower from the leader? It’s not logical to blame Jesus, or Christianity, for the actions of those who claim to follow, but the urge is strong. Why should they resist? After all, to do so is to give themselves permission to follow their fallen nature, rather than struggle against it.

Aye, there’s the rub. I can’t really fault them for their choice, wrong though it may be, because I know from my own experience that to act any other way is difficult, and I couldn’t do it on my own, without divine intervention.

Mr Johnson claims to have made his “peace with the Prince of it.” It’s obvious from the note he hasn’t; he’s simply decided to accept his own decision to reject that Prince based solely on the actions of some of the followers. It’s tragic but as I said, understandable. And the sad truth about those burned in this way is they become even harder to reach a second time.

The lesson Mr Johnson intends to teach is valuable. Forgiveness is indeed essential to life. Ever tried to walk a straight line forward while looking backwards? It can’t be done. Holding on to grudges and past wrongs, imaginary or real, only impedes progress. It is essential for us to forgive. But that’s only half the story. It’s equally essential for us to be forgiven.

And the lesson Mr Johnson didn’t intend to teach us is just as important. We stand in the place of our King, representing Him to the world. Our actions bring not only praise and blame to ourselves, but they also reflect on Him. This is a fact of life, however unfair we may consider it, and we have to behave accordingly.

It’s our responsibility to minimize the “collateral damage” done by our own actions to the cause of our King. In these two named, and countless other unnamed, we have failed. We need to learn those lessons well, lest these tradegies proliferate.

The major difference between Witherington’s work and the rest is that he limits himself to pointing out just seven major errors, occupying less than the first third of his book. The rest of his book is spent in analysing the deeper errors, made by some more renowned scholars, which tend to feed into books like The DVC.

Witherington spends most of the book challenging the revisionists, those attempting to rewrite church history, exposing just how little they actually know about the subject and how biased their aproaches are. He points out that such revisions are possible only if one succumbs to “historical amnesia.”

Along with pointing out errors of history, Witherington spends a lot of time describing the major players and the questions confronting the church councils of the fourth and fifth century (along the way pointing out that the canon was pretty well established centuries before the council proclaimed it, with only a few books questioned and a few more proposed — BTW, none of them were gnostic, the favored son of the revisionists). He also suggests that we should by all means examine the gnostic texts, but in doing so we should be sure to subject them to the same rigors of criticism we subject the “orthodox” texts to (and when we do so, none of them survive the scrutiny).

One of the good things about this book is the amount of “positive knowledge” to be gained from it. Most books from this category are flooded with “negative knowledge,” that is to say, they give you a long laundry list of things Brown asserts that aren’t true. Here we are treated to a fairly well-done overview of what actually happened; the book spends more time teaching you what actually occurred than it spends on what didn’t occur.

He travels through the early history of Christianity, showing us how most of the cannon was settled in the second century, before any of the gnostic literature even appears on the scene. Even if you haven’t read DVC (or, like me, aren’t interested in debunking badly-written fiction) the book is a worthwhile read, as it’s one of the better overviews of early church history I’ve run across.

But I’ve saved the best for last. Witherington doesn’t just drop these things on us and say “trust me, I’m a scholar” as all too many do. Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

This book has in some respects been hard-hitting, but I don’t want it to impede the search for truth about Jesus and early Christianity. All leads should be followed and all evidence evaluated (and not ignored, much less destroyed) — the same critical scrutiny that is applied to sources like the Gnostic Gospels should be applied to the canonical material as well. Fair is fair. But when we examine all of the evidence and clues, we find that our oldest sources are still the best sources on Jesus and the history of early Christianity.

It’s rooted in a principle I’ve always held dear: the Truth is never afraid of questions. In any fair comparison, the Truth will emerge victorious.

The Gospel Code. Highly recommended. And I’ve added another author to my “watch for” list.

You know how it is, the story is going along nicely, you’re getting in to the characters when suddently the author slips, and destroys the illusion that he’s been building up and that you’ve been enjoying. You want to scream, but settle instead for throwing the book across the room.

Well, that’s what happened here. No, it wasn’t the sneers he throws at religion; I’m getting used to that by now. That seems to be the current trend. When an author today wants to hang the “intelligent” label on one of the characters, the character disses religion. After all, it’s not possible to believe and be intelligent at the same time, is it?

But, as I said, that’s not why the book went airborne. The premise of the book involves the crossing over between parallel universes of a scientist. The twist is the scientist is a neanderthal, coming from a universe where the spark of consciousness lit up the minds of the neanders, not the cro-mags. He’s been learing english through conversation, aided by a computer, which beeps whenever it hears a word it cannot translate.

The situation is handled really well, until at one point the computer translates (into english) the exclamation “That’s so oxymoronic!” As if I’m supposed to believe that word has come up in conversation, when words like “endanger” haven’t. It blew the whole mood, destroyed the credibility of the process. After I picked up the book and read a few more paragraphs I realized that the reason for this was that the author needed to gather some momentum for the obligatory No Thinking Person Can Believe scene (since the author had been silent on religion up to this point, I confess I didn’t see it coming until it got here) and so had to suspend the limititations he’d imposed on his scientist to this point.

Still, the “first contact” scenes are handled well enough. The plot is too flimsy to carry the novel, but that’s more because the book isn’t plot-driven. Nor for that matter could you call it character-driven. It’s more driven by the examination of the concept of quantum states and many worlds, and by the chance to view of Neaderthal scociety.

If you’re looking for a strong plot, or compelling characters, pass this book by. If you enjoy travelogs to unfamiliar societies, however, you’ll enjoy this one a lot.

It’s a well-written thriller, in general, but the historical research is amazingly shoddy. As fiction, I’d give it a B, but if he submitted the “research” behind it as a term paper, it’d get an “F” at most, and we might even have to invent a lower grade for it. He begins with a page stating “facts”, virtually none of which is actually true in the strictest sense, though a few items you could “spin” into being acceptably true, in the sense that claims made in TV commercials are “true.”

You see, I’ve been down this “historical” road a few decades ago, when I read “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, but it seems Dan Brown lacks the critical skills required to be a researcher or historian. He seems to believe everything he reads (‘it’s in a book, therefore it must be true”) which is a fatal flaw when doing research, though quite essential, if only in a temporary sense, when reading fiction.

First off, let me say I don’t have a problem with the theological ramifications of much of the “data.” Though he’s clearly way off base, when you examine the historical record and the dating of old manuscripts, with the assertion that Jesus wasn’t considered divine until Constantine, the rest of the assertions aren’t really troubling. Jesus being married or having children, for example, doesn’t change anything, though it certainly doesn’t square with anything written in any of the historical documents.

My major problem with him is that he doesn’t play fair. When an author paints a historical backdrop for his fiction, he should take pains to get the history right. When he doesn’t, the cognitive dissonance he causes me forces me to drop out of my “suspension of disbelief” and moves me awya from the story. Brown’s use of easily recognized historical fallacies and proven hoaxes means that instead of writing about history, he’s writing an “alternative history” novel, Harry Turtledove’s specialty (to name one popular writer in the genre). Yet whether out of a desire to avoid that “ghetto” or just good marketing sense, he denies that’s what he’s doing.

His major source seems to be “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” (this doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, as that’s the prime source for everything written in this vein) yet he interestingly seems unaware that one of the authors, in an interview given after the book was published, admitted that he didn’t believe the book’s contention was factual. He simply thought it an intriguing possibility. Brown claims to be unaware that the Priory of Sion (claimed as “fact” by Brown in his book) was a hoax perpetrated by a man wanting to prove himself descended from the Merovingian Kings. (Notably, after the publication of HBHG this man quickly retreated from his claim; he wasn’t comfortable claiming Jesus as an ancestor, apparently.) Far from going back to the 11th century, it was invented in the 1950’s.

Many of Brown’s mistakes can be easily detected by using a mere smidgeon of common sense. If that’s Mary in DaVinci’s picture, then where’s John? (There are only thriteen at the table, and one is clearly Judas, so there’s a disciple missing.) If Constantine invented the idea of Jesus’ divinity, then why are there important manuscripts dating before that point making the same claim? If, as Brown says, the vote was close, why do the records of the conference show the vote to be hugely one-sided? (That’s the beauty of conspiracies, though. If the evidence is lacking, then obviously it’s because “they” have erased or changed it all. But when faced with that proposition the only proper response is, “then how did you find out about it?”) And why would anyone hide secret documents on the shelves of a research library? And if they would do such a bizarre thing, why would they ever choose to clearly label them as secret documents (“Les Dossiers Secret” in french)?

See what I mean? It beggars the mind that someone would not ask such common-sense questions. Other questions that should be asked require a bit of knowledge. One that immediately springs to my mind is that if Constantine selected the four Gospels in the New Testament, then why were they the only four on most lists of scripture we’ve found that were circulating as much as a century before him, and why were they the only ones selected when the Bible was officially compiled, long after Constantine’s death? (Oh, you thought Constantine was at that council, too? You must be reading too much Dan Brown.) Constantine’s role was clearly the same as King James’ would be later: he locked warring factions in a room and told them don’t come out until you’ve settled the question among yourselves.

As an amateur historian, the main reason I dislike Brown’s book is the way he plays so carelessly with history. He seems to think that you can change the authorship or dating of a manuscript almost at will, and that there will be no “ripple effect.” The dating of manuscripts is a difficult thing, and there are many points we use in figuring it out. In many ways, it’s like solving a sudoku puzzle; if a manuscript is mentioned in a known document, then we know it predates that document. If it shows the writer was familiar with another document, then it postdates that one. Slowly we block out the years the document cannot have been found in, and arrive by elimination at when it was probably written. But that process means that if you change the date of one document, that will cause you to completely revise other dates, and eventually, as in sudoku, you will end up with an insoluable puzzle because you’ll find documents that cannot have been written by people whom you have absolute proof wrote them.

I wasn’t at first able to maintain the suspension of disbelief required to fully enjoy the book, and this was the author’s fault for being such a careless researcher. But once I realized Brown wasn’t writing about reality, but rather an alternate universe where these bizarre assertions might be true, that changed.

When dealing with Da Vinci Code, I’m reminded of Errol Flynn’s intro to Robin Hood, “believe only what you see, and then, only half of that!” When reading the Da Vinci Code, remember the book is fiction, not fact, and remember also that most, if not all, of the “facts” claimed in it are also fiction. It helps to remember that in one of the plagiarism lawsuits that followed publication of the book, the judge called Dan Brown a liar. He writes fiction for a living, so why would it be surprising that most of his “facts” are fiction as well?

I’m not sure when it started, but here in the US we’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the old utilitarian definition of value. Your worth is what you do. A person’s value is directly related to what they do and have done.

Don’t believe me? Try this sinmple test: Ask anyone what they do (ask yourself, even). It’s nearly certain the response will be phrased “I *am* a(n) blank” with the blank replaced by the name of an occupation. In other words, they are defining themselves by their occupation.

That’s the trap we’ve all fallen into. It’s not scriptural, it’s not Christian. In fact it’s as far away from the Christian point of view on the subject as one can get. But it’s still a prevalent thought pattern. One that we need to break.

I am *not* a web developer, I *do* web development. I am *not* a writer, I write. The man who makes shoes for a living is *not* a shoemaker. He makes shoes. Shoemaking is what he *does*, not what he *is*.

As long as we continue to see each other in these utilitarian terms, however, we’re prevented from seeing each other as God wants us to, as unique creations with intrinsic value. As long as we see ourselves in this distorted mirror we can never become what it is God wants us to become.

I *am* a unique creation of the all-powerful creator of the known and unknown universe. So are you. We are both here because that all-powerful creator wanted us to be here. He (I’m using the traditional gender pronoun, but God is so far beyond any petty definition of gender that the term is really used only because that’s the metaphor He chose to relate to us through, and we should not be confused enough to apply limitations from the pronoun to the Person Himself) had a reason, known to Himself,for our existence. We are valued by Him enough for Him to cause us to be, so we really should respect that decision, and God Himself, enough to extend courtesy and respect to each other by default, not as some supposedly precious gift that only should be bestowed rarely, but as the natural right belonging to every unique creation of the Creator.

We’ve lost our way, and we need to find it again. We need to realize that simply by existing we are valuable. That person you disagree with so vehemently is still a person, and hence valuable. They are not obstacles to be overcome or tools to be used; they are people. The convict, the preacher, the flim-flam man, the congressman, the carpenter, the shoemaker, the vagrant; all are unique creations and therefore valuable in and of themselves.

This is a view at once inconvenient and necessary. Inconvenient because it reminds us directly that we ourselves are not the center of the universe, that there are other people who are affected by our actions and therefore who need to be considered before we take action. Necessary, because only when we truly accept this can we ever sit down and deal with others with courtesy and respect. And it’s only through courtesy and respect that we can reach the accomodations we must make with each other in order to keep this world from becoming the land of the eyeless and toothless. We have to get along while we’re down here on the planet, and that’s the only way we can acheve that.

I know I’m guilty of failing to do this. I know I have work to do. Join me?

It makes some very good and very interesting points. Frankie isn’t the thinker his father is, but who is? His main point is that Christians are ghetto-izing (that neologism is mine, so don’t blame him) themselves in the arts. Christians are creating subgenres of almost every art form by prepending the word “Christian” to it. And the entries in these subgenres aren’t very good. “Christian movies” (a subgenre close to his heart, as he is a movie maker himself) for example, have lower production values and the acting is worse than in their mainstream counterparts. And worse, the writing and plotting are stale.

Can his premises be argued with?

About the only market right now where I think he may be demonstrably wrong is in Christian music, which seems to me to be as rich and vibrant an area as mainstream music, though not a few artists have found it confining, even so. Christian movies and Christian fiction (with the possible exception of Frank Paretti in the last category) all are, let’s face facts, rather hackneyed and cliched. Several other words come to mind, but none of them are “creative”.

What’s the cause? We’ve recently (say in the last century or two) acquired a dichotomy between the secular and the spiritual that shouldn’t exist. It seems to me to border on the old Gnostic heresy that, despite the efforts of the apostle John in his Gospel, has hung on through the years and has even been picking up steam as of late. Schaeffer’s point is that we’ve divorced sprirtuality from “real life.” Being spiritual became something we did in addition to, but separate from, our daily life. God, Christianity, and religion had no real bearing on our lives outside of their compartment.

At the same time as this was developing, a utilitarian view of the arts and even each other began to appear, which Schaeffer credits to the advance of Darwinism.

The result of the first was that God, Who should be seen as the creator of the whole person and Christ as the Redeemer of the whole person, became limited to just the spirit portion. (This is what I said harkens back to the old Gnostic heresies which maintained that Christ could not have actually been human, because all material things are evil, and only non-substantial things could be good. John effectively demolished this rather absurd view in his Gospel, but no one has paid much attention ot him, it appears.)

The result of the second is that a tree, for example, ceases to be valued as what God created it to be, i.e., a tree, but instead becomes valued only for what it can do for us, from supply shade to building materials. The value of a person wasn’t intrinsic to the person, as God’s unique creation, but rather the value was derived from the works of the person, what they contributed.

Both of these attitudes are unscriptural. God looked at all he had created and pronounced it Good. No mention of any sort of utilitarian riders or codicils. Not conditional upon the measure of productivity. No strings attached. Nothing held back.

Christianity, if practiced the way the Bible clearly shows it should be practiced, isn’t tucked away in a corner of your life. Christ was buried with criminals and after being raised from the dead he ate breakfast. We are full beings, and Christianity is for the complete person, not just for a a part of us.

This is the way God designed the world to work. There is no such thing as a religious truth. Either truth is, or it isn’t. And if it is, it affects life on every level, not just a part of it. We all hope to do something worthwhile in our lives, but whether we manage to succeed in that or not, our worth is securely founded on the fact we are each a unique creation of God, made in His image. That’s not conditional.

Schaeffer points to the absurdity of phrases such as “full-time Christian service.” Every Christian, no matter what they are doing, from sweeping floors to programming computers, to preaching in the sanctuary to serving food in a soup kitchen, is involved in full-time Christian service. Every creative work of beauty glorifies God and celebrates His gift to the artist.

In the physical world the absurdity is obvious. If the man who repaired your car or built your house did a bad job, but offered lots of Christian platitudes, you’d still not employ him again. (I can speak personally to that point, because there is a roofing company in town who wears Christ on their sleeve, yet I had to call them out twice and even after the second trip they still did not perform the job I was paying them to do. I haven’t, and won’t, call them again to a job. It’s not that I don’t think they believe in God, or that they really aren’t Chrisitans. It’s just they don’t do the job, and at the end of the day that’s what they should be doing.)

But we are inundated with mediocrity in the arts, and the justification is that “someone might be saved” by encountering it. Someone might be saved after contemplating the fate of a frozen homeless person as well; does that mean we should actively create more homeless pepople so more can freeze to death on our streets? Of course not. But people accept excuses for the arts they would never in a million years accept in other areas. The fact that God can bring good out of evil does not mean we should not oppose evil. It only means God is powerful.

We need to remember that God is glorified by quality, not quantity. If 100 formula-written books come out, how does that glorify God. Can we really believe that a mountain of medocrity means anything special to God? Martin Luther observed that a cobbler glorifies God when he makes a good pair of shoes.

When you do what you do with excellence, with all your skill, when you bring to bear all of your God-given talents to produce something, it glorifies God. “Whatever you do, do as if you do it for Christ, not man.”

There are, of course limits to this idea. An artistic murder is still a murder. But when we create, we have a duty to God to create excellence, not mediocrity. We are showing God to the world. When the world sees us, the reaction should always be “I want what he has,” and never, “If being a Christian means I have to settle for writing what he’s writing, I don’t want to be one.”

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by this attitude; in a way it’s simply a religion-specific example of a more general attitude of shirking responsibility among the public. Whatever goes wrong is always the fault of an outside force; it’s never the repsonsibility of, or even within the control of, the person it afflicts.

Are you overweight? It’s not your fault, it’s the fault of McDonald’s for having things on their menu that make you fat. Can’t get a job? You’re being discriminated against, either because of gender, color, ethnic group, or whatever. Sure, sometimes the issues you’re struggling with aren’t your fault. There certainly do exist outside forces which impact all our lives from time to time. Just not every minute of every day.

I can see the attraction of this position. If you’re just a helpless pawn, you absolutely can’t fail. Nothing that goes wrong can or should be held against you. It’s OK if you just sit there and don’t do anything about your troubles; it wouldn’t matter if you tried, anyway, so why waste the energy?

But Christians in particular lack this convenient excuse. A belief in the existence of the devil is a necessary part of Christianity, true. But the belief that he is somehow the active force behind every bad thing that happens not only is not necessary, it runs counter to the witness of Scripture itself. Yes, Jesus cured some people by casting out demons. But he also just simply cured people. The blind, the lame, the leprous, and many more, were cured by Jesus without any reference at all to the affliction being demonic in origin.

We do wrong, to others and to ourselves, all the time, without the active assitance of the devil. Paul, writing in Romans (chapter 7 verse 15) said: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Paul’s point is that the fallen nature of humanity itself drives us to do evil; it’s a natural habit that we must unlearn as we walk with God; and He will help us to break free of it, which we cannot do on our own.

Note Paul does not say “what I hate, the devil makes me do.” He admits, as should we all, that we do it freely, of our own will, such as it is. Someone I know has been doing a lot of research in various sources, including occult, trying to rid herself of an “unwanted psychologocal influence” that exhibits itself in almost exactly Paul’s words, as written above. I wish her luck on her search, but I know she won’t find it where she’s looking. I’ve pointed that out, politley, but to no avail. Some people just don’t want to listen to the idea that it really is themselves, and not some evil external force, that is causing their problems.

We too often give the devil credit for what we ourselves do. I think it’s past time we stood up and took the credit, and the blame, for our own deeds. The devil works enough evil on his own, he doesn’t need to add our own deeds to his resume.