The Da Vinci Hoax : Part Deux
I'm copy-pasting this over from my myspace, since I know some of you don't do myspace very often, if at all. It's called part two, but part one was just an introduction, so it isn't really important (I also shamelessly stole the title from this month's Tabletalk). Part three will be comming as soon as I feel motivated enough to write it.
Ok, for part two of my right-wing fundimentalist assult on the liberating truth of The Da Vinci Code I'm going to correct Dan Brown's assertions regarding women and the church.
First the fiction: Dan Brown claims that a blissful matriarchal culture was prominent before Constantine and his chauvanist buddies crushed it and replaced it with a sexist patriarchal one. He also claims that over 5 million women were hunted down and executed by the church as witches, because of an anti-feminist document called the Malleus Maleficarum. And of course, he espouses that the church still seeks to demonize and repress women today.
The facts: Every ancient culture held a low view of women, especially the ancient Greeks. For the Greeks, women were not only inferior, they were thought to be the source of evil and not to be trusted. In truth, there is no evidence to support the dominance of matriarchy in the ancient world. According to noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, "...all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonesense. We have no reason to believe they ever existed."
In his claims about the 5 million witches being killed by the church, Dan Brown is referring to what is commonly called the "Great Hunt." In actuality it was secular courts, not church courts, that primarily used the Malleus Maleficarum. The number 5 million is based on old research that has long been known to be unreliable (some older data even had the number as high as 9 million). The most modern estimate is that there may have been some 100,000 trials, with only 40,000 or 50,000 actual executions. Most interestingly, almost 25 percent of those executions were men. It should also be noted that these witch trials didn't reach epidemic levels until long after the Catholic church had lost its position as Europe's indisputable moral authority. Robin Gibbons, a self-proclaimed pagan and scholar at Oxford University, wrote that "We Neopagans now face a crisis. As new data appeared, historians altered their theories to account fo it. We have not." She goes on to say, "We avoid the somewhat dull academic texts that present solid research, preferring sensational writers who play on our emotions." She wrote this in 1998, almost five years before Brown wrote his book. Still, even though Brown and others continue to wildly exaggerate the numbers, Christians must concede that the burning of even one person as a witch is one too many.
What of the Christian view of women? Is the church anti-woman? To answer that, you need not look any further than the Bible. In the story of creation we see that man and woman are both created in God's image. One is not complete without the other. The Da Vinci Code also continues to espouse that the Bible teaches that because Eve took the fruit first, she is to blame for sin entering the world (sort of like the Greek view and Pandora's Box). This is false. It is clear that the instruction not to eat the fruit was given to Adam before Eve was even created. The responsibiltiy fell on him, and so does the primary blame. Also, the Old Testament is full of women who are portrayed as smart, courageous and favored by God (such as Deborah, Ruth and Esther). And then we come to an often overlooked passage of the Bible that throws a wrench in Brown's entire theory; the Genealogy of Jesus Christ. Traditionally, genealogies contianed only males, yet Christ's genealogy in Matthew 1: 1-16 includes five women. Aside from simply affirming that women also hold an important position in the Bible, this genealogy flies in the face of Brown's notion that Constantine and his female-bashing buddies were out to tailor the Bible to their own agenda. If they did hand-pick what went into the Bible and what didn't, why did they leave these women in the genealogy of the man they were about to make their God, when it was against tradition to begin with?
To top it all off, Brown calls Jesus "the original feminist." I didn't include this in the list of fiction, because it's partially true. As I stated above, the ancient world had a seriously low view of women, to the point of viewing them as nothing more than the property of their husbands. Jesus came along and changed that. He affirmed the value and the special role of women in the church. Brown takes it too far by claiming that Jesus was actually a worshiper of the pagan "sacred feminine", but a little study of what Jesus actually taught will clear that misconception right up. It should also be noted that Jesus still upheld the different roles of men and women, but as I've stated before, gender roles are meant to compliment the wonderful differences between male and female, not to oppress or devalue either sex.
One last thing, which I find really amusing, regarding the Gnostic gospels. Brown suggests that these gospels were kept out of the Bible because they portray Jesus as he actually was, a worshiper of the sacred feminine, and because they held a much higher view of women than the books that were included in the Bible. Here's a passage from the Gospel of Thomas, I'll let you meditate on it and tell me what you think:
Part three will be comming in a few days. I'll be tackling Brown's retelling of the Council of Nicea and the formation of the Bible. Stay tuned.
Ok, for part two of my right-wing fundimentalist assult on the liberating truth of The Da Vinci Code I'm going to correct Dan Brown's assertions regarding women and the church.
First the fiction: Dan Brown claims that a blissful matriarchal culture was prominent before Constantine and his chauvanist buddies crushed it and replaced it with a sexist patriarchal one. He also claims that over 5 million women were hunted down and executed by the church as witches, because of an anti-feminist document called the Malleus Maleficarum. And of course, he espouses that the church still seeks to demonize and repress women today.
The facts: Every ancient culture held a low view of women, especially the ancient Greeks. For the Greeks, women were not only inferior, they were thought to be the source of evil and not to be trusted. In truth, there is no evidence to support the dominance of matriarchy in the ancient world. According to noted anthropologist Margaret Mead, "...all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonesense. We have no reason to believe they ever existed."
In his claims about the 5 million witches being killed by the church, Dan Brown is referring to what is commonly called the "Great Hunt." In actuality it was secular courts, not church courts, that primarily used the Malleus Maleficarum. The number 5 million is based on old research that has long been known to be unreliable (some older data even had the number as high as 9 million). The most modern estimate is that there may have been some 100,000 trials, with only 40,000 or 50,000 actual executions. Most interestingly, almost 25 percent of those executions were men. It should also be noted that these witch trials didn't reach epidemic levels until long after the Catholic church had lost its position as Europe's indisputable moral authority. Robin Gibbons, a self-proclaimed pagan and scholar at Oxford University, wrote that "We Neopagans now face a crisis. As new data appeared, historians altered their theories to account fo it. We have not." She goes on to say, "We avoid the somewhat dull academic texts that present solid research, preferring sensational writers who play on our emotions." She wrote this in 1998, almost five years before Brown wrote his book. Still, even though Brown and others continue to wildly exaggerate the numbers, Christians must concede that the burning of even one person as a witch is one too many.
What of the Christian view of women? Is the church anti-woman? To answer that, you need not look any further than the Bible. In the story of creation we see that man and woman are both created in God's image. One is not complete without the other. The Da Vinci Code also continues to espouse that the Bible teaches that because Eve took the fruit first, she is to blame for sin entering the world (sort of like the Greek view and Pandora's Box). This is false. It is clear that the instruction not to eat the fruit was given to Adam before Eve was even created. The responsibiltiy fell on him, and so does the primary blame. Also, the Old Testament is full of women who are portrayed as smart, courageous and favored by God (such as Deborah, Ruth and Esther). And then we come to an often overlooked passage of the Bible that throws a wrench in Brown's entire theory; the Genealogy of Jesus Christ. Traditionally, genealogies contianed only males, yet Christ's genealogy in Matthew 1: 1-16 includes five women. Aside from simply affirming that women also hold an important position in the Bible, this genealogy flies in the face of Brown's notion that Constantine and his female-bashing buddies were out to tailor the Bible to their own agenda. If they did hand-pick what went into the Bible and what didn't, why did they leave these women in the genealogy of the man they were about to make their God, when it was against tradition to begin with?
To top it all off, Brown calls Jesus "the original feminist." I didn't include this in the list of fiction, because it's partially true. As I stated above, the ancient world had a seriously low view of women, to the point of viewing them as nothing more than the property of their husbands. Jesus came along and changed that. He affirmed the value and the special role of women in the church. Brown takes it too far by claiming that Jesus was actually a worshiper of the pagan "sacred feminine", but a little study of what Jesus actually taught will clear that misconception right up. It should also be noted that Jesus still upheld the different roles of men and women, but as I've stated before, gender roles are meant to compliment the wonderful differences between male and female, not to oppress or devalue either sex.
One last thing, which I find really amusing, regarding the Gnostic gospels. Brown suggests that these gospels were kept out of the Bible because they portray Jesus as he actually was, a worshiper of the sacred feminine, and because they held a much higher view of women than the books that were included in the Bible. Here's a passage from the Gospel of Thomas, I'll let you meditate on it and tell me what you think:
Simon Peter said to them: "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit, resembling your males. For every women who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."
Part three will be comming in a few days. I'll be tackling Brown's retelling of the Council of Nicea and the formation of the Bible. Stay tuned.
posted by David at
12:22 AM
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