Church, work and stuff

[owl]

We're having a meeting at church tomorrow night on the Da Vinci Code. It's a sort of evangelistic judo, to use it for starting discussions on 'how reliable are the NT documents' or 'who was Jesus, really'. I managed to miss the bit where we trek around the town (we have the Hilliest Town in the County Down) shoving invitations through doors because I was at work (it has to be good for something).

If I were taking the meeting, it would run thusly: 'Frankly, I've seen better research in the pages of the Sun, and if Dan Brown told me the earth was round, I'd want to verify it before I believed it. Oh, and the characters are cardboard, the plot has holes big enough for dolphins to escape through, and the style stinks. Any questions?'

It's a good thing I'm not, then :)


Sometimes I love my work. Today I discovered that one of the other area teams had labelled their Deductions, D[eceased] file, "The Book of the Dead".

Comments

To play Devil's Advocate...

[skywalker-child.livejournal.com]

...there's a certain amount of logic to what Brown is saying, even if it is not 100% fact. A lot of what he said about the Catholic Church is true (having taken classes on the subject which verify statements about Christ's divinity, the choosing of gospels, etc). Is there ONE secret blood line of Christ hanging around out there? Probably not. Could Jesus have been a married man who made with the babies? Quite possibly. Does this make believing in his divinity and miracles any harder? Not for me it doesn't.

There were certain parts of his novel that read like a history book, but on the whole, it was enjoyable for me.

Re: To play Devil's Advocate...

[richenda.livejournal.com]

Could Jesus have been a married man who made with the babies? Quite possibly

Just so. People have argued for centuries that he must have been, because it would have been commented on if he hadn't been. Look at the fuss about why Paul wasn't!
What annoys me, and stops me bothering with the book, is that all the discussion I've read suggests that some of the old hat ideas mentioned are new.

Re: To play Devil's Advocate...

[owl]

About the only thing Brown said that was true was that there was this Council at Nicea once. The way he tells it, Constantine strolled into the middle of the assembled bishops and went, 'I have this really radical idea—you'll never believe you didn't think of this before', and after weeks of frenzied debate (a damned close-run thing, as the man said at Waterloo, when he missed the last train home), the dissenting bishops went home and meekly threw their Gnostic texts in fire (possibly accompanied by a detachment of Roman soldiers to make sure they did it). He gives the impression that no-one considered Jesus divine before 325. Oh, and I wouldn't exactly call five dissenters a 'very close vote' either.