Chapter 14
In This Chapter
● Getting the scoop on the real Council of Nicaea
● Not knocking Gnosticism
● Discovering why priests are bachelors, and meeting some who aren’t
● Going to the source on celibacy
If you picked up this book because of your interest in the Knights Templar, this chapter won’t hold much interest for you. But if you came to this book because of what you read in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, this chapter goes right to the core of his story: namely, that the direction of the Catholic Church and Christianity was decided by the Roman Emperor Constantine I and the Council of Nicaea.
Brown’s book presents a view that has very little to do with the historical record. Like the Templars (see Chapter 12) and the legend of Mary Magdalene (see Chapter 13), The Da Vinci Code version of the Council of Nicaea and the early days of Christianity is almost completely fictional. Almost. The names are spelled right.
In this chapter, we discuss two pivotal turning points in both Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church: the conversion to the faith by Constantine, and the activities of the Council of Nicaea. We explain some of those supposedly missing “gospels” commonly known as the Apocrypha. We examine the horrible destruction of the Cathars during the Albigensian Crusade. And, in case the only place you’ve ever read about this stuff was in The Da Vinci Code, we set the record straight on some of Dan Brown’s other historical howlers.
Fiction, History, and the Early Church
Go ahead and say it. “What part of the word fiction do you guys not understand?” The problem is not simply that much of what is presented as historical fact in The Da Vinci Code is wrong. It’s that it is so incredibly wrong, and that Brown carefully binds it all together with the patina of truth. Sure, that makes Dan Brown a talented author of fiction. The problem is that a substantial portion of his more than 60 million readers believe him when he says his fictional books are factual.
According to The Da Vinci Code, much of what we know about Jesus is wrong because of Emperor Constantine I and the first Council of Nicaea that met in A.D. 325. The book alleges that the Christian conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine I was political rather than spiritual, that Jesus was considered merely a mortal man for four centuries up until the Council of Nicaea, and that the Church burned and suppressed gospels that did not conform to their vision of a patriarchal, male-dominated, sexually repressed version of Christianity. To understand the controversy, you need to take a closer look at the real Council, what it really did, and the evidence as to whether it tinkered with the word of God. And you need to understand the place of Christianity in Roman society after the death of Jesus up until Constantine and the Council.
Early Christianity: A secret society
When discussing the early Christians, the words of the ancient Roman nobility usually dripped with arrogance, if not venom. The Emperor Nero famously accused Christians of setting the Great Fire of Rome in A.D. 64. In telling Nero’s story, the Roman historian Suetonius really fries the mad emperor (who famously “fiddled while Rome burned”). But in an effort to be fair and balanced, Suetonius does present a list of some of the good things Nero did, including “punishments inflicted on the Christians, a sect professing a new and mischievous religious belief.”
Tacitus, the noble Roman historian, called Christians “a dangerous cult,” hated because of their “shameless activities,” which had come out of Judea, “the origin of the evil.” He accused them of everything from cannibalism to using the blood of babies in their obscene ritual of the Mass. And the Emperor Trajan had Christians executed for breaking two laws: his edict against “secret societies,” and his law requiring the worship of the state gods and sacrifices to the god/emperor.
On top of being a religion for the plebs and the mob, Christianity was also perceived as being a faith run by women more than men, and that it was women who were doing the bulk of the converting. Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century emperor who tried to return Rome to its former religion of gods and goddesses, grouses endlessly and bitterly about hordes of Christian women, who converted the lowest scum of the street by feeding them and giving them a place to sleep. Those bloody do-gooders.
Christianity underground
A visit to the catacombs of Rome is a unique glimpse at the very different culture the new religion created in the center of the Roman Empire. The bodies of the first Christian martyrs were buried in the Roman-style necropolises. Wealthy Roman Christians offered up their own private aboveground cemeteries for the burial of some members of the Christian community, but with the persecutions that started under the Emperor Claudius in a.d. 41, they were soon defaced and destroyed. The solution was to go underground, out of sight and out of the easy reach of troublemakers.
In a.d. 150, the Cecili family gave their private burial ground on the Appian Way outside of the city walls to the Christian community, and the digging began in earnest. In time, more than 60 different sites of catacombs were dug all around the city's walls, through the fourth century.
Romans referred to a necropolis as a "city of the dead," but Christians called theirs a dormitory (coemeterium), which was a place of rest until the physical resurrection of the body. Burial niches were carved into the volcanic rock walls, like endless rows of four-story-high bunk beds, and bodies were interred as Jesus was — wrapped in linen, anointed with scented oil, and sealed behind a slab of stone. And this kind of burial was not only for the rich. The astonishing size of the catacombs is a testament to the desire for the rich and the poor to have a proper burial. Even criminals and abandoned babies had their places in these subterranean vaults. More important, there was a curious sense of community in being buried together in these massive places. And digging down to almost 70 feet allowed them to bury thousands of bodies under a relatively small piece of topside real estate.
Larger areas were excavated for subterranean chapels, often attached to the tomb of a saint or martyr. Families would dig out family-size crypts so they could all be buried together. Some were decorated with fresco paintings as well. However, the longstanding myth that these were underground hiding places where Christians concealed themselves from Roman search parties are largely untrue. The Romans knew exactly where these places were all around the city, and the stench of hundreds of rotting corpses would have been unbearable for any length of time.
The catacombs declined in popularity after Christianity was declared a state religion and bodies were allowed to be buried in church cemeteries. The catacombs were largely forgotten until large-scale exploration of them began in the 1800s. The largest that can be seen today are the catacombs of St. Calixtus, near the St. Sebastian Gate. There are 12 miles of tunnels that actually interconnected four different burial sites; they're estimated to contain as many as 500,000 graves.
In the early 300s, Christianity was not popular (making up no more than about 8 percent of the Roman population), lower class, pretty much illegal, and not exactly the sort of religion that would attract an emperor (after all, emperors were being worshipped). The period immediately before Constantine took the throne was, for the Christians, called the era of the Great Persecution. They had suffered oppressions off and on since their inception, the worst being under Nero. But the two co-emperors just before Constantine — Diocletian and Maximian — passed some of the most oppressive laws against Christians yet, burning their churches, outlawing their Mass, burning their sacred books, and putting them to death. As far as we know, Constantine, as well as his father, the Emperor Constantius, fully approved these laws.
Dan Brown's version: Teabing does the talking
Some of the biggest historical whoppers in The Da Vinci Code begin in Chapter 52, in a key sequence between Sir Leigh Teabing, Robert Langdon, and Sophie Neveu. Most of this scene consists of pronouncements on Brownian history from Teabing, described as one of Britain’s foremost historians, who has devoted his life to the study of the Holy Grail and its “real meaning.” Here are some of Teabing’s claims about the Council of Nicaea and Constantine:
The Emperor Constantine made the important decisions at the Council of Nicaea in a.d. 325. According to Teabing, Constantine was not, as history tells us, a Christian, but a lifelong pagan, converted on his deathbed when he was “too weak to protest.”
Constantine’s conversion was a strictly political move to bring peace to the two warring factions of Christians and pagans in the city of Rome.
Jesus was not considered divine before the Council of Nicaea.
Constantine pushed through the idea of Jesus’s divinity so that he could follow through with his dark plan to invest absolute power in the Vatican, in order to consolidate his own.
Church leaders voted at Nicaea on Christ’s divinity, and that it was “a relatively close vote at that.”
Over 80 “gospels” were considered for the New Testament, but only 4 were chosen, only the ones that showed Jesus as divine, with no human traits. The rest were burned.
Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s wife; she carried his child; the Holy Grail was in reality Mary Magdalene; and the “blood in the cup” was the holy bloodline.
What Boring Old History Books Say
Back in the days of the very first Star Trek series, it was a common event in almost every episode for the U.S.S. Enterprise to get whacked with a photon torpedo from some alien ship, and when they did, the camera shook and everybody on the bridge fell out of their chairs. When a fan asked the series creator, Gene Roddenberry, why there weren’t seat belts in the seats, he answered, “If there were, they couldn’t fall out of their chairs!” People falling out of chairs is more dramatic than people just getting shaken around. The same is true with The Da Vinci Code. We know that if Dan Brown had stuck to the facts of history, he wouldn’t have sold 60 million copies and set the world talking about Jesus, Mary, and the Bible. And people wouldn’t have fallen out of their chairs.
The problem comes in when Brown claims that people and events were facts when they weren’t — and the readers don’t know the difference. So, here we crack open some moldy old history books and see what they say about the claims of Brown’s characters about the early days of Christianity.
The Christian conversion of Constantine
The Roman Emperor Constantine I was converted to Christianity on October 28 in the year A.D. 312, just before a battle at Milvian Bridge. Constantine saw a vision of a cross in the sky, one he later had cast in gold — it was a chi-rho cross, the cross with two Greek letters at the top, the first letters of Christ’s name in Greek (see Chapter 1).
When Constantine had his vision of a cross in the sky he was already an emperor and an extremely successful general — hardly someone who could be called a wannabe looking for some new followers. At that time, Rome was ruled by two emperors — one in the East and one in the West — because of the cumbersome size of the empire. Constantine was engaged in a civil war with the emperor of the West, with whom he was about to do battle at the aforementioned Milvian Bridge.
According to Constantine, his vision occurred at dawn just before the battle. He also said that Christ came to him in a dream that same night and revealed the same sign to him, promising him protection from his enemies. Constantine’s vision, accompanied by a voice that told him, “In this sign, conquer,” can’t be dismissed out of hand; its effect on the course of history was too great. So, he was a liar, he was a lunatic, or he got a message from God. Constantine’s nimble handling of the reins of power in the coming years made one thing clear: The man was no nutbag in need of a jacket that laced up the back. And a reason for lying doesn’t come quickly to mind. But modern, secular people don’t put much stock in visions, spiritual or otherwise.
Rome = Vatican = Church
Throughout The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's characters persistently, constantly, refer to "the Vatican" as being in cahoots with Constantine, as suppressing fourth-century Gnostic Gospels, as being the dark force behind the Crusades, and other evil deeds. The Vatican wasn't even built until the 14th century, and it was quite some time after that before it came to be an interchangeable term with Catholic hierarchy.
Even if Constantine’s religious experience is explained away in modern terms — like a narcoleptic seizure, a psychoneurotic episode, or, another popular theory, that what he saw was a comet — one question still rises above all others: How likely is it that a man of the highest rank would convert to the religion of this oppressed and despised minority of vagrants and derelicts because it was “politically expedient” or a “smart business move”?
Dan Brown’s fictional character of Sir Leigh Teabing asserts in The Da Vinci Code that Constantine was never really a Christian. Many in the Brown/ Teabing camp have implied that Constantine’s contemporary, friend, and biographer, the early Church father Eusebius, exaggerated the stories of his conversion for his own dark purposes. Yet, shortly after his victory at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which proclaimed that all Romans were free to worship whatever divinity they chose, without fear. When he presented the edict to his legions and explained that he had become a Christian but that they in no way had to follow his example, the legionaries began to come forward in droves to be baptized by the bishop who was present — he was overwhelmed by the crowd.
Constantine’s conversion to Christianity involved nothing shady — he didn’t “back the winning horse.” The Christians were an oppressed minority in the Roman Empire and had been since their beginning. It was quite simply against the law to be a Christian. They were despised by the upper classes, of which Constantine represented the cream at the top. They represented 5 percent to 8 percent of the population. There was no rioting between Christians and pagans — pagans ruled the city, and Christians spent a lot of time hiding from them, especially during the reigns of Nero, Diocletian (Constantine’s predecessor), and several other deeply anti-Christian emperors. This is the “winning horse” that the conquering hero Constantine is so eager to have on his side that he abandons his own faith?
The Da Vinci Code also makes the astonishing statement that Constantine was “a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest.” Constantine was a Christian from the time of his conversion, in A.D. 312. He was baptized on his deathbed in 337 by Eusebius in a ceremony that was quite common at that time. It was practiced by other heretical sects, and even later by the Cathars. The belief was that, after baptism, the soul is cleansed of all sin and heads straight for paradise. The ritual of the Last Rites, called Extreme Unction, was only beginning to be used in the late second century and took much longer to become a regular practice. The seven sacraments of the Catholic faith — Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Orders, and Matrimony — weren’t even finalized as doctrine until the Council of Trent, the 19th ecumenical council of the Church, in the 16th century. In Constantine’s day, a man could remain a practicing Christian, called a neophyte, and then be baptized on his deathbed as a sort of Last Rites ritual by another name. (The Cathars in the south of France did precisely the same thing, having their final ritual of swearing to the ascetic life, called the consolamentum, put off until they were aged or dying. If a Frenchman’s going to give up wine, women, and rich food, he’d rather do it when he can barely make it from the bed to the chamber pot!)
The real Council of Nicaea and what happened there
The Ecclesiastical Council at Nicaea in A.D. 325 was not the first of its kind. The first “general council” of Christian leaders, the Council of Jerusalem, was called in A.D. 49, only 16 years after Christ’s crucifixion, in an attempt to settle differences between Jewish and Gentile practices within the two types of followers of Christ’s teachings. And there would be many more to follow Nicaea, as important as it was. Dozens of councils over the centuries would decide important issues of the Catholic faith, right up to the 20th century’s Vatican II, between 1962 and 1965.
The Council of Nicaea is usually listed as the first ecumenical council, but there have been at least 21 of them over the centuries. They are called general councils, because cardinals and other officials may attend. These 21 councils have decided an incredibly wide variety of issues over the years, from Nicaea in 325, right up to Vatican II from 1962 to 1965.
From the beginning, Christians viewed Jesus Christ as divine. The more than 300 bishops, along with 1,300 other deacons, priests, and interested bystanders who attended the Council of Nicaea, viewed Christ as divine. The argument wasn’t over his divinity, but over the nature of his divinity, a question that would plague the Church for centuries (if not to the present day) and would spawn major heretical sects with a different opinion. At Nicaea, the biggest bone was being picked by the Arians, who believed that Jesus was like God, but not actually God, per se.
The Council of Nicaea had other fish to fry as well, like deciding the proper day to celebrate Easter (in order to separate it from the Jewish Passover). But the most important thing the Council did, after 300 years of arguing, was to achieve consensus on one set of principles, one calendar, and one set of definitions that would, at last, achieve common ground from which Christianity could proceed. Consensus wouldn’t last long, but the Council of Nicaea did achieve it for a time. And it took a 900-pound gorilla like the Emperor Constantine to get everybody to do it.
Keep in mind that Constantine was a neophyte Christian. We’re certain that, like any new convert, he came in excited and full of questions. When he was confronted by priests and bishops who couldn’t answer them, his solution was to get the movers and shakers of the faith together and force them to make the rules and decisions that needed to be made to put an end to the organizational chaos.
The arguments that ted to the Council of Nicaea
The main reason that the Council of Nicaea was called was to deal with the growing problem of the Arian Heresy, which was a fundamental argument over the exact nature of the divinity of Christ. Was he a god or a man? Was he part of God, of the same substance? Was he a human being, touched by the divine? Was he just some kind of ghost or vision who didn’t actually have a physical body? And what makes it worse for the non-historian is that every philosophy, creed, sect, and point of view had a name. Here’s a brief rundown of the major players in this debate:
● Docetists believed that Jesus was not human at all but strictly divine, and his humanity was only a facade. Cathars and many other Gnostics believed this as well.
● Adoptionists believed that Jesus was human in every way, but that he was the best and most righteous human on the planet, so God chose him, adopting him, to be his son.
● Patripassianists believed that Jesus actually was the Father and that they were one, an idea pretty roundly rejected by most people. (After all, how could God suffer and die?)
● Dualists believed that there were two forces in the universe — good and evil — and that the world was created by the evil side. Dualism was the foundation of most Gnostic faiths.
Early Church fathers were trying to avoid anything in the faith that might smack of more than one god — they left belief in more than one god for the pagans. But how do you explain an overarching God on high, one whom Jesus spoke to, but Jesus is down here on Earth, and he’s God, too?
The unspeakable name of God
In The Da Vinci Code, supposed professional symbologist and super genius Robert Langdon blithely explains that the "tetragrammaton," which is four Hebrew letters that are sort of analogous to YHWH, comes from the name Jehovah, which he claims is a union of the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, havah. Try this one on a rabbi. It's wrong in so many places, it's tough to choose where to start. The word Jehovah is English. It wasn't even invented until the late Middle Ages. It came into use because it was an attempt, in English, to come up with a pronunciation of those four letters. The letters of the tetragrammaton, YHWH, are sacred to Jews. They are four letters of the Hebrew alphabet: yodh, heh, vav, and heh. At the burning bush, when Moses asked for God's name, he got the reply, "I am that I am. Tell them 'I am' has sent you" (Exodus 3:14). In Biblical Hebrew, YHWH is a form of the words to be, as if they were calling him "I am." For Jews, it was blasphemy to even attempt to speak the name of God. We say "Yahweh," the Hebrew word, but by the third century b.c., this word was forbidden to Jews. They have many acceptable names for God, the most common being Adonai, which simply means "My Lord," or Elohim, meaning "god," a generic word for a god of any religion.
During the period of Constantine, there were two large sects of Christians causing the biggest headache for the more mainstream or orthodox church leaders:
● Manichaeism, based on the dualist beliefs of the Persian prophet Mani. Even St. Augustine had once been a Manichaean.
● Arianism, a rather complex brand of dualism that said there was only one God the Father. His first creation had been Christ the Son, who then went on to create all things, but who was subordinate to God the Father. Christ the Son then became human in order to bring his message and to die for our sins, before he died to rejoin his Father in heaven.
Arianism was a far worse betrayal to the Church than Manichaeism because it was founded closer to home, by a highly respected teacher of religion in Alexandria named Arius. Arianism became very popular all over Europe, and would remain so with the newly converted Goths, Franks, and especially Germanic peoples.
Arius’s chief critic was another Alexandrian, a church deacon and eventual bishop named Athanasius. Athanasius believed that Christ was divine, had always been divine, and was not a created entity. Christ and God shared the same essence.
The Nicaean Creed defines Christ's divinity
The Council of Nicaea discussed and voted upon many issues, but the most important thing to come out of the council was a final statement of position from the Church on the nature of Christ, known as the Nicaean Creed. This statement not only remains the Church’s position on the nature of Christ’s divinity, but it is also accepted, with minor differences, by virtually every Christian denomination. The Nicaean Creed spelled out the concept of the Holy Trinity: one God, but with three natures (three faces), all equal: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
"Closing the Canon": Determining the books of the Bible
In The Da Vinci Code, the character Leigh Teabing claims that over 80 “gospels” were considered for the New Testament, but only four were chosen, only the ones that showed Jesus as divine, with no human traits. He goes on to say that the rest of these discarded books were burned or otherwise destroyed.
No one has any idea how many gospels were considered for inclusion in the canon that became the new Testament. Jesus’s life was not recorded by “thousands of followers,” as Teabing says in The Da Vinci Code. Not only were these people illiterate for the most part, but he makes it sound as if, before the Council of Nicaea, everyone had a gospel of his own, until some evil jack-booted goons in the Church came along and confiscated them.
Constantine and the Council of Nicaea had absolutely nothing to do with deciding which texts would be in the Bible, and which texts would be omitted. Here’s the straight dope on Dan Brown’s claims:
● The 4 gospels and 27 books of the New Testament were not decided upon at Nicaea. The four main gospels were a bedrock of the Christian faith long before then. The inclusion or exclusion of the others is the process called closing the canon. It was the product of a long, drawn-out debate in all corners of the Christian world that went on for about five centuries — long before Constantine’s birth, and longer after his death.
● The contention that any books not included in the New Testament canon were rounded up and destroyed is nonsense. Not only is there no historical evidence to prove it, but there is ample historical evidence that such a roundup and destruction never occurred. These alternative gospels remained popular all over the world, whether they were actually in the Bible or not. Some weren’t even written down, but they became part of myth and folklore all over the Christian world. And some of them were included in the Catholic Bible that were not included in the King James Version.
● The Latin Vulgate Bible did not come about until a.d. 380, when the books in common use by the church were translated by St. Jerome.
● The contents of the Bible were officially hammered out and agreed upon at the Synod of Hippo in a.d. 393 and the Synod of Carthage four years later in 397.
Pre-Vulgate copies of New Testament gospels are remarkably similar to the ones we have now. As for the books left out, there’s no question this was a subjective judgment call.
The Apocrypha and the Bible
The term apocryphal appears through this book, and it has a couple of meanings. Apocrypha is derived from a Greek word that means “to hide away.” If you’re the sort of person who tends to believe in conspiracies, this alone should raise your hackles. And when the term gets applied to certain books that are or aren’t in the Bible, you’re definitely venturing into Dan Brown territory.
There seem to have always been two views of the term Apocrypha. The first is applied to a particular group of Old Testament books that were first included in the original Latin Vulgate versions of the Bible, and then removed from the King James Version editions published after 1640. Most Protestants have never seen the deleted books called the Apocrypha, while Catholic Bibles have always included them.
The other use of the term Apocrypha is in the case of books such as those found at Nag Hammadi that were not included in any official bible after the Synod of Carthage. Some speculative authors have claimed that the books were “hidden” because they contained esoteric knowledge that was too mysterious, subversive, or dangerous to become common knowledge.
Others argued that they were hidden because they contained ideas that were heretical to current Church doctrine.
Early Christians largely decided the makeup of their Old Testament based on the books accepted by Jewish scholars, but there were additional books that were of perhaps equal antiquity, rejected by most Jewish traditions. First-century Christians argued for their inclusion in their biblical canon, which may very well have led to the final split between the Jews of Jesus’ era and the Christians who incorporated gentile practices (who didn’t follow Jewish dietary and circumcision laws, for example).
The Old Testament Apocrypha
The earliest Christian Bible came from first-century Greek sources of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, and not the Hebrew texts. Seventy-two Jewish scholars had translated the Septuagint into Greek in the third century b.c. for King Ptolemy II, but there were many differences between it and the first-century Tanakh. The version of the Septuagint that the Christians in Alexandria were working with after the death of Christ included the books of the Apochrypha, or as they are known in Roman Catholic writings, the Deuterocanonical books.
The Deuterocanonical books include: Wisdom; Sirach; Tobit; Judith; 103 additional verses of Esther; 1st and 2nd Macabees; Baruch; an expanded Book of Daniel that includes the Prayer of Azariah, Song of the Three Holy Children (or the Three Jews), Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon.
The early Christians argued for the inclusion of these books because they seemed divinely inspired, and because their original source material had included them. Later scholars, including St. Jerome between A.D. 380 and A.D. 405, believed the Greek Septuagint was extremely flawed, and preferred to go back to Hebrew sources.
Why most Protestants have never heard of the Apocrypha
The Apocrypha became part of Martin Luther’s list of complaints against the Roman Catholic Church. The growing 16th-century Protestant movement in Europe finally argued strongly against the inclusion of the Apocrypha. In particular, heated arguments erupted during the Protestant Reformation over items that are discussed only in these books that became Roman Catholic rules or traditions (in particular, the concept of Purgatory, as well as the practice of offering Masses for the dead, which are contained in 2 Maccabees). The King James Version of the Bible included them for three decades, but editions published after 1640 eliminated them.
In 1592, the Roman Catholic Church responded to the Protestant furor by reaffirming most of the books of the Apocrypha as being part of their official canon. This remains the position of the Church today.
But wait, there's more! The Gnostic Gospels
The discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt in 1945 and the Dead Sea Scrolls in the West Bank between 1947 and 1956 turned up more biblical era documents that some scholars believe should be considered as part of the New Testament. These additional books include the Gospel of James; the Gospel of Phillip; the Acts of Peter and the Twelve; and many more. (The Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene was discovered in Egypt in 1896, but it was not contained in the Nag Hammadi texts.)
Gnosticism itself can be a very difficult term to understand, because it encompasses many different sorts of beliefs. Also, in the last couple of decades, people have been tossing around the term Gnostic with unbelievable irresponsibility, using it as an adjective to describe almost anything that’s either esoteric, occult, or not an orthodox belief. Remember: Gnosticism is a generic term that covers a wide variety of beliefs. There is no one, single Gnostic Church. Gnosticism was partly a pre-Christian concept that teaches that God is infinite and incomprehensible to humans. Gnosticism’s essential belief is dualism, the idea that good and evil are in a constant struggle for supremacy in the Universe. Christian Gnosticism became a popular movement up in the Christian Church of the second century A.D.
Dan Brown’s characters in The Da Vinci Code argue that the Gnostic Gospels are every bit as valid as what’s in the commonly accepted New Testament, but biblical scholars almost completely disagree with that viewpoint. The Gnostic Gospels were not excluded from the biblical canon simply because they contradicted what Church fathers wanted to hear. The Gnostic Gospels were written, in most cases, 150 to 200 years after Christ, with a few notable exceptions (the Gospel of Thomas, possibly written in A.D. 50, being the most famous of these exceptions, though its date of origin is disputed). In the case of the almost purely Gnostic writings discovered in Nag Hammadi, they were most certainly hidden in about A.D. 390 by the monks of the monastery of St. Pachomius after the rulings of St. Athanasius that Gnostic texts were heretical.
Conflict over celibacy
One of often-repeated themes of The Da Vinci Code is that so-called Gnostic Gospels have a more open attitude about sex, and that is one of the reasons why the Gnostic Gospels were “suppressed “ by the Church (even though reading them doesn’t supply any evidence to back this up). Because of The Da Vinci Code's overarching theme that Jesus was married, and that a Church terrified of that fact has been willing to kill to cover the secret up, it does seem important to say a few words on the subjects of sex and celibacy.
Celibacy in the ancient World
The Catholic Church didn’t invent celibacy. The concept of shamanism, the wise ascetic living alone in the desert, is nearly as old as man, and usually included celibacy. The most famous Roman celibates were the Vestal Virgins, a community of priestesses who took a solemn vow to abstain from sex for 30 years. (After that, if someone wanted you, go for it.)
Although Robert Langdon and other characters in The Da Vinci Code speak wistfully of some peaceful, all-natural, bygone era of goddess worship, those religions could be pretty brutal, and celibacy was a cruel part of it. High priests and priestesses of pagan goddesses were often expected to remain celibate. In one particularly gruesome example, “The Great Mother of the Gods,” a popular figure in Eastern and Greco-Roman paganism required priests to castrate themselves in order to enter the order. Then, every March at the goddess’s annual festival, the “Day of Blood,” the priests lacerated what little was left of themselves and swirled madly, sending blood flying onto the altar. It’s a bit difficult to accept Dan Brown’s assertion that the reason our society is so violent is that we’ve lost goddess worship as part of Western culture.
Cathars, heresy, and the Albigensian Crusade
The Cathars appear throughout this book, and they touch on Gnosticism, heretical philosophy, and the Knights Templar. They also illustrate, along with the Inquisition, the darkest page of Catholic history.
Catharism was a Gnostic belief that arose in the years leading up to the 11th century, and it grew throughout southern France and into Spain. What put the Cathars into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church was their view that the world was created by a lesser, imperfect "god," who was analogous to Satan, and not the true God. Catholicism taught that resurrection — both in the case of Jesus, as well as the resurrection of the faithful on the Judgment Day — was a physical resurrection of the body out of the grave, into the Kingdom of Heaven. Cathars, on the other hand, taught that resurrection was simply a spiritual rebirth. In addition, they were anti-sacerdotal, meaning they did not believe that bishops, priests, or any other mortal human could perform the works of the "true God" on Earth. Cathars were very critical of the corruption they saw among the hierarchy of the Roman Church, and they weren't shy about it.
Cathars, like other Gnostic sects, had the appearance of almost being a "secret society" — not just in keeping their beliefs low-key to outsiders, but within the organization itself. There was the general population of the faithful and there was an inner core of ascetic elders; the latter group practiced extreme self-sacrifice and deprivation in their efforts to attain the most supreme inner knowledge of the true God. The sacrifice of worldly goods and pleasures were meant to keep the evil things of the physical world that were created by the lesser god, or demiurge, from corrupting the spirit and the body. They did believe in Jesus, but not in the form that the Church had at last settled on. To the Cathars, Jesus was like a divine hologram — a projection of spiritual energy who appeared to be a man, but was more of a ghost. The God of the Old Testament was an evil imposter, but Jesus was sent by the true God as His messenger.
All this may seem harmless enough, but the Roman Catholic Church didn't see it that way. Catharism was clearly heresy, and it was quickly growing in popularity. The first known Cathars popped up in Limousin in central France in the early 1000s; they were promptly put to death by the Church as heretics.
As the movement grew and came to be centered in the Languedoc region of France, the Church attempted to send missions to the Cathars to change their ways, including Templar patron Bernard of Clairvaux, all of them ultimately unsuccessful. Worse, local noblemen and regional royalty seemed to be protecting Cathar strongholds. The largest concentration of Cathars coincided with Knights Templar outposts in the south of France and northeast Spain, but the order did not seem to take any interest in assisting the Church in rooting out the heretics.
After a little more than 200 years, the Church finally was at its wits' end. In 1208, the pope sent his personal legate, Pierre de Castelnau, to excommunicate Count Raymond VI of Toulouse for supporting the heretics. Raymond reacted a little disproportionately and had the pope's representative murdered.
Pope Innocent III retaliated by calling for a new Crusade (known as the Albigensian Crusade) against these heretics living in the very midst of Europe. In 1209, the town of Beziers was attacked by the crusading army. When the pope's commander, Cistercian abbot Arnaud-Amaury, was asked how to tell Catholic from Cathar, his famous reply was, "Kill them all. God will know his own." Arnaud had spent years trying to convert the Cathars and had been humiliated at their reception of his attempts. At Beziers, he got his revenge. He had 20,000 men, women, and children burned alive.
The crusaders then turned to attack Carcassonne. Its Viscount, Roger-Raymond, was taken prisoner during truce discussions and murdered, but unlike Beziers, Carcassonne's population was allowed to surrender.
Arnaud-Amaury needed a true military commander to finish the big job ahead. He pressed Simon IV de Montfort into service, with the promise of new land possessions as a reward. De Montfort reluctantly took the job, but when he got started, killing Cathars was like eating potato chips, and there was no stopping him. He burned 140 Cathars at Minerve, and at least 50 at Casses. Between 1210 and 1218, he took Lastours-Cabaret, Bram, Termes, Lavaur, and Castel. In 1213, he defeated King Peter II of Aragon in Spain, and then turned back for sieges and battles that ended for him at the endlessly troublesome Toulouse in 1218. Simon was killed by a rock dropped on his head by several women in the village.
The crusade began to suffer setbacks, largely as a result of the rebellious Raymond of Toulouse, followed by his son, Raymond VII. France's new 18-year-old King Louis VIII was eager to expand his realm and entered the crusade with great ferocity in 1224. By 1229, the fighting was ended by a treaty, and the Inquisition officially began to exterminate the last of the Cathars. In 1233, mass burnings of them took place, and the Inquisition went so far as to dig up dead Cathar bodies and burn them as well. Further uprisings occurred, and a brief holdout at the French village of Montsegur has been the topic of wild speculation for centuries about a secret Cathar treasure or secret being smuggled out — perhaps even the Holy Grail (see Chapter 10). The last known Cathar burning by the Inquisition in the Languedoc happened in 1321. An estimated 1 million Cathars and their neighbors, nearly half of the population of the Languedoc, were killed in the first true genocide of Europe.
Finding celibacy in just about every major world religion leads inevitably to the conclusion that there’s just something in the human mind that wants to separate the spiritual from the physical, and that a denial of the physical pleasures of life will help in focusing on the divine.
The Da Vinci Code contends that Judaism “condemned” celibacy, and that all Jewish men were married, but this is clearly not true. Few of the apostles mention wives. And the most prominent sect of Jewish celibates was the apocalyptic Essenes. It is believed by many researchers that the Essenes were the men who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jesus may well have studied with them, and John the Baptist was probably an Essene. But as far as we know, no one has claimed to have found any evidence of a lost wife of John the Baptist.
Christian celibacy, and why Paul stuck us with it
Actually, if you cruise through the New Testament, you’ll find that Jesus didn’t have much to say on celibacy. So, as for who’s to blame, we’ll come right out and say it. St. Paul did it in I Corinthians 7:
I would that all men were even as myself; but every one hath his proper gift from God. . . . But I say to the unmarried and to the widows, it is good for them if they so continue, even as I.
Paul was a great believer in purity for Christians. Even so, in his defense, he stood by the words that “the two shall be of one flesh” regarding marriage, and spoke of its blessed state. It’s just that celibacy was better, a higher calling, as far as Paul was concerned.
To be fair, many scholars have theorized that the emphasis on celibacy in Paul’s time grew out of the apocalyptic bent of mind a lot of early Christians had. When Christ said he was coming back, and the judgment was at hand, they thought he meant next week. And if that were true, then keeping yourself ritually pure was more important than the directive to “be fruitful and multiply.” But as a couple of centuries passed, and the Church began to realize that they may have been over-anticipating a bit on this apocalypse thing, then the attitudes in the last books of the Bible toward marriage warm up, including some of Paul’s later letters. By that time, the Church was building a system, with a bureaucracy and with a congregation. And you don’t get a congregation by telling people to remain celibate.
The Catholic tradition
The Roman Catholic Church based its rules about celibacy for the clergy around the concept of imitating the life of Jesus. Priests are considered to be acting in persona Christi, literally “in the person of Christ,” when performing the sacraments, and with no evidence to the contrary, Jesus was assumed to be celibate. Moreover, Jesus does have a few words to say on the subject. In Matthew 19, Jesus mentions men who do not marry living as “eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven.” In Luke 18, he says that anyone who gives up marriage, children, and possessions for the sake of the Kingdom of God, he shall be repaid many times over. And Paul speaks of chastity in I Corinthians. But there is absolutely no scriptural doctrine against marriage. Roman Catholic rules of celibacy among priests are a part of Church tradition, which is subject to rulings by the pope or ecumenical councils. As recently as 1965, Pope Paul VI stated, “man cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”
Earlier Church practices seemed to reflect the view that priests may marry, but that higher ecclesiastical positions could not be entered if a man had a wife. (The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches do this today. Both allow priests to marry, but bishops must be unmarried, or their wives must enter a monastery). Priests were required to abstain from sex prior to performing the miracle of the Mass, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood. It didn’t take long for the Church leadership to figure out that this rule was pretty flagrantly ignored. The simple solution was to disallow married priests altogether and to require complete celibacy.
The Synod of Elvira in the early 300s met in Spain to hammer out a series of ecclesiastical issues, and one of them was clerical celibacy. Its Canon 33 prohibited marriage for bishops, priests, and deacons. If they were already married, they weren’t forced to leave their wives, but having children was out. Throughout the next century, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Hilary, and others all wrote in favor of celibacy among the clergy.
Pope Siricius in A.d. 385 declared that the apostles had abstained from sex, and therefore, so should the clergy. Subsequent popes reaffirmed the opinion. The decrees were apparently being ignored on a wholesale basis, because in 1074, Pope Gregory VII finally decreed that married priests would not be allowed to say Mass or “serve the altar in any way.”
Between the fifth and ninth centuries, the Church really began to put the pressure on about married priests. Early on, many had married in all innocence, thinking it was all right. Later, when asked to put away their wives, it was a crushing blow. Afterward, for many centuries, in the countryside it was common enough for a priest to have a woman about the house, someone the villagers called a “housekeeper” but knew to be a wife. Cardinals may have lived in luxury, but parish priests were poor, humble, and generally loved. So, that tension between what the hierarchy of the Church in their scarlet robes said your parish priest should do, and what he really did, was just a normal, accepted part of life. Man lived in sin and did the best he could to earn forgiveness. Then came the shrug. The average villager loved his priest, and didn’t see why the poor man should have to live without the comfort of a wife. After all, it was Augustine, the most passionate of celibates later in life, who famously said when he was young, “Oh God, give me chastity and continence, but not yet!
Bear in mind that the early Christians had many other examples of celibacy among priests in earlier religions, from the ancient Egyptians’ cult of Isis, to the earliest Gnostic Christian sects and various Hermetic movements that practiced sexual abstinence among their priests. Curiously, Islam went the opposite direction. It was against Islamic law to be a celibate; the whole concept was derided as “monkery.”
Married to the Church
The one thing that the New Testament did seem to have plenty of references to was that a man should only have one wife, and that he shouldn’t remarry if he was widowed. And I Timothy 3 clearly said that a man who wanted to be a bishop should only have one wife. So, a new explanation arose in the 400s that seemed to paper over this subject. Clergy were considered to be “married” to the Church. Thus, if a priest took the Church as his “bride,” he had to be faithful to her, and therefore, celibate. Likewise, nuns are considered to be the “brides of Christ.” This is the terminology applied within Roman Catholicism today.
You may be surprised to hear that there are, indeed, married Roman Catholic priests today. The catch: Since Pope Pius XII in the mid-20th century, the rule is that any Protestant minister who is already married and wants to become a Catholic priest may do so and remain married. Defrocked or laicized priests who still want to remain Catholic may get married by special dispensation of the Church. (For more about celibacy and the Catholic clergy, see Catholicism For Dummies, by Rev. John Trigilio Jr., PhD, ThD, and Rev. Kenneth Brighenti, PhD [Wiley].)