The movie The Da Vinci Code was banned in the Philippines. Too shocking. If you still don’t know why, you don’t have to watch it, just read the novel which is more suspenseful, better, clearer than the movie.
That movie was seven years ago and the book, happy tenth anniversary. This May, Dan Brown’s new book will come out: Inferno the book’s cover telling you that it has to do with Dante’s masterpiece: one of the four or five greatest literary works in the western tradition. Dan Brown certainly knows how to choose his characters — Jesus, Da Vinci, and now Dante, all men who are towering historical figures.
Except that in the case of Jesus he touched on what is called Sacred History which you cannot touch. (Jose Rizal’s novel’s title Noli Me Tangere can do very well as notice or warning to film-makers and writers who will venture into this vein.) A classic example by now of the problem that can ensue is Salman Rushdie and his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses that so incensed Muslims, the outrage assumed an extreme form when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini passed a death sentence on the Indian novelist.
Not that Muslims will have nothing of film depictions of the Prophet. The 1977 movie The Message was about Muhammad and the birth of Islam — in fact, a remake will soon be shooting. The inviolable thing is the film-maker has to be utterly reverent. Interesting to Christians is a rule kept intact throughout the film: the Prophet’s face is never shown nor his voice heard.
Except for this thought-provoking guiding principle, an analogous care or reverence obtains in The Ten Commandments (1956) as well as in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), films that centered respectively in Moses and Jesus, and enthralled generations of pious viewers. But since both Judaism and Christianity had neither (not quite) iconic nor docetic problems in making the film, Moses and Jesus appear on screen vividly, loud and clear so to speak. So long, repeat, as the movies are faithful to Sacred History.
Not so The Da Vinci Code, the root of whose controversy is the premise, advanced by Dan Brown as history not fiction, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, the marriage producing a bloodline down to our day.
Dan Brown is a capable writer of thrillers. But he was, in his subject matter, anything but original. In fact, the authors of an ‘80s blockbuster, Holy Blood, Holy Grail took him to court on charges of plagiarism, of which he was acquitted, reasonably enough. Nonetheless the truth was he took his ‘history’ almost wholly from that book and from a latter one, The Templar Revelation by a different team of authors.
But regardless of whether or not Brown’s historical claim would get vindicated, I felt something was not boding well.
The problem with the three prophetic religions — particularly the younger two — is that their two core figures are historical. They are therefore, even if incased in the rock of faith and the forcefield of Sacred History, exposed to the effect of historical or archaeological findings — which you can rest assured can lead to serious unrest. And the century has just begun.
The antidote to the Dan Brown ‘thesis’ could be a book by the French Orthodox priest, Jean-Yves Leloup: The Sacred Embrace of Jesus and Mary, a conscious reaction to the storm. The book says that the real heresy is to deny Jesus’ sexuality. Whatever the lost history is, Jesus, says Father Leloup, was fully human and may well have loved a woman.