Contemporary Portrayals of Biblical Figures

The purpose of this research is to examine contemporary portrayals of biblical figures and events in popular fiction. The plan of the research will be to show how contemporary views of the historical figures in the Bible demonstrate that there are diverse opinions regarding their meaning, purpose, and symbology, most notably in respect of Dan Brown's treatment of Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus, in his book The Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Code's best-seller status shows that there is widespread popular interest in the presentation of matters Christian in the United States and that there is something of a dynamic relationship between fictional treatments of biblical themes and the modern American experience of religion. Dan Brown's novel has affected popular as well as scholarly discourse, not so much in literary terms as in terms of religion and What It All Means. What brings the novel into popular discourse is that contemporary Christians and Christian institutions have a stake in the narrative of their religion's origins.

The big picture of The Da Vinci Code is that the institutionalized Catholic Church--and, by extension, the whole of Christianity--has as its formative doctrine a misogynistic view of its founding deity. The plot of the novel has its principal characters searching for clues to the proposition that the feminine principle was valorized by the doctrinally truest Christians but that the bureaucratic apparatus of what became the orthodox ecclesia

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canon. The first three centuries of Christianity were marked by doctrinal rivalry over the major texts of faith. The general consensus of mainstream scholarship is that in the competition between orthodox and Gnostic views of how the figure of Jesus Christ ought to be perceived by the faithful, the texts that made it into the orthodox canon are represented by the books that are in the Christian bible today. In The Da Vinci Code, the assertion is made that the orthodox canon in general and the Vatican in particular suppressed the more human portrayal of Jesus. The actual scholarly consensus, based on discovery of Gnostic texts in the so-called Nag Hammadi documents, holds that Christian Gnostics had a more mystibal view of Jesur and that the orthodox canon portrayed Jesus as more human or just as human as he was divine (Ehrman 45). Doctrinal rivalry between orthodox and Gnostic Christians was intense, and each considered the other heretical and that each sect wanted the other's texts discredited. In The Da Vinci Code, the Gnostic documents are said to be "secret" and suppressed, but the facts of history are more mundane. One analyst of The Da Vinci Code cites the "debate's contentious nature from early on" (Bock 97). The "secret"

Category: Philosophy - C