Angry in the Great White North

The reason is that I have heard enough of the premise secondhand to know that Dan Brown is recycling old Gnostic theories and dogma. I've read these stories before. Some twenty years ago or so, as a teen, I read a Leslie Charteris novella featuring the playboy crimefighter Simon Templar, better known as The Saint. In this story (the name of which I can't recall), Templar gets caught up in a murderous treasure hunt. After collecting a number of plot coupons, the story reaches its climactic end on Crete in the ruins of the old Templar fortress. There, in a crypt, the great secret guarded by the Templars is uncovered: the Gospel of Judas.

Sound familiar? Of course it does -- the Gospel of Judas made headlines only a few weeks ago, in part because of the intense interest surrounding The Da Vinci Code.

The point it, these alternative theories of Jesus' true nature and the notion that the Catholic Church (and it's invariably the Vatican, by the way) has been hiding these secrets for two thousand years have been around for, well, just under two thousand years.

Now with the fuss and bother surrounding the release of the movie version of Dan Brown's bit of silliness (a movie that has opened to resoundingly bad reviews, which is another reason to avoid it), there has been a deluge of programs on television dealing with Biblical secrets and revisionism. I've caught only bits and pieces here and there, mostly on the National Geographic Channel. I don't get much time to watch programming I like on TV. Usually the kids are yelling for cartoons, and when they aren't monopolizing the TV, my wife vetoes most programs I care to watch ("None of those war documentaries!").

So given that I've caught maybe 10% of the programming being aired, it's amazing that in a five-minute segment I caught in all of yesterday, I witnessed something so mindnumbingly awful that I wondered if I was just unlucky, or if the average quality of these programs is so poor that I'm likely to be shocked on any random sampling.

There was a woman being interviewed as part of a documentary called "Illuminating Angels and Demons". I later determined she was Lynn Picknett, co-author of the The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ. Dan Brown credits this work as the main inspiration for his novel.

Too bad he didn't credit Leslie Charteris. If there really was a Simon Templar, he'd probably give Dan Brown a thorough drubbing.

Picknett was giving her great insight into the sorts of lies the Church has been caught spreading. You see, according to Picknett, we've all been told that the papacy draws its legitimacy from the fact that Peter the Apostle was the first to see the risen Christ. But here's the astounding revelation. If you read the New Testament, you realize that Mary Magdalene was the first to see Christ after the Resurrection. Moreover, Peter was not even the first male to see Christ, but rather it was the apostle John.

Stunning!

Stunning because I have never, ever, in decades of religious instruction in school or in mass, heard of this nonsense of Peter being the first to see Christ, and from that we have the papacy and the Catholic Church.

As a Catholic, I am well aware of the order of witnesses to the Resurrection. Moreover, the apostle Simon was chosen by Jesus well before the crucifixion to be the first leader of the Church when he was given his nickname "Peter".

And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18

Picknett's revelations are absolute nonsense. According to Wikipedia, this is a relatively minor revelation. Here are some of the bigger ones:

• Mary Magdalene had a ritualized, "sacred" sexual relationship with Jesus, in keeping with their religious beliefs, and as his "initiator" into the sacred mysteries had an equal relationship to Jesus
• Politics and religion were synonymous in ancient Palestine, and Jesus was an astute and aggressive political competitor against John
• The Jesus group may have been responsible for the death of John the Baptist
• Jesus was a magician, and that there was a transmission of power from John to Jesus through the beheading of John. They note that only after this beheading is Jesus recorded to have performed miracles.
• Jesus is one in a line of many "dying-and-rising" gods, who share many similar traits

So Jesus was a charlatan and the founder of a murderous sex cult? Lucky for Picknett and her kind, Catholics are not likely to burn down embassies or butcher film directors caught bicycling down the street.

My point, however, is that how dense does the poor research have to be in these pseudohistories that I can catch a five minute segment at random and be witness to a story so jaw-droppingly off-base as this Peter-was-Pope-because-he-saw-Christ-first-but-not-really bit? Either I was just really unlucky, or you can't swing a dead cat in the presence of Picknett, Brown, and other like them without smacking into example after example of poor research, extreme historical revisionism, and flat out fabrications.

Too bad so many people are taking Brown so seriously. I've never met anyone who thinks Simon Templar was real.