Letters to the Editor
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Let me know...
...when you find the historical texts written during or immediately after Jesus's time that tell us anything at all about this Jesus fellow. Otherwise it's just hearsay..decades, and sometimes hundreds of years-old hearsay.
This article is a waste of time and space since all Ms. Miller opines is for one make-believe story to perhaps be less false than another. The "coverup" is that is the faulty premise of Jesus's existence, not whom he may have started a family with. Interesting, today's news about the Gnostic "Book of Judas" (another few decades or so after the fact) throws this article's premise for a loop. Day late, dollar short.
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Religious Tolerance
Can you imagine an article like this about Mohammed? People would be killed for it.
The strenghth of Christianity is it has nothing to do with with this -- rather -- feed the hungry, visit the afflicted, love the unlovable, turn the other cheek, be humbler than the humblest. That is the way to God in the end.
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Everything in HBHG is not necessarily wrong
This article leaves the reader, in my opinion, with the suggestion that "Grail" was a mountain of complete falsehoods, but there are some gems in the book. For instance, note the geneology given in the bible for both Mary and Joseph, right at the beginning of the Gospels. If Joseph had nothing to do with the birth, why does it matter that he descended from David?
Another point the book made was that Jesus was likely a claimant to the Jewish throne, while in the gospels this idea is sort of a sideshow, a mockery, and merely a falsehood used by the Romans to crucify him.
Still further, "Grail" gets into the history of Paul, and how he essentially created modern Christianity with lies and deceit.
Sure, the Baigent books are filled with melodramatic conspiracy theories, but it seems intellectually dishonest to merely point out the faults of "Grail", and absolutely none of the virtues. I haven't yet read it, but I'm willing to accept that Tabor's book is better. It was also published 20 years after Grail, which, with all its faults, was a groundbreaking work.
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Thanks, Denise, for proving my point
Nice backhanded slap at "that other religion" that is so inferior to yours, you know, the one that preaches tolerance and kindness and all that other stuff you can't even practice for one paragraph. I've read a lot about Christians. I just have yet to meet one.
P.S.--The H. is for Holier-than-thou, evidently.
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Christianity in Crisis
Laura Miller has it exactly right about "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" -- it's a bunch of nonsense. The real question is, why has it been so successful? And why has "The DaVinci Code," a work of fiction based on the same vague sensationalistic ideas about Jesus, also been so phenomenally successful, and is now being turned into a motion picture?
Christianity is in crisis, that's why. People realize that the fundamentalist Jesus just doesn't cut it, but they don't know where to turn. The Christian right has tried to invoke this fundamentalist Jesus to justify their own visions of a wealthy and militaristic U. S.; because they have dominated the media with their own idea of Jesus, people have assumed that this is what Christianity is actually all about.
So what is there instead? Could Jesus actually have something meaningful to say about our wealthy, militaristic society? Laura Miller has grasped another important point when she mentions James Tabor's book "The Jesus Dynasty": the importance of looking at the historical Jesus and early Jewish Christianity. The message of Jesus was not about founding a new religion, but about simple living and nonviolence.
I don't believe that I agree with everything that Tabor says, but he's clearly understood one point very well. It was the Jewish Christians who followed James, not the gentile Christians who followed Paul, who best understood Jesus. The Jewish Christian Ebionites were pacifists and vegetarians; it was they who best understood the message of simple living and nonviolence.
So all the people who will be streaming into the movie theaters to see "The DaVinci Code" are on the right track in one respect. The reason they see something meaningful in these strange stories is that these stories treat traditional Christianity as a crock of nonsense. We know that traditional Christianity has missed Jesus, but we don't quite know where to turn; and that's the crisis of Christianity in a nutshell.
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this is one of the reasons i read salon
Because we get articles like this that dare to take on conventional or popular "wisdom". If people enjoy the books as fictional mysteries that's cool, but the believers baffle me. Thanks for asking the question I always want to scream--Why the hell would a conspiracy go about planting "clues" in art and architechture? What, no clues being planted in literature? How about Jane Eyre? What about on the Sopranos--surely David Chase is in on it.
The Bible and the Quran should be studied, like all religious documents, from a historical perspective.
To the person who said that there would be riots if an article was published about the Quran...You say that as if you lament the fact that Christians don't riot and murder over cartoons and bad press!...As if you wish they would so we would all stop studying things instead of taking things on "faith alone"! This is all wrong. We live in a free country--which is something you religious folks pretend to love--but you don't love it really, you just want everyone to think like you. Living in a free country also means the freedom to be offended. I think the rioting Muslims should be condemned, not the Denmark newspapers who published them.
I agree with the poster who said feed the hungry, heal the sick...We can do this, and love one another, without the religous overlay. We don't need Jesus or Mohammed to teach us how to behave and how to love. We teach these values to our children.
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Politics trumps religion
Ms. Miller seems to have missed two important aspects of Holy Blood, Holy Grail: First, the sequels to the book. What happened to Yehoshua (aka Jesus) is a comparatively small part of the much longer story that starts before the events in the New Testament and continues to this day.
Second, and more importantly, it doesn't actually matter if the descendents of King David effected the world for thousands of years, it only matters that people believe it to be true. Politics trumps religion every time. Political power doesn't depend on the facts, as we see today, it depends on spin control, threat of arms and who can be bought. Convince a Pope here and a King there and armies are on the move.
Dan Brown brilliantly made the subplot of his book about sexual politics and only peripherally about religious politics. Whether the whole story has come to light, or even if the whole story needs to come to light is irrelevant. The issues are important, then and now. As always, a study of the past -- whether real or speculative -- is actually about today.