I came across a book entitled "Cracking the Da Vinci Code" [1] yesterday, and read most of it under the disapproving eyes of shop assistants (naughty naughty me); I felt I should add my two cents worth. Why not? There are so many two-cents-worths floating around that I could buy enough Vanilla Fudge icecream to satisfy my craving for years - no mean feat, may I add.
I'll start with one of the obvious points on which the above book erred: lumping medieval Catholicism - and even more modern forms of Catholicism - with biblical Christianity. I find myself irritated that Bible-believing Christians who stick to what the Word of God says are always apostrophized as bigots and "fundamentalists", while other religions which stick to their teachings (yes, I'll say it: religiously) are admired. (Everyone goes on at length about Buddhism or Zen, while some of these faiths have terrible tenets. Treating women as non-humans, for example. Or saying to people who are suffering that it must be their fault, as they were probably murderers in a "past life"!) Catholicism has many strange teachings which do not line up with the Bible: decrees of popes taken as divine truth, or a lot of the stuff which is found in what is called the "Apocrypha" [2], books that were never accepted as part of the Old or New Testaments, but which were tacked onto accepted Catholic doctrine in the sixteenth century by the Council of Trent [3].
Within Catholicism, of course, there are widely differing viewpoints also: the old-fashioned Catholicism which takes its views from the afore-mentioned Council of Trent; a more moderate version dating from Vatican II; a liberal version; a non-practicing cultural attachment; or even atheist and charismatic Catholics. You can't tar any group with the same brush. Some Catholics want Mary elevated to the same level as the Trinity, or even above. Others see this as blasphemy. The contrasts continue. But my main point is that many Catholic beliefs do run counter to Bible teaching, and as such are not accepted by Christians of the evangelical Bible-toting sort. (No, we don't carry them around with us all the time . . .)
For example, you will never catch Protestants praying to, or venerating, Mary in any way. As far as we are concerned, she was a human woman who gave birth to God the Son. She did NOT accrue any form of divinity in so doing. When you hear about "The Immaculate Conception", you think it refers to Jesus Christ, don't you? At least I thought so... But no: it refers to a pope's declaration that Mary was born without sin. That she was somehow also divine. This totally overturns the Bible's standpoint that Christ alone was born without sin, and I view it with horror. It is this belief, and the one that Mary's consent to the death of "her" son let to humanity's redemption(!!), that has led to a large body of Catholics wanting Mary declared "co-redemptrix" with Christ, something the majority of Christians would regard as pure anathema [4].
The Mary of the Bible was very different from the Catholic Mary. For one thing, she wasn't a perpetual virgin. Joseph had no relations with her until Jesus was born; then she had other children, James being one of the most famous. She was probably about fourteen when she fell pregnant, a dark little Jewess with beautiful curly hair who bore almost no resemblance to the skinny, pale, simpering woman in blue that you see everywhere.
A lot of what I see as the Mary cult dates back to ancient mother-goddess rites. There
were several
female goddesses mentioned in the Bible: The Astartes/Asheras, bloodthirsty fertility goddesses
who demanded child-sacrifice and prostitution-worship, and were represented by large
phallic symbols; Diana of Ephesus, a many-breasted earth-mother type similar to Cybele,
the Roman "Magna Mater"; and the most pertinent, Isis. She was called "Salvia", Saviouress,
wore a blue robe, a snake on one arm, and carried her son Horus around constantly.
Cleopatra dressed up as the goddess, as she believed she was Isis-on-earth, leading
to the myth that she killed herself with a snake (the ancient Cretan goddess is, it is thought,
represented by statues of a bare-breasted woman in a long skirt, holding a writhing snake
in each hand).
The Roman Venus was not the goddess of
love as much as of the life-force: birth, sex and even death were aspects of her worship.
Her symbol was a sacred grove of trees, and one tends to find statues of Mary in groves,
and Gothic pillars in Marian cathedrals are supposed to represent trees. The Astarte
element was called the "Queen of Heaven", as was Isis, and one finds references in
Jeremiah to the fact that the Israelites were pouring out wine-libations to her
and making votive cakes shaped like her[5]. This is reminiscent of the "corn-dollies" made in
honour of the corn-goddess in parts of rural England. Jeremiah rebuked the Israelites for
this idolatry, but they ignored both him and God, and so were destroyed (these were the
members of the tribe of Judah who were not sent to Babylon; the "bad figs" in God's book).
Catholics often cite the Jeremiah reference to the Queen of Heaven as precedent for their
worship of Mary - but it isn't quite the reference they think it is!
This brings me to the Assyro-Babylonian goddess, Ishtar. She is said to have been the
wife of Nimrod, who had a son named Tammuz (a year-king type, who died each winter and
came back to life in spring - Ezekiel mentions "women mourning for Tammuz" in the temple of
God, which God found highly insulting. The giant stone penis in the temple court was
equally revolting, but this referred to Astarte). Tammuz was born posthumously, and Ishtar
said that he was his father reborn. This was carried into the Egyptian Osiris-Isis-Horus
legend as well. The symbol of Ishtar was the rose, a symbol of the female genitals which
continued well into the middle ages. Ishtar rose-symbols can be found in some
Freemason-sponsored chapels and churches, as well as being adopted to represent Mary.
Mary is called Salvia, and Queen of Heaven, and is shown with baby Jesus in much the same
way as Isis was depicted: a tall, dark-haired, blue-gowned woman with a child. Isis worship
was a Mystery-cult in the later Roman Empire: it involved, much like the Cybele-cult from
Asia Minor, priests flagellating themselves as they went begging alms through the streets.
Another rather shocking rite associated with Isis was self-castration; devotees would go
into a trance-like frenzy, waiting until her statue passed to publicly perform the act.
Needless to say, Isis worship was reformed as Christianity grew widespread throughout the
empire. I recall a Roman poet-devotee had a dream about Isis, and wrote a poem entitled
"Salvia". You will note that the song "Ave Maria" has a line that says "Salve, regina"
meaning Save, [our] queen.
During the Passover Meal (ie the Last Supper) which Jesus had with His disciples, He took the bread, broke it, and said: "This is my body, which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me." Then he took the cup of wine, and said, "This is my blood which is shed for you, for the forgiveness of sin. Do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me."
This remembrance of Jesus' death and resurrection is called Communion. Mass, on the other hand, actually involves mingling the bread and wine to make some sort of simulacrum of Jesus' body, which is "re-sacrificed" on the altar to "atone for" the sins of the congregation! Practically a pagan rite. One which makes my teeth ache. The main theological teaching behind the crucifixion was that Jesus' death atoned for the sin of humanity once and for all, and that salvation is a gracious gift from God to whomever asks for it. It is not achieved by a lifetime of hard work, ages in purgatory and the hope that, somehow, one's descendants will pray sufficiently for your soul so that the Scarab Beetle of Goodness will outweigh Maat, the Feather of Truth, on the Cosmic Scale... wait, that's a Ancient Egyptian belief. Oops. I get so careless sometimes...
Catholics pray to saints. They pray to Mary too. In fact, I wonder if they ever pray to the Father or Jesus, I really do. There is a saint for every occasion, even one that helps you find stuff you've lost. "Saints" in Catholicism refers to people who were good Catholics while alive, then died and were decreed saints by the pope for something they did, or wrote, or something. They might have done a miracle while they were alive. This is "beatification". If any saint performs a miracle after they are dead, they are "canonised". There are only three canonised saints, one of whom is Elisha. Someone threw a dead body into his grave and the man came back to life. I forget the other two...
Anyway, people actually pray to dead popes. They venerate past clerics. They worship dead people, and wonder why I find this strange.
Catholicism states that there are two levels of worship: latria, supreme worship offered to God, and dulia, a lesser worship given to Mary and the saints. They say that because there are two Latin words for worship, therefore there are two kinds, and so they excuse breaking the commandment to worship no one but God. Unfortunately for their argument, there is only one Greek word for worship, proskuneio (which implies "approaching to kiss", a gorgeous thought), from which the two Latin words were originally translated. Idolatry is idolatry, however specious your excuses. Of course, worshipping money or television is also idolatry, so you can't point fingers, can you?
I really hadn't heard of the Cathars until last year, when I came across a book which mentioned them as the Albigensians. They were a really tiny cult in the middle ages, and while they were extremely weird, no one deserves to be maimed and murdered by being burned to death under the tender mercies of the Inquisition...
Think a cross between the Masons and the Watchtower cult. Maybe with some Mormon and Catholic thrown in. And some Buddhism. Okay, lots of weird too. The Cathars started with Catholic sacraments: confession, mass, last rites and baptism, and priestly hierarchies between the common people and the church of the time, and came up with some particularly strange conclusions. They reasoned that, if one was in a state of grace after the last rites, why bother with any other sacraments? They lived normal (even good) lives, then took their sacrament from a parfait, a perfect one, just before they died. They then did nothing to threaten this state of grace, eating or drinking nothing from that point onwards.
"Parfaits" could be male or female (anathema - there's that word again - to Medieval priests), had to be celebate, and were considered "ascended masters" in their lifetime. One could only get into heaven through these people; if you never met one, you were reborn again and again until you did. Which says Hinduism to me. They were pacifists who denied the crucifixion; they read the Bible assiduously but denied its content. They called themselves Christians, but didn't follow any of the tenets of Christianity. I find them rather repulsive, but weird as they were, they didn't deserve to be burned alive. I suppose Medieval Catholicism had a thing against odd people knocking on the door with tracts...
What else can I say? I regard the idea that Jesus "didn't die on the cross, but married Mary Magdalene and had a child" revolting? That it couldn't be true in a million years? That I'd like to twist Dan Brown's ears off, but the queue's too long? That it's a bloody stupid idea, unsupported by any historical evidence? That anyone who believes that Constantine could've found all existing copies of every Bible and book of the Bible and change it somehow (there are 15000 extant copies, in ancient Greek, of the Gospel of John alone), that the Gospels were written in the fourth century (they found parchment fragments of John dating to within 100 AD in Egypt some time ago), that the death and resurrection of Christ and His divinity were invented in the fourth century... A creed, recited by children (sorta like "Now I lay me Down to Sleep"), which mentions the resurrection, had arisen eight years after it happened.
People don't think, they believe everything they're told because it sounds... interesting, or salacious. Why would practically all the apostles be prepared to die in hideous ways for a lie? So many others willing to die in Roman arenas, or tortured and maimed, just for something they knew didn't happen? Would you?
I think the only "conspiracy" here is one of stupidity. Really. "Lets find the most offensive idea possible, pretend it's true, and cash in on the controversy". Urrgh! I think it's pathetic, stupid, flimsy and has no actual research behind it. Yes there are a few elements of truth, but these are in the way of : There were Cathars; Catholism has some weird elements that are totally un-Biblical; there are odd elements in Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings. Ummm. I don't see any actual connection. At all. Sorry.
The vision of "Mary" which later came to be named "our lady of Fatima", famously beheld by three children before the Second World War, has been twice crowned Queen of Heaven and Earth (at least, her statue has) by the late pope John Paul II, who gave all the glory to Mary when he wasn't killed by the well-known assassin's bullet some time ago. Unfortunately, by breaking the commandments about having no god besides God, and not making any graven (ie carved) image to worship, people "forfeit the grace which might be theirs", which saddens me greatly.
No one likes to scream "Idolatry", but that is exactly what Mariolatry and hagiolatry (saint-worship) really is. It is what lead to Iconoclasm (icon-smashing) in the Eastern church. It is putting others before God, putting something between ourselves and God, when His deepest desire is to have a personal relationship based on covenant. And I really must put up something about covenant...