Jesus in America
Behind the wild success of a theological thriller lies a centuries-old urge to recapture the original Jesus
Is it fair, though, to fault a page turner for failing to exhibit the rigor of a Ph.D. dissertation? Not really, says Margaret Mitchell, a professor of early church history at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She has written that the Code is "a quick romp, largely fun to read, if rather predictable and preachy." But she also concluded that the book should have come with its own decoding device to assist readers in determining "which `facts' are trustworthy and which patently not." For example, Mitchell says Brown cites the Gnostic gospels (found among other documents at the Nag Hammadi site in Egypt in 1945) to make the case for a human Jesus. But, she argues, those texts are famous for depicting Christ as, if anything, more divine than human. Brown also asserts that Mary Magdalene's marriage to Jesus is "a matter of historical record," basing his claim on a shaky translation of a word in one of the noncanonical gospels. That word is usually translated as friend or companion, says Mitchell.
But the very weaknesses and excesses of the novel are also what put it so squarely in the grain of American religious culture from the earliest days of the republic to the present, particularly as that culture has been shaped by Protestant understandings of Christianity and the figure of Jesus himself. What Brown's novel taps into above all is a persistent American desire to recapture the true, original Jesus. "That's what Protestantism itself has always been about," says University of Southern California historian Fox.
Of course, there is no way to return to the original Jesus, any more than there is a way to go back to the original church, however much Christians have tried to do both. The traditions that have been built on top of the life and teaching of Jesus and his early followers cannot simply be discarded or tossed aside as irrelevant, Mitchell explains. "You can't just go back to the originating moment and say that's all it is," she says.
There is another reason for the impossibility of returning to the original Jesus: Humans are not capable of seeing across time in some pure, unmediated way. Their perceptions are shaped by their own conditions and their own needs as creatures living at a certain time--hence the need for the corrective of tradition. Throughout their history, Americans have repeatedly recast their understanding and image of Jesus to suit their present needs. "What Americans have seen in him," Prothero writes in American Jesus, "has been an expression of their own hopes and fears--a reflection not simply of some `wholly other' divinity but also of themselves."
One of the big changes in how Americans regarded Jesus came with the Revolution itself and particularly during the religious explosion of the early 19th century. While in colonial times Christians focused mainly on God the stern father, after independence they began to dwell on other parts of the Trinity--particularly Jesus the son. "This is when they start yanking him out of the creedal formations and start to think about him as a person whom they can love," says Prothero.
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