The last post in this string was the bridge. We looked briefly at how books made it into the Christian canon (The Bible), the Gnostics, since Mr. Brown's book The Da Vinci Code (TDC) brought him up, poor ol' Constantine. Last time we addressed some of the tired old charges brought against Constantine and his supposed machinations in keeping certain things from Scripture (which were brought up yet again in TDC). We'll continue for a post or two on other alligations TDC makes and hopefully show you that what Mr. Brown calls "Facts" should be not taken just on his "authority".
In addressing the numerous errors in TDC it is difficult to being. We can talk about some his trivial errors such as stating that there are 666 panes of glass in the pyramid entrance to the Louvre (p. 21) when the actual number is 673. While it makes for a fascinating allegation (though the equating of the number of panes of glass on the Pei addition to the Bible's "Mark of the Beast" takes some real stretching), Brown is simply wrong. Surely, if anything should be a "Fact" it should be something as easily checked as this. But alas, it is not to be. But as fascinating as it is, this discrepancy between story and reality is minor and has no hard implication other than to case a rather dim conspiratorial shadow. We're interested in the serious ones such as those we discussed in relation to Constantine in the pervious post. Let's take a look at a couple more:
On p.309 of TDC Brwon writes "The Jewish Tetragrammaton YHWH - the scared name of God - in fact deried from Jehova, an androgenous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah." What is Brown up to here? Well, one of the accusations against Christianity is that we tried to do away with any connection of the feminine with the divine. Now, in this passage from his book Brown does get one thing correct, the Tetragrammaton was used in Jewish writings because they thought that base man using the name of God would profane it, so they used four Hebrew letters which we would translate Y-H-W-H. As to what they actually stood for, we do not know. What we do know is that YHWH goes back much, much farther than Jehovah, since we can trace its origin to the Middle Ages while YHWH can be found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And just where did the word Jehova come from? It isn't from the fusion of the words Brown states, but rather from Jewish scribes called the Masoretes working in the Middle Ages, who used the vowels from the word adonai interspered amoung the "Latinized" YHWH. So what we got was something that could be pronouned in public readings, J-a-H-o-V-a-H. If you want to conjure up a plot to hide the feminine nature of the divine, you need look somewhere else.
To show Mr. Brown's linguistic ineptitude, let's look at one more passage today (and it happens to involve our old friend Constantine): "Anyone who chose the forbidden gospels over Constantine's version was deemed a heretic. The word 'heretic' derives from that moment in history. The latin word haereticus means 'choice.' Those who 'chose' the original history of Christ were the world's first heretics" (TDC p.234). Oh my. I honestly don't know where he gets this stuff. In linguistic reality, the word for "heretic" goes back farther than Constantine (early fourth century). Paul himself used the greek word hairesis and its variants in passages such as 1 Corinthians 11:19 and Titus 3:10 (both somewhere around AD 60-ish). Of course, if you only read titles, you can find it in the writings of Irenaeus (Irenaeus Against Heresies, circa AD 180) and Tertullian (Prescription Against Heretics around the late second centruy).
And folks, this is just the beginning...
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