Her professional life will gain from this realisation no doubt
Her professional life will gain from this realisation, no doubt.Susie Boyt’s novel ‘Only Human’ is published by Review. Last-minute disasters can’t be planned for, and Pierre P?’s latest novel, translated by Ina Rilke, opens with a particularly horrifying one. On a wet afternoon, Etienne Vollard, driving a vanload of books, knocks down a little girl, Eva. At the hospital he meets Eva’s mother, a single parent who longs to escape her responsibilities.
Vollard takes over bedside duties, and talks the girl out of her coma, quoting to her from Beckett and Goethe Language eventually wakes Eva up, but fails to save her. As in all good French fiction, rationalism triumphs over sentimentality.. Many critics of The Da Vinci Code have condemned the author’s appalling research. The recent copyright case revealed that it was not Dan Brown but his wife Blythe who trawled books and the internet, copied down chunks of text without checking their accuracy, and handed these to her husband with no sources attached. He then, apparently not knowing their origin or their validity, and thus not understanding their context, plugged them wholesale into his novel Hardly surprising that it’s so flawed. Brown’s authority-character Leigh Teabing rather patronisingly tells the heroine Sophie, “The Bible is a product of man, my dear Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds.” Who better, then, to challenge this supposed erudition than New Testament scholars?
These two books both examine in some detail how the New Testament was cobbled together – a messier process than even Brown portrays – and how many familiar books including, astonishingly, the Gospel of John, very nearly didn’t make it into the canon while now-unfamiliar ones nearly did.
Most Christians are unaware that the first list of exactly the books in today’s New Testament wasn’t written until AD367, and many churches had different lists. Brown’s emphasis on Constantine and the Council of Nicaea in 325 is misplaced.Although “he mixes fact with fancy”, says Robert M Price in The Da Vinci Fraud, Dan Brown is doing us a favour by revealing “a dumbed-down version of.. the history of Christianity to a wider readership”. Many readers have “discovered that they were ready for something beyond what their churches had … spoon-fed them.” This is why the Church is panicking.Much of his book is a good read, but Price’s chapter about the human and divine nature of Christ, as hammered out at Early Church councils, could have been greatly simplified. All he needed to do was demonstrate that Brown was talking rubbish when he said that the Council of Nicaea turned Jesus from man into God.Unfortunately Price uses the novel as a convenient peg on which to hang his own theories. He draws parallels between the Jesus story and the death-and-resurrection myths of other gods such as Osiris, Adonis and Tammuz Nothing new there; but Price takes it one step further.
Each of these was restored to life by a female partner: Isis, Aphrodite and Ishtar. Who should take this role in the Jesus story? Inevitably it’s the Magdalene. Yes, it’s theoretically possible that the Jesus story is mythical and that Mary Magdalene is “a historicised goddess”, but as Price says of other writers, “possibility is not probability”.While Price ends up chasing a mythological Jesus, Bart D Ehrman explores Jewish apocalypticism: the heady milieu in which Jesus lived, and crucial to understanding him. Here we have a rebuttal of the central idea of the novel, that Jesus was married.