He Isn't Risen

The Vatican's made farmfulls of hay over the inhistoricity of Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, but what they won't admit is that it's closer to the truth than anything they'll ever preach.

Like Christmas, Easter is a day of ritual for the media. Acknowledge that Christians are celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. Maybe toss in a little about the (recent) origins of Easter eggs and bunnies. Talk about church clothes or something equally innocuous. If you're Time or Newsweek, publish a bland article reassuring everyone that while there are still a couple of open questions about the resurrection, orthodox beliefs are socially respectable to hold.

But never, ever ask difficult questions about the central tenets of Christianity. That would be like questioning Mohammed's sanity in Iran. Dan Brown's DaVinci Code has helped, though, since it's piqued the curiosity of so many Americans. But it's two-thirds fantasy based on questionable scholarship, even if it's better scholarship than the Vatican routinely displays.

That's because the Vatican vis a vis the Passion is in the same prickly position that the Bush administration was in vis a vis Iraq: The evidence doesn't point where they want it to, so evasion and deception determine the message and its method. (The Vatican's foot-dragging on releasing the full Dead Sea scrolls is classic government evasion technique.) And the media in countries with high numbers of Christian citizens can't say anything too bold about the dominant religion without hemorrhaging advertisers. Plus, wringing the truth out of scholars is hard, time-consuming work.

What the media can never say is that Christianity isn't really different from Paganism. It is Paganism. A perverted version of it. Our version of the mystery religion, Gnosticism, has been historicized, so that instead of taking the passion story as a metaphorical or allegorical tale, we're raised to believe that it actually happened. But it never did.

If you're in the mood for reading about this sort of thing, try this. Or this.

Oh, and the picture up top? That's Dionysus. He was crucified long before any carpenter was.

A few books on the subject:

• The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, by Robert M. Price
• Christianity and Mythology and especially Pagan Christs, by J.M. Robertson. Both are hard to get but they're probably the best books on the subject.
• The Jesus Mysteries, by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. A good overview whose authors purport to have "uncovered" what scholars have been investigating for, oh, a couple of centuries.
• The Gnostic Gospels, The Gnostic Paul and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, by Elaine Pagels, the first scholar to get her mitts on the Nag Hamadi scriptures.