I’m not going to add this to the post below because it will start a whole other discussion.

I think it’s worth asking why Dan Brown was so determined to separate Jesus from Judaism, to scrub him clean of Judaism in order to make him more presentable to his eager readers.

Oh sure, he’s Jewish, and part of the plot hinges on the marriage of the bloodllines, blah, blah blah, but…other than that, you’d be hard pressed to figure that Jesus and early Christianity existed in a Jewish context.

Reading the canonical gospels, of course, we can’t avoid this, nor do we want to. It’s who Jesus was. Understanding this is crucial to understanding Jesus. There’s not even a shorthand way to express this without diminishing the depth of it. Jesus wasn’t a faux-gnostic teacher of androgynous wisdom. He was Jewish and taught in that context to other Jews.

Why does Dan Brown find it necessary to change this? Why does he work to eliminate Jesus’ Jewishness?

In his accounts of the origins of Christian ritual – taken from old, hoary "Christianity is stolen from paganism" texts of anti-Catholic polemics, both "academic" and popular, Brown has Teabing explain it all in terms of baptism and eucharist’s supposed eery similarity to pagan ritual.

Uh…Jewish ritual washing? Upon conversion? Uh….Passover?

Nowhere to be found in Brown’s "account."

Worth noting? Sure.

It’s not new. I’ve not done extensive examination of this point, although I’d like to – when you examine much of Biblical scholarship that emerged in the 19th century (mostly from Germany, but I’m trying hard not to notice that), you find a similar effort on a more scholarly plain. The quest for the historical Jesus seemed to always end up stripping him of his Jewishness. Incidentally, the same thing happened to Paul. One of the great contributions of New Testament scholarship over the past twenty years has been to aggressively re-situation Jesus, the early Christian movement, and Paul in Second Temple Judaism. N.T. Wright, in particular, is well worth reading because he so strongly examines the world of Second Temple Judaism, situates Jesus there, and then, for example, analyzes what Jews of this period believed and said about resurrection, places what the apostolic witness said about the resurrection of Jesus, and makes the connection – given what Second Temple Jews meant when they talked about "resurrection" there is, for example, no way that those who testified to Jesus’ resurrection could have meant "Well, we really felt his presence and so we decided to talk symbolically about that by concretizing our sense of his continued existence in our hearts by saying we saw him."

The Paul stuff is fascinating too, and something, after all this DVC nonsense is over with, I’ll blog on, because reading Wright’s little book on Paul really opened my eyes to a much bigger picture than I used to thinking about when I thought about Paul.

Anyhoo.

The question is – why does the "real" Jesus – the "good," "authentic" teacher…have to be situated outside Jewish tradition and teaching, according to Dan (and Blythe) Brown?