More DaVinci

The DaVinci Code's unacknowledged premise is that there can't possibly be a community of people continuous through history that remembers that the Lord died on the Cross, rose from the dead, ascended into Heaven, and didn't marry St. Mary Magdalen, Apostle to the Apostles. Between a Christ placed in a remote, unreachable past, and "us," are merely fragmentary scrolls whose meaning "we" can't agree on.

I call this the Caveman Hypothesis of Western Christian Historiography (with apologies to the guys in the Geico ad!).

Maybe it's because of the trauma of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the spread of illiteracy there, or the Christian legalism that developed there in place of Orthodoxy, or the "hermeneutical critique" of the Protestant Reformation, or even recent Western man's infatuation with himself and his "progress." But Western man is used to thinking of the Apostles and the Early Church as little more than cavemen, and that "we" now know so much better than they.

But is it really so difficult to believe that the literate Early Church in a literate Hellenistic world knew something of what it was talking about? Westerners accept Plato and Aristotle and Co., and they were 500 years earlier! Why this "suspicion" of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul? and of the Orthodox Church that directly descends from them - the Church of Jerusalem, the Churches of Antioch and Alexandria, the Churches of Greece and Cyprus, are all in the Bible!

The Western Church may be agnostic on many points of Early Church history, or legitimately questionable. But we Orthodox remember!