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Mother Mary and the Fathers

How did I let so much of May go by without writing something Marian? Shame on you for not reminding me.

The Church’s first expressions of Marian devotion were beautiful and memorable. They’ve been passed intact from generation to generation, and they’re still used today. She is there in the early creeds (“born of the Virgin Mary”), there in St. Ignatius of Antioch’s professions of faith. In the middle of the second century, St. Justin described her as the New Eve. Like the first Eve, Mary is mother of all the living — now those who are truly alive in Christ.

The earliest recorded Marian prayer was in use in Egypt in the 200s (and possibly earlier). Catholics still pray that prayer today: “We fly to your patronage, O holy Mother of God. Despise not our petitions in our need, and keep us from all danger. O ever glorious and faithful Virgin Mary!”

The oldest surviving images of Mary show her cradling the baby Jesus at her breast. Probably the earliest is a fresco in Rome’s Priscilla Catacombs, painted probably around 250 A.D. The earliest Egyptian Madonna is exquisitely engraved in stone.

The earliest surviving record of a Marian apparition is also from the 200s. She appeared St. Gregory the Wonderworker, and you can read the story here, as told by St. Gregory of Nyssa.

If you have not yet read Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought by Luigi Gambero, please do yourself the biggest favor and order a copy today. Do it for your Mother.

If you’ve read Gambero and you want more, take a look at On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies by Brian Daley, S.J.

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Lovin’ the Ruins

Just discovered ArchArt, a site full of art and archeology images, mostly from the Holy Land and formerly Byzantine lands. There’s some striking stuff here. It’s all copyrighted and watermarked, but it does give you good close-up views of several must-sees, like the famous allegorical inscription of St. Abercius. You’ll find that one, plus a nice Peter and Paul image, at the page marked Christian archeology.

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Jacques Sauniere, You Better Beware

Stranger than fiction: The Vatican Museum’s renovation plans have emerged, straight from the pages of The Da Vinci Code.

ROME (CNS) — A projected new entrance to the Vatican Museums will feature a giant glass pyramid … Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said the above-ground pyramid at the entrance site would help illuminate the underground complex and would evoke the famous pyramid at the entrance of the Louvre in Paris.

Gasp. Which oppressed woman of Christian antiquity do you suppose will be buried there — at the very heart of the conspiracy?

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Merlin Among the Fathers

The “historical Merlin” has joined his friend the “historical Arthur” over at the pages of GrailCode.com. I hope you’ll stop by to welcome everyone’s favorite wizard. You’ll also find new material on St. Gildas the Wise, who, according to the old patristics manuals, flourished around 569 A.D., preaching the Gospel to areas of Ireland that had lapsed back into paganism. (I wonder if the snakes returned?)

You can also meet these characters in the pages of our book, The Grail Code, should you be kind enough to buy a copy.

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Grrrrrreat!

Michael Barber of Singing in the Reign wants us to know something:

A brand new Catholic school is opening up on the West Coast. There is really nothing like this school. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. Let me explain…

This week The Da Vinci Code movie is being released. Sadly, it will no doubt do damage to the faith of countless believers. The Telegraph is reporting that two thirds of Britons who have read the book now believe its claims regarding Jesus’ relationship to Mary Magdalene …

The movie’s release underscores the immense influence Hollywood has on our culture. In fact, it was only a couple of years ago that a movie moved countless numbers of people across the country to rediscover God’s grace. I will never forget the moving testimonials I saw on evening newscasts from by people who had just watched Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ …

These two movies represent Hollywood’s great potential to either foster the faith or undermine it. Yet, despite the great influence of the media, there has been little professional training offered from a faithful Catholic perspective to those young people interested in entering into the field—until now.

Enter John Paul the Great Catholic University. The new college—approved by the state and supported by the local bishop—will offer state of the art training and degrees in Media. Students will learn from those who have succeeded in the field. In addition, the school will offer degrees in Business, helping to train young Catholic professionals of tomorrow …

All students will be required to take a number of courses in Scripture, Moral Theology, and Catholic Literature and Art—taught by faculty faithful to the teaching of the Church’s Magisterium. In all of their Catholic formation, students will learn how to live out their faith in the world and apply Catholic principles in their future professions.

That’s a compelling vision. I don’t have to tell visitors to this blog about the papacy’s other two “Greats” — Leo and Gregory — and how those men turned the challenging circumstances of their day to the benefit of the Gospel. I think they, and John Paul, would approve of this “Great” effort.

Read the rest of Michael’s exhortation here. And visit John Paul the Great Catholic University online.

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Gifs of the Martyrs

Thanks to those readers who pointed out that MARI’s online profile of St. Aquilina was not “sumptuously illustrated,” as I had promised. Mea culpa: I had only told you a third of the story. See also part 2 of the journal’s treatment of St. Aquilina, “Renewing the Devotion to Aquilina the Martyr Saint”, and part 3, “St. Aquilina’s Church and Sanctuary.” If you still want more pictures, all I can say is, sheesh, don’t be so greedy. It’s not like the Lebanese were wielding Kodaks in the third century.

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Code Envy?

Reflecting on A.O. Scott’s savage review of The Da Vinci Code in the New York Times, my co-author Chris Bailey said: “One of the most amusing things about Dan Brown’s book is how it provokes real writers (like me) into withering sarcasm, doubtless rooted in our envy of someone who can make a billion dollars from a book without going through the pointless toil of learning to write. I’d say that enough sarcasm has been spent on The Da Vinci Code to wither what’s left of the Amazon rain forest.”

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Apocrypha Now!

After a sixteen hundred year market lull, gospels are once again a growth industry.

Publishers now are rushing to market to supplement the only standbys — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — with some ancient castoffs: the so-called gospels of Judas, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, and Philip, among others.

These are the “apocryphal” (“hidden”) gospels, purported portraits of Jesus that were spurned as phony or heretical by the early Church. For years, they were a curiosity indulged only by scholars. Now, they’re making a popular comeback.

Browse your local bookstores, and you’ll likely find a dozen collections of apocrypha, most of them released by major publishers in the last five years. Titles are provocative: “The Other Bible,” “The Complete Gospels,” “The Hidden Teachings of Jesus” and “The Lost Books of the Bible.” All suggest that the standard Christian Bible is missing something essential. One volume boasts that it contains “Everything you need to empower your own search for the historical Jesus.”

Many Catholic scholars, however, dismiss the fad.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” said Father Peter Stravinskas, author of The Catholic Church and the Bible. “When I was in grade school, some sisters would tell us syrupy stories from the infancy gospels, and they would be reprimanded by their superiors for teaching such nonsense.”

The infancy gospels — fanciful accounts of Jesus’ childhood — make up just one category of apocryphal literature. There are also collections of Jesus’ alleged sayings, full-scale biographies, apocalyptic tracts (similar in style to the biblical Book of Revelation) and letters attributed to the apostles.

Most arose in the first three centuries of Christianity, before the Church officially proclaimed the “canon,” or definitive list of New Testament books.

Some of the apocrypha were dismissed out of hand by the Fathers of the Church because of the narratives’ patent absurdity or crude style. Others were seriously considered for inclusion in the canon, but were eventually dropped because their contents did not stand up to scrutiny.

Lists had long been in use in local churches. A Milanese fragment, the Muratorian Canon, survives from the second century. And St. Athanasius, in the mid-fourth century, published a list that is identical with New Testament as we know it today. The matter of the Christian canon was definitively settled with the Synods of Hippo (A.D. 393) and Carthage (397 adn 419), which were guided by the brilliant St. Augustine. These synods confirmed the list of the Roman synod of 382, attended by Jerome and presided over by Pope Damasus. The same list appeared in a letter of Pope Innocent I in 405. Rome had spoken; the matter was settled, right?

Well, sort of. Even afterward, however, some Christian apocrypha continued to influence popular piety and art. Yet few people seriously considered these “gospels” sacred, or even historically reliable — until recently.

Some years back, I interviewed William Farmer, who was then the general editor of the International Bible Commentary. Farmer (a remarkable scholar, who has since passed away) traced the resurgence of interest in Christian apocrypha to an archeological find in 1945: “The single most important factor has been the discovery of the fourth-century Nag Hammadi library in Egypt. The texts included a copy of the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of purported sayings of Jesus.”

Scholars differ on the exact date of the Gospel of Thomas, but most agree that it is of great antiquity. Some — though not in the mainstream — believe it to be older than books that were included in the New Testament.

The Gospel of Thomas, like all the texts in the Nag Hammadi cache, is Gnostic in character. Gnosticism, a religious movement contemporary with early Christianity, held that salvation came through secret knowledge (in Greek, gnosis) given only to a spiritual elite. Gnostic Christians, whom the Church rejected early as heretics, taught that Jesus’ mission was to reveal this secret knowledge and separate the saved “knowers” from the ignorant rabble.

Most Gnostics took a dim view of the material world and especially of the human body, which they saw as a prison for the spirit. As a result, they minimized (or denied) the importance of Jesus’ bodily incarnation, His suffering and His resurrection, emphasizing instead His spiritual reality and teaching. Thus they also minimized the uniqueness of the witness of the twelve apostles.

Gnostic Christians taught, instead, that any one of the elite could have a spiritual encounter with Jesus and write a “gospel” that was just as authoritative as those by the apostles.

And write them they did — leading St. Irenaeus to complain, in 180, that “every one of them generates something new, day by day, according to his ability; for no one is deemed perfect who does not develop some mighty fictions.”

The Nag Hammadi find included mighty fictions attributed to James, John, Peter, Paul, Thomas and Mary Magdalene. Some 30 years after their discovery, the texts reached a wide audience through Elaine Pagels’ popular paperback The Gnostic Gospels, which some critics described as an “altar call” for a Gnostic revival.

Pagels, however, did explain why the institutional Church could not peacefully coexist with Gnostic members.

The Church proclaimed universal salvation, while Gnostics reserved the gift only for an elite. The Church taught that the death and resurrection of Jesus were decisive historic events; Gnostics saw them as metaphors or illusions. The Church looked to the apostles for authority, while Gnostics looked in the mirror.

St. Irenaeus railed against Gnostic arrogance: “They consider themselves mature so that no one can be compared with them in the greatness of their knowledge, not Peter or Paul or any other apostles!”

The most famous Gnostic gospel, that of Thomas, is a collection of sayings, some of which also appear in the canonical Gospels, while others portray a Jesus unrecognizable — a savior who denies he is “master” to his followers.

Yet “Thomas” has gained a following, recently, among fringe groups in academia. The Jesus Seminar, a free-standing research institute, published Thomas with the four canonical Gospels in a single volume titled The Five Gospels.

Father Alfred McBride, O. Praem., author of many Catholic Scripture studies, sees the book’s title as significant. “Those who speak for the Jesus Seminar show a great deal of interest in elevating Thomas to canonical status,” he told me in a 1998 interview. “And in so doing they reduce the importance and authority of the present New Testament canon. They have their reasons: Thomas has no passion narratives, no miracles, not much that’s supernatural. It’s Jesus the wisdom teacher, which suits their idea that religion is merely humanitarian common sense.”

Participants in the Jesus Seminar also produced The Complete Gospels, an anthology of more than a dozen apocrypha packaged with the canonical four — implying a level playing field for what they call alternative “early Jesus traditions.” Yet they fail to emphasize that the apocryphal gospels rarely gained more than small, local followings, and that many were condemned as heretical from the get-go, while others were dismissed as inaccurate or tawdry.

The Gospel of Nicodemus, for example, is a moving courtroom drama, attempting to portray the small details of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. Doctrinally, it checks out; stylistically, it passes muster. But ultimately it failed the test for the Church Fathers because it is wildly inaccurate in its depiction of Roman jurisprudence and Jewish custom. It also stretches credulity by purporting to describe Jesus’ descent into hell.

“You find a tendency toward sensationalism in the apocrypha,” said Father Stravinskas. “In the canonical Gospels, there’s a reverential silence on some matters The apocrypha, however, are ebullient in divulging intimate details about Our Lady and Our Lord.”

Indeed, while canonical Luke and Matthew merely state that Mary is a virgin, the author of Infancy-James goes so far as to drag in a skeptical midwife to perform a physical examination.

The boy Jesus, for His part, appears in the infancy gospels as a sort of wonder-working Dennis the Menace. In Infancy-Thomas, Jesus breathes life into clay birds, stretches beams in His father’s carpentry shop and strikes dead a teacher who dared to punish Him. In the Arabic Infancy Gospel, He turns cruel playmates into goats. According to Infancy-Thomas, the boy’s neighbors lived in constant fear, moving St. Joseph to cry out: “Do not let [Jesus] go outside the door, because anyone who angers Him dies!”

More troubling, the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Philip strongly suggests that Jesus was physically intimate with Mary Magdalene: “Christ loved her more than all the disciples,” it alleges, “and used to kiss her often on the mouth.”

Most of the apocrypha offer not a different perspective on the historical Jesus, but rather a different Jesus, and some, indeed, purvey a different religion.

According to Father Stravinskas, this accounts for some of their appeal today. “This is a resurgence of Gnosticism,” he said. “These people claim to have a better grasp of the truth than anyone else in the Church, including the magisterium.”

He said the apocrypha also appeal to prurient interests of more mainstream Catholics: “It’s in synch with a tendency to rely on extraordinary revelations: apparitions, visionaries and messages of a doomsday nature.”

Father McBride pointed out that the marketing of these books relies on anti-Catholicism to tease readers with a taste of forbidden fruit. “The message is that the Catholic Church has been keeping secrets, once again chaining up the Bible, not letting people know the real story.”

But, for scholars, the recent surge of interest presents an opportunity, according to Farmer, who enjoyed a distinguished career in biblical studies at Southern Methodist University and converted late in life to Catholicism. “The emergence of these new materials gives us an opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the canon,” he said. “I hope that Christians who regard the canon as decisive for faith might come to a better understanding of why the Church has preserved some books and not others.”

Still, all the dialogue in the academy won’t change the list of approved books, Farmer said. And Father McBride agreed: “The canon belongs to the Church, not the university.”

Father Stravinskas explained why: “Karl Rahner said that the Church, in deciding the canon, was like a mother at work in her apartment, and down below in the courtyard there could be 40 children screaming or crying — but she could hear the voice of her own and know it.”

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Coming Soon to a TV Near You

Scott Hahn and I just — this very day — finished taping our sixth series for EWTN. This one’s called “Letter and Spirit,” and it’s based on Scott’s book by the same name. Our general area of discussion is the relationship between scripture and liturgy. The Fathers figure hugely, of course. I don’t know when the series will air. But as soon as I know, you’ll know.

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A Distant Relation

When I was a kid, my parents had an old, battered and tattered Family Bible, in the back of which was a long list of saints. I was fascinated by the entry for St. Aquilina. It was nothing but her name, of course — but her name was my name, and I was not accustomed to seeing my last name in lights. At nine years old, I couldn’t imagine a time or a place where people observed naming conventions that were different from my own. (Even Jesus had a last name, right? Jesus Christ.) What’s more, I could hardly imagine a Church where all the important people didn’t have names like McCormick and O’Brien.

Yet here was this little-girl saint, who apparently went by her last name, which happened to be my last name — a last name that ended in a vowel.

My distant cousin, my paesan, St. Aquilina had made it to the back pages of a Catholic Bible — and from an Irish publisher, no doubt, like P.J. Kenedy & Sons. I don’t recall whether I fantasized about a Da Vinci Code-style bloodline transmitting fortitude across the centuries, but I might have.

Fast-forward many years, to the advent of the World Wide Web. When my son first taught me how to surf, he plugged in our surname, to impress me with a vanity search. And who should we find but my long-lost cuz, St. Aquilina, the child martyr of Byblos, Lebanon. The Maronite Research Institute had built up an impressive virtual shrine of scholarship in her honor, all sumptuously illustrated.

She’s not a Father. She never even reached the age to be a mother! But she lived in the patristic era, and so she lives within the purview of this blog, and she’s worth getting to know.

Aquilina was born in Byblos in 281 … She received her catechism from Evthalios, Bishop of Byblos. Her heart was inflamed with the love of Christ; hence her faith and fervor radiated like the sun in Byblos and its surroundings. At the age of twelve, Aquilina began an endeavor to spread Christianity among her compatriots. That was done through her example and teachings driven by the zeal of apostles and the innocence of children. Due to her preaching, many of the pagans were baptized, especially young lads and maidens. She was reported to and brought before Magistrate Volusian during the reign of Emperor Diocletian, and, according to ancient tradition, this dialogue took place:

“I am Christian,” she answered, when Volusian questioned her.

The Magistrate said, “You are leading your friends and comrades away from the religion of our gods to the belief in Christ, the Crucified. Don’t you know that our kings condemn this Christ and sentence to death those who worship Him? Leave this error and offer oblation to the gods and you shall live. If you refuse, you shall undergo the most atrocious sufferings.”

You can guess where this story is going. I’m told that Aquilina is to the eastern churches what Agnes is to the west: an icon of Christian innocence crushed under the heel of Diocletian, in the Roman Empire’s last, worst, and most systematic persecution.

Read the rest of Aquilina’s story at the website of the Maronite Research Institute, an organization that has sponsored great work on the eastern Fathers, but is struggling now for want of funds.

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Mary Magdalene, De-Coded and Untangled

I’m convinced that what made Irenaeus such a great saint is that he had the stamina and the stomach to suffer through all the gnostic works. We don’t know for sure how the man died, or whether he was a martyr, as some late biographies aver. But there is perhaps a greater martyrdom in reading apocryphal gospels cover to cover, one after another, shelf after shelf. Irenaeus read enough, after all, and read closely enough, to provide definitive analysis of all the polymorphous varieties of gnosticism concocted up till his time.

All that is mere prelude to my praise for Amy Welborn’s book De-Coding Mary Magdalene — because, gosh, she not only read the ancient gnostics, she read the neo-gnostics as well. I’ve been patting myself on the back for finishing The Da Vinci Code (on the third try). But Amy’s actually read Margaret Starbird, Baigent and Leigh, and other modern heirs of Valentinus and his dreary ilk.

The genius of De-Coding Mary Magdalene is the author’s patient and charitable effort to disentangle orthodox tradition from many strains of fanciful legends, heretical fictions, and artistic conventions. The Fathers are everywhere in this book, especially Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Gregory the Great. But so are the better modern exegetes, such as N.T. Wright, and critics of gnosticism old and new, such as Philip Jenkins. In the end, we see that the Mary of the canonical gospels — the historical Mary — shines brighter than any of the made-up (and now made-for-Hollywood) versions.

Amy’s chapter analyzing gnosticism as a wider cultural current includes helpful summaries of the most infamous gnostic writings. So you won’t have to suffer through them as Irenaeus did — or Amy herself did!

On the homepage of her blog, Amy applies a Flannery O’Connor line to herself: “She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.” Don’t believe her. Enduring page upon page of gnostics old and gnew is a species of martyrdom. And it’s hardly the quick kind.

De-Coding Mary Magdalene deserves to outlive the fifteen minutes of fame we’ve given Dan Brown. It stands on its own.

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Da Vinci Joke

Toward the end of the movie “The Da Vinci Code,” the main character, Robert Langdon, tells his sleuthing partner, Sophie Neveu: “You are the last living descendent of Jesus Christ.”

That line, meant to be the dramatic apex of the film, drew laughs from many of the approximately 900 journalists who viewed the film’s first press screening May 16 at the Cannes Film Festival.

The derisive laughter, along with widely critical comments from reporters afterward, summed up the Cannes press reaction to the much-heralded launch of the movie. When the credits ran, silence and a few whistles drove home the response.

The movie sticks to most of the book’s controversial religious elements…

Surprise, surprise. Read the rest of the story at Catholic News Service.