Let me see if I’ve got this straight. The book and movie basically say two things:
1) Jesus was a human being who was married and had children.
2) The Roman Catholic Church left some of the facts out of His story.
And for this we’ve sold billions of dollars worth of books and movie tickets, confused an entire generation and enraged the Church? Huh? To which ignorant, bone-headed morons is this news?
As for me, I thought the humanity of Jesus was kind of the point. Here’s a fully human man who also happens to be divine. That’s perfectly in keeping with the tradition of the ancient gods. I do not think anyone has attempted to assert that Jesus was an eternal virgin. He was a Jew of the First Century. Why wouldn’t he have been married? Why mightn’t he have had children? Why is this a big deal? There’s no implication that divinity is a biological trait, nor is there any reason to think there would be some sort of “royal bloodline” passed down. He was of the House of David but surely so are many others.
And the Church, my dear Church. Of course they picked and chose what facts to use. In fact, nobody is or was sure of the facts. What the Council of Nicea did was choose the most consistent information to include in doctrine and attempt to create a unified faith that could – and did – sweep the world. Thousands of years and billions of followers later the base beliefs are still in place, indicating – at least to me – that there must have been some truth in it.
The end result of all this is to demonstrate that the inclusion or exclusion of one side of things does not imply the negation of the other side of things. The fact that Christ was fully human does not make him any less divine. The fact that the Church left out some of the story does not make what’s left any less true. Life is lived in absolutes but it does not have to be absolutely exclusionary.
I give the whole experience a big fat, “Meh.” I think that a rollicking adventure story was absolutely butchered by the principals involved in the making of the movie. I just kept thinking back to National Treasure and wishing the folks involved in that one had been drafted to make this one. What a film it could have been!