Free The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction by Robert M. Price Page A

owe something to the ubiquitous iconography of the Isis and Serapis faith. Things like this may well have been, as Brown intimates, cynical marketing decisions. But again, there is no reason at all to make it the fiendish scheming of a single mastermind.
    Was there religious warfare in Constantine’s day? Before his time, Decius and Diocletian had persecuted Christians with state power, and before that there had been sporadic lynchings of Christians by suspicious neighbors. But Constantine faced no interreligious crisis as Teabing suggests, nor did he try to fuse paganism and Christianity. The convocation of the Council of Nicea had nothing to do with any such scenario.
    Nor did Constantine initiate or preside over the transformation of a merely human Jesus into a superhuman, divine Christ as Brown claims. As any seminary freshman knows (or used to know, until Green politics and encounter groups took over the theological curriculum), Nicene orthodoxy stipulated that the Word that was made flesh (John 1:14) shared the same divine nature as the Father, but not that he was no longer to be considered simultaneously human. Subsequent councils sought only to iron out the theological wrinkles. Many of us feel uneasy with these ancient formulae, but at least let us not misrepresent them.

    EARLY CHRISTIANS, EARLY CHRISTS
    Some early Christians believed that Jesus Christ was a supremely righteous man who had been adopted by God either at his baptism (Mark 1:11, “You are my Son”) or at the resurrection. Acts 2:36 and Romans 1:3-4 certainly appear to preserve this understanding. The former has Peter proclaim: “Let all the house of Israel, then, know for certain that God has made him Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified,” that is, subsequent to his crucifixion. Likewise, the latter passage: “the message concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.” Mark’s gospel may be understood as implying this conception of Jesus. Notice that Mark has no miraculous birth narrative, but Jesus is simply shown appearing among the crowd of pilgrims to be baptized by John, and then he hears, apparently for the first time, the news from God that he is his Son. People who hold to this Christ concept are called Adoptionists .
    This is the view closest to that which Dan Brown attributes to all early Christians before Constantine and the Council of Nicea. (Only he seems to imagine that people never called Jesus the Son of God in any sense at all until Constantine.) And it may indeed have been the earliest Christ concept, though there is no way to be sure. There is a kind of common sense to the idea that Adoptionism was first though. For instance, we find the Ebionite (“the poor”) Jewish Christians upholding this view in the second century, even rejecting the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus, once they heard about it, as a foreign pagan element. It is possible, on the other hand, that the Ebionites were rather a later Judaizing sect that thought Jesus was held in too high esteem by other Christians who thought him a divine being and that the Ebionites wanted to cut him down to size. But this runs against the current of what usually happens in religions where an initially mortal founder (Muhammad, the Buddha, Moses, Mahavira) is sooner or later exalted to a divine status formerly restricted to the God whom the founder had served as a “mere” prophet.
    There are a couple of New Testament texts that seem to try to deflate exaggerated estimates of Jesus. For instance, Mark 10:17-18, “And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up to him and asked him, ‘Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good? Surely no one is good, except only for God!’” Or John 12:44, “And Jesus cried out, saying, ‘Whoever