c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In my corner of the world, an unknown gunman fired shots outside a middle school and gunfire closed down a nursery school. Investigators found more DNA evidence in the Duke University rape case, and a biomedical engineering deal collapsed over money.

A lot else happened, too _ everyday news affecting people’s lives, such as housing sales, baseball, education spending, layoffs, hockey and vandalism. Bombs took lives in Iraq, floods hit New England, disaster hit Nigeria, domestic spying was shown to be more invasive than previously known, and excited teenagers gowned up for proms.

Meanwhile, as the release of the film “The Da Vinci Code” draws near, Christian leaders are in high dudgeon. Many attacked the film as “blasphemous,” as undermining the “pillars” of Christian faith, as an affront to believers, as worthy of public scolding by the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury. They launched boycotts, counter-teachings, counter-books and publicity campaigns.

In addition to guaranteeing an even larger audience for the film, such attacks seemed to miss two crucial points.

One is that people are curious about “The Da Vinci Code” because it raises interesting questions about Jesus. Rather than driving people away from Jesus, it is drawing people closer.

Yes, it calls into question some doctrines and institutional decisions made in the early Christian era. But recent scholarship suggests those doctrines and decisions need to be questioned, because they distorted the gospel in order to build a church.

We now know that, as prelates seeking power shaped creed, doctrines and the New Testament, much that was true about Jesus was lost, useful writings were discarded, male hierarchy took control, and an apparatus worthy of Caesar replaced the circles of friends that Jesus had formed.

Jesus might not have married Mary Magdalene and fathered children, as Dan Brown’s novel speculates. But something happened, something was lost, and people not only sense that, but they want to dig deeper. It is that digging deeper into Christian origins which so threatens church leaders. What I see in recent dudgeon is the franchise protecting itself.

The second point: don’t Christian leaders have better things to do?

In a world where gunmen threaten children, where wealth is flowing inexorably toward the few, where our own government is chipping away at civil liberties, and where people want to make sense of their lives and need God’s help in doing so, how do these prelates have time for movie criticism? Are they so cut off from the needs, wounds and joys of their own people that they think a movie is worth a single protesting breath?

Rather than expend their dwindling credibility on fighting a movie, I wish Christian leaders saw their people’s lives, heard their questions, dropped defense of the franchise and joined in their people’s curiosity about Jesus.

This is a teachable moment, not a threat to the Christian enterprise. When a parishioner asks when exactly Jesus and Mary Magdalene got married, they’re asking about the humanity of Jesus and how far that went. They, like Christians throughout the ages, are curious about the woman to whom Jesus first revealed himself after resurrection. Such questions should be a joy to answer, not some malicious code to debunk.

Similarly, if the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t want to be known for scheming monks and Opus Dei zealots _ assertions that Dan Brown didn’t invent _ this is an opportunity to frame the church’s story differently.

A fresh examination of the early years of Christianity is long overdue. A disdainful “Harrumph” about ancient heresies doesn’t answer people’s legitimate questions. Stoking the fire of culture-war rage is just bullying.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)

KRE END EHRICH

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