Geza Vermes fala sobre O Código Da Vinci, o Evangelho de Judas e quejandos, no Times

Geza Vermes, famoso especialista em judaísmo, com importantes pesquisas e publicações sobre os Manuscritos do Mar Morto e o Jesus Histórico, diz, por exemplo, que o Evangelho de Judas é totalmente irrelevante para a tentativa, hoje feita por muitos especialistas, de recuperar a mensagem original de Jesus.

Esta notícia eu li no PaleoJudaica.com do Jim Davila:

Qumran Scholar Geza Vermes offers expert commentary on The Da Vinci Code, The Jesus Papers, and the Gospel of Judas in today’s Times.

Geza Vermes é professor emérito de Estudos Judaicos da Universidade de Oxford, Reino Unido. Há livros de Geza Vermes traduzidos no Brasil.

The great Da Vinci Code distraction

Jesus married Mary Magdalene and admitted he wasn’t God, Judas was only obeying orders after Dan Brown the litany of biblical revelations seems unending. Geza Vermes asks why

IN THE BEGINNING, before the recent media frenzy about a dastardly conspiracy over Christian origins, there was Dan Brown who, after writing several detective stories, begot The Da Vinci Code (2003).

He penetrated the dark central mystery and disclosed that the marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene had been hushed up for two millennia by a clandestine clique within the Church. The book was fruitful and multiplied. It became a big hit in 70 languages of the creation, procuring Brown royalties from the sale of 40 million copies.

In Chapter 2, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of the 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, begot The Da Vinci Code court case. They accused Brown of plagiarism: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail had already told the world that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were Mr and Mrs Christ.

A few weeks ago, a sensible judge rejected their claim and landed them with a six-figure legal bill. But the idea that Jesus married the Magdalene woman was not new. It was foreshadowed by Nikos Kazantzakis’’s novel The Last Temptation of Christ, filmed by Martin Scorsese.

An even more picturesque story can be found in Barbara Thiering’’s Jesus the Man (1992), a wholly idiosyncratic interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament in which Jesus fathers two sons and a daughter by Mary Magdalene before divorcing her and finding solace with Lydia, a woman bishop with whom he has another daughter. But in fact there is not a single ancient source for the invention of a sexual relation, marital or extramarital, between Jesus and Mary of Magdala.

Chapter 3 revolves around The Gospel of Judas, recently published in an edition by Rodolphe Kasser and others. In this not very significant late-2nd century text, Judas does not betray Jesus but obeys orders to hand him over to the chief priests.

On Palm Sunday, this ‘“gospel’”, originally begotten by an Egyptian Gnostic sect, was turned, with the help of a two-hour programme on the National Geographic television channel, into a rewritten New Testament that could be watched on five continents. The media furore was of almost nuclear proportions. The internet is still buzzing. The Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Patriarch of Moscow preached against this new peril to the faith.

Finally, up steps the loser in the Da Vinci Code case, Michael Baigent, having freshly begotten The Jesus Papers. His latest attempt to put the record straight about the New Testament arrives in time for the wave of publicity building up for the release of the film of The Da Vinci Code later this month.

Baigent’’s story is familiar in presenting Jesus and Mary Magdalene as husband and wife. What is new is the claim that Jesus did not die on the cross. With the connivance of Pontius Pilate, he was taken down alive, nursed back to health and, in the company of Mary Magdalene, lived happily, if not ever after, at least until the middle of the first century.

How serious a threat are these ‘“revelations’” to the picture of Jesus? The Da Vinci Code is a category apart. It is fiction and does not pretend to rewrite history. As a novelist, Brown is free to write whatever he chooses. The phenomenal success of the book and, no doubt, of the movie, does not claim to be anything other than fiction, even if it does not derive wholly from originality or from literary genius. No one would mistake Brown for the new Graham Greene. A good conspiracy yarn is highly attractive, but there is more to it, as I will suggest later (cont.).

Fonte: The Times: May 06, 2006