Monday, May 22, 2006
THE BOX OFFICE CODE
Theaters around here were running multiple screenings of TDVC, some back to back. But no lines at the ticket windows.
Cleveland Jewish News presents the Jewish view of the Code:
Gleicher explores what Judaism has to say. “As to the divinity of Jesus, that’s a given. We don’t believe in that,” he states. “But what do we believe about early Christianity, and what do we believe in as far as what Jesus represented?”
For someone of Jesus’s relatively late age (in his early 30s) to not be married, says Glei- cher, “would make him an oddity among his peers.” There were sects like the Essenes, he admits, “some of whom, not all, believed in celibacy — but that was considered a deviant idea.”
So could Jesus have been married?
“Oh, I think it’s entirely possible, but that raises a whole bunch of other questions,” Gleicher says. If Jesus had married roughly at the same age as most of his peers, then “he would have celebrated his tenth wedding anniversary before he was killed. But we have no record of a wife, so it’s uncertain.”
The historical record was written “with certain polemical interests in mind,” he points out. “Who knows what could have been left out?”
Looks from this article like the Jewish interpetation is close to what Dan Brown presents:
Brown uses the vehicle of his fictional character, symbologist Robert Langdon, to make two controversial assertions about practices that allegedly took place in the Holy Temple, says Gleicher.
First, he accuses priestesses of having sex in the Temple in Jerusalem. The second relates to the female concept of God’s consort, the Shechinah.
“When Brown says that there was sex in the Temple, yes, there was,” Gleicher maintains. “When he says that there was idol worship and a consort of G-d in the Temple, yes, there was. It just wasn’t Shechinah, and it wasn’t normative Judaism. It was the violation of normative Judaism or of whatever we would call the religion of the time.”
Gleicher believes that the concept of the Shechinah as a female aspect of God came into being as a direct result of the first flowering of the kabbalah in the late 1100s in France. “Kabbalists not only turned the Shechinah into a female aspect of God, but in some kabbalists’ eyes it became almost like a female equivalent to God — a consort of God or the daughter of God.”
