The Da Vinci Code is certainly ruffling some feathers. When I read the book a couple years ago, I really enjoyed it. I felt that the book was well-written, intriguing, and that the author had done his homework to create a great work of fiction. The fact that the book was rather vehemently attacked by some Christians seemed sad and overly-defensive to me. I overheard a youth leader from a local church tell one of his students that the book was a threat to people of faith as well as to the lost, and that he was ashamed that the Christian community at large was not more concerned.

Well, the movie has come out now, and I feel like I can't walk around for more than twenty minutes without hearing something about it. A friend told me that he knew of churches that are boycotting the movie. There are a lot of elements at play, but I think that what some Christians find most offensive about the book/movie is this: it brings theories to light which emphasize the humanity and physicality of Jesus, rather than his divinity and status as an uber-spiritual figure.

An overwhelming majority of Pop-Christian leaders would love to convince you that your spiritual well-being is at odds with your physicality and basic human needs (which is strange, considering their self-indulgence when it comes to comfortable, million-dollar homes and extravagant lifestyles). Issues of sex are especially taboo, so when The Da Vinci Code suggests that Jesus was married and experienced physical intimacy, it hits a very sensitive nerve. The general Pop-Christian consensus seems to be that the more physical and human a person is, the less spiritual they must be. I don't believe that the spiritual and physical aspects of life need to be separated with so much distance. I believe that whenever we make such hard distinctions between the two, we are bound to suffer from a deficiency of both.

The canonized biblical account of Jesus' life omits the entirety of his teenage and twenty-something life. I'm guessing that he went through puberty, that he fought with his parents, that he worried about money issues, that he knew a beautiful girl when he saw her and wondered if she was making eyes at him-- in short, I think he felt and thought about all the terrible and wonderful things that people his age did. Would that really take him so far away from the spiritual realm of life? Would it really mean that he couldn't be what he claimed, or that he didn't have the ministry that the Bible says he did?