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Brown has turned one of history's most fascinating figures into a cartoon-ish villain.
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He is as hard to figure out on this score as Henry VIII, Osama Bin Laden, Tammy Fay Baker and George W. That Constantine the emperor had "political" motives (p.234) is hardly news to anyone! The question is how religion and politics (which cannot be separated in the ancient world) were interrelated in him. Further, Constantine's religious life - whether, when, how and by what definition he was Christian and/or "pagan" - is a much debated issue because the literary and non-literary sources (such as coins) are not consistent. "The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable" (p.232), but that does not mean "Nothing in Christianity is original." The relationship between early Christianity and the world around it, the ways in which it was culturally embedded in that world, sometimes unreflectively, sometimes reflexively, sometimes in deliberate accommodation, sometimes in deliberate cooptation, is far more complicated than the simplistic myth of Constantine's Stalinesque program of cultural totalitarianism. In his own lifetime Jesus "inspired millions to better lives" (p.231) there were "more than eighty gospels" (p.231 the number 80 is factual-sounding, but has no basis) "the earliest Christian records" were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (including gospels) and Nag Hammadi texts (pp.234, 245) the Nag Hammadi texts "speak of Christ's ministry in very human terms" (p.234) the marriage of Mary Magdalene and Jesus is "a matter of historical record" (p.244) Constantine invented the divinity of Jesus and excluded all gospels but the four canonical ones Constantine made Christianity "the official religion" of the Roman Empire (p.232) Constantine coined the term "heretic" (p.234) "Rome's official religion was sun worship" (p.232). The bottom line: the book should come coded for "black light," like the pen used by the character Sauniere to record his dying words, so that readers could scan pages to see which "facts" are trustworthy and which patently not, and (if a black light could do this!) highlight the gray areas where complex issues are misrepresented and distorted. This is a good airplane book, a novelistic thriller that presents a rummage sale of accurate historical nuggets alongside falsehoods and misleading statements. It was a quick romp, largely fun to read, if rather predictable and preachy. Besieged by requests for my reaction to The Da Vinci Code, I finally decided to sit down and read it over the weekend.