Debunking the Debunkers

Religious leaders and others distressed by Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" -- and its movie debut this weekend -- might take a cue from an Oxford don steeped in medieval literature, C.S. Lewis.

A former atheist, Lewis became one of the most beloved Christian authors of 20th century. He was not only a master at exposing the fault lines of modern, secular thought. As a layman, Lewis also could see the weaknesses of the church with unusual clarity -- a skill he likely would apply to the furor over this latest challenge to orthodox belief.

There are few things more easily corruptible, Lewis observed, than religious belief and practice. "We must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better," he wrote a friend, "it makes him very much worse." Stories like "The Da Vinci Code" and Michael Baigent's "The Jesus Papers" carry a special appeal for people who are vividly aware of the historic failings of the church: the anti-Semitism, the persecutions, the soul-crushing legalism, right down to modern-day sex scandals.

In a short yet brilliant 1959 essay, "Fern Seeds and Elephants," Lewis debunked the debunkers of his own day -- those who held that the Gospels were the product of myth, legend and outright deception. He began by drawing attention to the "shattering immediacy" of the Gospel stories, the often brash realism of Jesus' encounters with ordinary people.

Lewis, I suspect, would also point out that theories about massive cover-ups presented in fanciful works such as "The Da Vinci Code" ignore an elephant-sized fact: There are any number of people and events in the Bible that are frankly embarrassing to believers. Recall, for example, that the family tree of the Messiah includes a prostitute (Rahab), a king who commits adultery and murder (David) and another king who leads his nation headlong into religious idolatry (Manasseh). Yet the earliest Christians failed to excise these characters from their story.

The first "conspiracy theory" about Jesus, in fact, actually appears in the Gospel of Matthew. After the crucifixion, religious leaders ask Pontius Pilate to post a guard at the tomb of Jesus because they suspect his disciples "may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead." Why keep a story about a possible conspiracy lodged at the heart of your sacred text if you're determined to cover up a deception about the credibility of that text?

Here is the real harm of these modern conspiracy theories: They may appeal to our emotions, but they violate our common sense. They reject reason, just as surely as they reject revelation.

"I do not wish to reduce the skeptical element in your minds," Lewis explained. "I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else."

WSJ