Tonight, the girlfriend read this to me, from The DaVinci Code:

Teabing chuckled. "Constantine was a very good businessman. He could see that Christianity was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse. Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity

And a bit later:

"The twist is this," Teabing said, talking faster now. "Because Constantine upgraded Jesus's status almost four centuries after Jesus's death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling his life as a mortal man. To rewrite the history books, Constantine knew he would need a bold stroke. From this sprang the most profound moment in Christian history." Teabing paused, eyeing Sophie. "Constantine commissioned and financed a new bible, which omitted those gospels which spoke of Christ's human traits, and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned."

I marvel at Dan Brown's many internal contradictions and loose ends -- and that people apparently aren't even noticing them.

First, I'm a bit confused: If this is all supposed to be such a "secret", then why is Brown constantly appealing to "historians"? If this was standard history, such that nearly every historian agreed and taught it in college classes, then why is it a novelty found only in Dan Brown's book, and a few fringe New Age publications? (Apparently, somebody forgot to tell the historians!)

And one minute, we hear that Christianity had a winning formula, which is why Constantine adopted it. The next minute, we hear that he replaced it with a completely different religion which had only superficial similarity. Wouldn't someone have noticed?

I mean, did the Christians, people who were willingly martyred in droves under previous empereurs, just stand by and allow their bibles to be confiscated, rounded up, burned, and then gladly receive and accept another bible, one with a completely different theological message?

And if Christianity, post-Constantine, is so compatable with paganism, then why do pagans have such problems with it today? And why do Christians have such problems with paganism? If Constantine's religion satisified both pagans and orthodox believers, then who rewrote it AGAIN into the exclusive religion it is today? When did that happen?

And how was the "original" version of Christianity supposed to have worked?

If Jesus was just viewed as a normal guy before, then why wasn't Christianity just Judaism? After all, the main difference between modern Christianity and modern Judiasm boils down to this: Jews consider it blasphemy to believe that a man could have been God incarnate.

Also remember that the entire reason there were gentiles in Christianity in the first place was the belief that, because Jesus was God, he was capable of making a "New Covenant" which now included them. If Jesus wasn't God, then who would have had the authority to replace the old covenant -- which God himself made with the Jews at Mount Sinai -- with a new one which allowed the gentiles in, and allowed many of the Jewish laws to be ignored?

And I'm not sure I understand Constantine's alleged motives: the old form of paganism allowed the empereur himself to be God. If that's YOU, then why downgrade that to a religion which denies such a possibility? And if the Christians had no problem at all idea with promoting some man to God -- Jesus, for example -- then why couldn't the emporeur simply have promoted himself instead? If the motive was to gain more political power, wouldn't that have been much better?

And if Christians didn't have any problem with the idea of "promoting" a man to be God, by decree of an empereur, then why on earth do real historians know full well about the huge numbers of Christians who were killed -- by previous Roman Empereurs like Nero and Calligula -- because they refused to worship the empereur or deny the that Jesus alone was God?

And what were they killed for, then? Or did Constantine fabricate those events too? And if he did, then where's the evidence? If you say he destroyed it, then you're again admitting your proof is that there is no proof. (Tin-foil hat time!)

And hey, I thought Paul was supposed to have invented Christianity! Or that it was actually based on Egyptian belief -- or Zoroastrianism. Or Buddhism. Did Constantine invent it also? I'm just so confused!

I guess the only thing we can be sure of, with absolute certainty, is that its wrong. :-) The specific means by which it is in error is of little interest, I suppose.

Update: Upon re-reading, just noticed one more HUGE contradiction:

"Constantine upgraded Jesus's status almost four centuries after Jesus's death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling his life as a mortal man... Constantine commissioned and financed a new bible, which omitted those gospels which spoke of Christ's human traits, and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike."

Brown has blown his whole these here, himself. One minute, he's asserting that Jesus was not thought of as "godlike" until Constantine made him so. The next, he's asserting that some gospels were chosen and "embellished" on the criteria that they already made Jesus seem "godlike."

Well, which is it? If Jesus wasn't thought of as God, then how is it that Brown here admits that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were "gospels that made Him godlike"? And if those gospels already made him seem like God then...

(a) Brown's undercutting his whole case, that people didn't think this way beforehand -- he's admitting that people readers of the four gospels thought of Jesus as being "godlike", and

(b) if the Gospels already portrayed Jesus as "godlike", then why bother "embellishing" them? How would you "upgrade" them, if he already seems like God in them?

(c) Who, then wrote this "godlike-Jesus" gospels? It wasn't Constantine. And if those people authors existed, then they must have had a genuine following at the time of Constantine. The "godlike-Jesus" people. So how do we know, if Constantine already burned all the records, that these people weren't already the majority?

In fact, they did exist, we do have the records, and they were the majority view. Hundreds of years of official persecution couldn't wipe evidence of the huge numbers of bible books -- and I mean ones that are now canonical -- they carried, so it's absurd to explain the paucity of competing documents by an official ban. Other views were simply on the fringes. And, as I show here, even people on the fringe thought of Jesus as divine.