Dr. Trevelyan's Da Vinci Conversation

Monday, March 20, 2006

Sir Richard Arcos' World of Docetic Twaddle (I.)

We were considering what the 'Gnostic gospels' that Dr. Langdon is so inexplicably enamoured of actually contain. The answer is, as I have noted in the title of this post, 'docetic twaddle'. Docetism, let me remind you, was the heresy that Jesus only seemed to be a man, and was in fact pure spirit. The Church quite naturally proclaimed this to be not only nonsense, but heresy. The Gospels portyray a Jesus who was both man and God. Dr. Langdon seems to think the opposite, which makes me, as professor of Systematic Theology at Mount Zion Reformed Baptist College, want to bung his book out of the window. Which I would do if one of my daughters wasn't directly under the window.
And this is heretical in so many ways: 'Some said, "Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit." They are in error. They do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever conceive by a woman?" Sorry, that is just bizarre. The Holy Spirit's a woman? "Mary is the virgin whom no power defiled. She is a great anathema to the Hebrews, who are the apostles and the apostolic men." Note that Mary here has to be the Virgin Mary, not Mary Magdalene, because no-one ever said May Magdalene concieved by the Spirit. "This virgin whom no power defiled [...] the powers defile themselves. And the Lord would not have said "My Father who is in Heaven" (Mt 16:17), unless he had had another father, but he would have said simply "My father".' This is just bonkers! How can Christ have had 'another father' (and, by implication, a father on earth) if his mother was a virgin?

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