Scholarly gripes about The Da Vinci Code, by Larry Hurtado

Larry Hurtado chimes in on the DaVinci Code, at Slate:

" . . . the historic Gnostics and the gospels often linked with their circles did not emphasize Jesus' human nature at all - quite the opposite. Typically, Gnostic Christians portrayed Christ as a heavenly being who came down to earth to awaken them from their spiritual slumber by disclosing their own divine inner nature. Regarding the physical world as a source of delusion and place of confinement, Gnostics were deeply negative about bodily existence, including their own. So, they tended to treat Jesus' body as simply the temporary vehicle for his revelatory mission, believing that he discarded it before returning to his heavenly status in the realm of pure light. It was actually the Orthodox Christians who made much of Jesus' full human nature and the reality of his death as the essential redemptive act."

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