“Everyone throws out The D’avinci Code” I thought to myself, as I passed another Toronto ‘little library’ with a copy — I’d discarded it in my mind for good reason: otherwise, I would have to claim descent from Jesus Christ, which is a lot of pressure…
I’m not kidding, because the historical figure the fictional book links him to is someone I descend from, according both to ancestry.com and what my father and his father claimed, Hughes de Payens…
My friend snickered when he noticed the connection to the dubious book, because it was already a running joke that I looked like Jesus, despite my virulent teenage Atheism, but of course what we understood was that iconography had most likely been re-written, and that the French templars pushed a Jesus that looked more like them, my French forebears — not to mention the influence of Dutch painters and my Frisian ancestry…
The Davinci Code is in fact, another work in a long vein of claiming Christ for Europe, when he was anything but European, by all accounts, especially his own, and I can’t say I believe the tales he made it all the way to Ireland, or that my Irish ancestors descend from Noah — that one is explicitly flagged as Irish pseudogenealogy — what’s more likely is that King Henry descended from a real Odin, or at least it’s believable.
It’s also more likely that Jesus travelled to the East when he went missing for ten years…
So don’t believe the myths, folks, my ‘resemblance to Jesus’ is a colonial accident — blame the Templars — but I do believe the midrash, that Jesus had a mortal father, a Roman soldier named Pantera, and that this is part of why the evangelical right in America is so virulently pro-life: the ‘virgin birth’ is a polite historical euphemism for a horrible crime: the rape of a Jewish woman by a Roman soldier, his conception itself an act of antisemitism and misogyny.
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adamgolding.ca
