Recollections

AKMA has some talking points on The Da Vinci Code for a lecture he will be giving on Wednesday. His questions about the movie / book / pop cultural phenomenon include this very pertinent one:

What is a “document,” and how does it testify to truth? If you find a basement full of Top Secret documents, does that make them instantly reliable?

One could supplement that rhetorical question with a thought experiment. If historians in the year 4006 were to discover a fragmentary issue of the National Enquirer hidden in a cave, would they be justified in concluding that a vast conspiracy in 2006 had somehow suppressed a peripheral sect of people who believed in three-headed babies and alien abductions? Less tendentiously, suppose our future historians were to discover a disintegrating copy of The Celestine Prophecy. Would that discovery make the text “instantly reliable” as a report of mainstream late-twentieth-century spiritual beliefs?

If the documents themselves were all our historians had, then such conclusions about their popularity or their reliability would be wildly speculative. Only with a larger documentary record–a New York Times bestseller list from 1995, for example, or parodic documents spoofing the Enquirer–could historians even begin to venture conclusions about the context surrounding these texts, and even then their suggestions would have to be tentative in the absence of a larger documentary record.

Yet what most of the media coverage about the Gnostic documents underlying the Da Vinci Code’s fictional narrative obscure is that the conclusions some scholars are drawing from these documents are not too different from the kinds of hypothetical conclusions I’ve been attributing to historians in 4006. On the basis of isolated documents–which are extremely fragmentary at that–people are detailing extremely determined and robust theories about first-century spiritual practice and belief. While these theories are offered in the somber guise of historical accuracy, they are in fact incredibly unfair to the experience of people in the past. You’d probably roll in your grave if some journalists in 4006 started claiming that the National Enquirer gives a reliable picture of popular cultural myths in 2006. So you can imagine how first-century grave dwellers feel.

My hypothetical scenarios may seem a little tendentious. I’m not suggesting that the Gnostics are roughly similar to readers of the National Enquirer. But I think these thought experiments place a needed focus on the question AKMA is raising: what is a “document” and what can a “document,” all by its lonesome, tell us about a historical movement or the Zeitgeist of a period? Perhaps one reason people are tempted to say that a single document from the first or second century can tell us a great deal is out of a belief that documents from the period are so scarce. Since we have fewer documents from the first century than we do from, say, the nineteenth century, we are tempted to place a greater degree of evidentiary value on the few documents we have. But the thought experiments I’ve mentioned help show why that logic is flawed. “Documents” are not like gems: their scarcity does not appreciably or reliably raise their value.

(I’ve also noted, in an earlier post, another of the potential reasons why The Da Vinci Code is so alluring: it promises a religion based on gnosis that conveniently avoids the Christian imperative to love.)