The question is: will Christmas survive The Da Vinci Code? If, as is often asserted, the
19th century was preoccupied with the search for the historical Jesus, then the opening years of the 21st century might in future be remembered for sounding the death knell of any such enterprise.

Notwithstanding its dubious academic integrity, The Da Vinci Code has created in the popular imagination a suspicion that organised Christianity got it wrong. Dan Brown's flirtation with obscure ancient texts has done more to undermine the status of Jesus as 'true God and true man' than over 200 years of formal biblical criticism. For this reason, churches committed to the divinity of Jesus are quick to enter the foray by highlighting flaws in the book's central claim.

This is not the first such controversy to erupt. The early years of Christian history were characterised by conflicts involving two factions who each had their own particular take on the Jesus story. They were the Literalists and the Gnostics, and, although the Gnostics suffered a major defeat when literal Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, their heresies are never far from the surface in subsequent Christian debate.

The literalists understood the Gospel stories as history. They were interested in the flesh and blood Jesus and sought to extrapolate moral messages from his life. Their great weakness was that, in order to accept these stories literally, they had to suspend their rational faculties. The literalist must believe that virgins can give birth, that men can walk on water and that the dead can be brought back to life. In the mind of the literalist, David Hume's contention that we should mistrust our senses before we mistrust the constancy of nature's law, was countered with Tertullian's optimistic exclamation credo quia absurdam, 'I believe because it is absurd'.

The Gnostics took an altogether different approach. Taking their name from the Greek word for Knowledge, they approached the Gospel texts as an explorer might approach a map. They saw in the Gospels an intuitive, metarational knowledge which explained the inner life. From what we know, most Gnostics were dualists who associated the world of matter with evil and the world of the spirit with good. Their task was one of liberating the person from the entanglements of matter, thus freeing the soul for union with God.
Despite their rejection of matter, there were certain advantages to being a Gnostic. Chief among these was the fact that they didn't have to deal with the inconsistencies and contradictions contained within the Gospels.

For instance, as my colleague Bill Darlison in Dublin recently asked, was Jesus born during the reign of Herod the Great, as Matthew has it, or when Quirinius, the governor of Syria, ordered a census, as Luke asserts? History tells us that these events are separated by a span of twelve years. Furthermore, did Jesus cleanse the Temple at the start of his ministry (John), or at the end (Matthew, Mark and Luke)? Did the crucifixion occur on the day of the Passover (Matthew, Mark and Luke), or the day before the Passover (John)? As long as the Gnostics were concerned with the 'deeper meanings' in these texts, they didn't have to worry about the apparent incongruities. For them, the Gospels were not histories to be believed. They were poems which sought to penetrate and then liberate the hearts of those who listened.

The literalists, meanwhile, were busy building their argument that the stories contained in the Gospels constituted an authentic historical tale. They went so far as to do something very naughty indeed to substantiate this claim. They altered an ancient text. The celebrated passage by the Roman historian Josephus which claims that 'about this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if one might call him a man', is now accepted as a phoney addition made years after the original document was penned. It would appear that the historicizing tendency within early Christianity was so desperate to supply proof for a historical Jesus that it had to concoct some.

Sales of The Da Vinci Code have set new standards in the world of publishing. It appears that not far from the surface of our so-called 'godless' culture, people are actually interested without requiring us to believe in fairies. I know that I sometimes fall into bed at night and wonder, is this it? Is our existence here merely concerned with periods of work, periods of rest, the odd bit of good writing, a nice meal now and again and the occasional bit of sexual excitement before we drop off the earthly coil?

If such questions bother you, then the Gnostics, while not offering a definitive answer, may offer a glimpse of an alternative approach. They just may incite you to consider the perennial wisdom that the Divine is more alive in you than it can ever be in an institution. While I would want to reject the Gnostic denunciation of the material world - as a Walt Whitman fan I am compelled to agree with him that 'the scent of these arm-pits [is] aroma finer than prayer' - I nevertheless applaud their contention that the Christ-Spirit resides in every human heart.

I admire their efforts to liberate the Divine from the encumbrance of being God. By doing this they strike a match in the darkness and offer us a liberation from the burden of being meaningless machines, programmed to carry our brains around and nothing else.
Have a happy Gnostic Christmas.

Cal's annual carol service will take place at 6.30pm on Sunday 18 December at the Unitarian Church on Newington Green, where he serves as minister.

Alistair Tear, 1950-2005
By Rab MacWilliam

Few conventional funeral ceremonies would include recordings from Wire and The Fall ('Last Orders') and a reading from Charles Bukowski. However, at the St Mary's Old Church funeral of Alistair Tear, who died recently at the age of 55, homage to these disputatious, iconoclastic subcultural heroes was entirely appropriate.

Alistair could, if he wished, project a fearsome image. A tall, somewhat cadaverous Scotsman, generally dressed in black, with an icy stare which could bring terror to the heart of a casual intellectual opponent, he could be a formidable presence. But that was on the surface. Underneath was a sensitive, perceptive and honourable man, with an easy, if often sardonic, sense of humour and a passion for literature, art, music and Rangers Football Club.

Until he moved to Highbury acouple of years ago, he would usually be found in the Rochester Castle with a book, a roll-up and a pint of McEwan's Export. This choice of bevvy was one of the many things on which we disagreed, although with Alistair argument and contrary discussion were the stuff of life. The Scottish 'man of pairts' he certainly was: a clever, thoughtful man with a questioning, dialectical mind and an inability, unless rashly provoked, to hold grudges.

I last saw him a few days before his diagnosis of terminal cancer, and he died just three weeks after this, with his family and close friends at his bedside. Alistair was an independent character, and in some ways a committed seeker after truth, whose life was complicated but who would not be deterred from his quest by what he considered to be trivial concerns. People like Alistair are rare these days. I'm glad I knew him.

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