Harry Potter Web Quest Activity

1. Feminist reading of Harmione’s character in Harry Potter

Hermione Granger, a good, loyal friend of Harry Potter. She is a manifestation of the author herself within the text. “Hermione is me,” Rowling has said in several interviews, “A caricature of me when I was younger”. She is not only as a strong female character, an essential part of Harry's life, but also as a feminist protagonist in her own right. Hermione represents the bookish knowledge, she knows the spells very well and also knows how to apply it. In the first and second part she represents the good virtues like, friendship, loyalty. In any kind of situation she stands for Harry.  
Hermione is the perfect example when examining the feminist principles in the novels. Throughout the series she has many strengths and weaknesses, but she is mostly criticized about her weaknesses as a character. At some time she becomes concious about her look, which becomes very problematic from feminine perspective. 

Other female characters like Mrs. Weasley, who represents motherhood, caring nature. Ginny, Luna, ProMcGonagall, all has significant role, though they remains shallow under the patriarchal power.

2.  Discourse on the purity of Blood and Harry Potter



In Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling includes several issues like racism discourse of blood like wizard blood, muggle blood.

1)    Muggles (non-magical persons)
2) Muggle-borns (witches/wizards with magical abilities but non- magical parents)
3) half-bloods (witches/wizards who are not pure-blooded, but also not Muggle-born)
4) purebloods (those with complete magical ancestry)
5) Squibs (a non-magical child with magical parents


In the world of wizards Hermione portrayed as marginalized, she doesn't have pure-blood, her parents are muggles. She insulted many times by Draco Malfoy on the name of muggle blood.

Harry described as half-blood, because only his father belongs to wizard world, and her mother is not. Through the aspects of blood author satires on the American society, and the raises the question of racism. Ron Weasley, a pure blood and good friend of Hermione and Harry. So, here author makes possibilities that the intellectual and ability does not dependent on the race or cast.


3. Confronting reality by reading fantasy

 Fantasy story could be the reality of our own world. In this series we can find author tells many problems of racism, class conflict, in the form of fantasy. But the characters are very much realistic which represents the universal emotions, moral values and so on. Through the fantasy author shows the reality of contemporary time. May be it speaks of, the racial issues, class discrimination. As the issue of blood described in the series. Harry Potter is a fantasy story, but it is not stereotype. Harry who is protagonist, he is presented as a orphan, wearing glasses, which breaks the stereotype of great hero. Writer presented 21st century’s mind, modern ideas, Rationality well though it is fantasy.


4. Self-Help culture and Harry Potter

A self-help book is one that is written with the intention to instruct its readers on solving personal problems. It can also called 'self improvement'. In the novel Harry himself find his own way. In the whole novel he and his friends do self learning in Philosopher's Stone, chamber of secrets, and in order of phoenix they chooses practical education and practice with great effort. Hermione, leaps and bounds ahead of her classmates in wizard knowledge, potions and spells. This great intellect was both gifted to her, but also the result of hard work and intense studying. At times her skills (and confidence) was off-putting to others, but she never felt she needed to hide just how capable she was. So, characters finds their own way.
5. Self help culture and Harry Potter:

The characters of Harry Potter series are struggling to gain something. In a way all are helping themselves with some ideologies. Harry is treated very badly in his guardian home. He learns to stay strong in terrible situation in the life. He fights with the obstacles of the life without other's support. When he lives all alone in he dangerous situation then face all the problem with his ability. There is one scene in the last part when Sirius is killed then Harry saves his body and himself and also from the Dementors, same case with other character like Hermione, Ron who are constantly struggling for their identity. Hermione wants to show her talent that she is best from all the pure blood students. She is intelligent and with her knowledge she defeated everyone and in this way help herself. So, in this way we can get the idea about self-help and how overcome all the problem of life by our own self so from children to man all can learn this from Harry Potter series.

6. Christianity and Harry Potter: 

Harry Potter series directly have no relation with Christianity. Many critics say that the novel is anti-christianity because there are many thing in the fiction are ant Christian like magic. Magic js abondon in Christianity so Rowling written an anti christian work. In addition, there is not any kind of church for prayer even the good fights with powerful evil force though they do not pray to God for survival. All the characters fights and save themselves without any divinity power. But there are couple of scenes which somehow connected with Christianity like Christmas celebration and after the death of Albus Dambledor we see the view like heaven. So, at last we can say that Harry Potter is ant Christian fiction.

7. Theme of Love and Death:

Love and death are the major themes in J. k. Rowling's fantasy novel and she also said that these series all about death and love. She justifies her point by presenting the characters of Ron and Hermione who are in love from the very beginning even they are fighting with each other. Further, the love between Harry and Dumbledore, Lily's love for Harry, harry's love for his friends, etc. In the other death also a crucial element in the novel. At the very beginning of the story we heart that Harry's parents have died, and in due course both we and Harry learn that they were murdered. The Shadow of death hangs over Harry; he learns that he, too, was intended to be a victim, but spared in a way no-one can explain. He narrowly escapes death again at the close of the first two books, and third is concerned with his pursuit by an escaped murderer. At the end of the fourth book, a school friend is killed before his eyes, and he himself barely escapes again. In the fifth book he loses his newly regained godfather, and in the sixth even his great and seemingly indestructible mentor, Dumbledore. Yes, death is a constant visitor to Harry's world.

8. theme of choice and Chance:

Harry Potter novel says that in life chances and our choices both are important. First, it was only chance that Harry lived. When he needed help, help is always there. He gets invisibility cloak when needed. In Chamber of Secret Phoenix comes to hlep Harry. There are fortune portion alos. When Harry can't find way the fortune potion works. But choices have given same importance. Sorting hat puts Harry in Gryffinder because he wanted. Harry doubts that sorting hat may have put him in wrong house but in answer Dumbledore tells him that it is not our abilities that make us, it is our abilities who define us. Sirius Black also says same things. There are good and bad inside us but what path we choose determine us. In the final part, king cross station chapter when harry meet Dumbledore, Dumbledore says Harry that it is your choice to return or not. So both choice and chance are important in life.

9.  Moral and Philosophical reading:-

Harry Potter series i all about moral lessons and Philosophy of life. Dumbledore used to teach morality and philosophy to Harry Potter. There are many moral lesson that teach us how to become a moral being. The characters like Dumbledore and Harry Potter themselves moral being and philosophers. For instance, we see that Harry Potter who used to help bad people like Malfoy and many others.

As per the Mitchel Foucault's theory "Power and Knowledge. J. K. Rowling similarly conveys the message that question the power because what is written is not always true in the post truth era. These lines by Rowling is also relevant in the present era, we see in many political leaders and media who keep on speaking lies for remaining in the power and also there are many speeches or write fake history. So, we have to cross check everything rather than follow blindly.

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Assignment paper no 15

Paper-15

Name: Ramiz M. Solanki

M. A. Sem:- 04

Roll No. 27

Batch: 2017-19

Enrolment No.2069108420180051

Paper: Mass Communication and Media Studies

Assignment Topic: Role of Cinema in Education

Email Id: ramiz.solanki39@gmail.com

Submitted to: Department of English MKBU

in today's day and age, education has transcended the traditional and orthodox methods of teaching. Gone are the times when using technology for imparting knowledge seemed like a distant dream. A product of this technological development, the modern concept of utilizing movies as a tool for providing education continues to find new suitors with each passing day. With textbooks often failing to entice the younger students, combining learning with a source of entertainment seems like the ideal way of getting the most out of them. While this method has its own set of critics, the pros outweigh the cons.

How movies can help in learning

Using movies to teach can definitely be a challenge, but when carried out in a proper manner, it boasts of numerous benefits. Unlike texts, movies enable students to learn visually. The movie Gandhi, for example, allows a student to view a recreation of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, a paramount figure in the history books. The visual clips provide a greater understanding of the time and era as well as the lifestyle of the historical figure than simple words. Additionally, movies are not limited in the way books are. They occasionally go beyond the curriculum and touch upon topics which might not be part of the course but important nonetheless, like the class and gender conflicts forming an inherent part of 'Gandhi'.

The interest factor

Interest is an important factor of learning. On a general level, many students respond better to watching movies than to reading which helps in keeping them interested and prevent them from getting easily distracted. This is especially effective for those who are not motivated readers and prefer videos over the written word.

Subtitled videos have also proven to substantially improve reading and literacy skills. And with so many novels getting film adaptations, teaching the subject of literature has become more versatile. Students can choose which medium of studying they prefer and even start a healthy debate on which version they found better and why.

For some students, learning through films is actually a boon. Even those with the severe learning disabilities have shown a response to movies and can relate to them. Students belonging to deprived backgrounds, without books to learn from at home, often show the inability to read properly but still willingly and excitedly talk about movies they are familiar with and which they relate to. With the film industries growing diverse by the day, more and more films are starting to cater to the preferences of different types of people throughout the world by being relatable. Films can be considered as a 'universal language' which overcomes the barrier of textual learning for all backgrounds.

Challenges ahead

While there is no questioning the fact that movies can be a competent method of education, there are still several challenges it needs to overcome to be accepted universally. The older generation still hasn't come to terms with the educational aspects of the cinematic universe and many parents still carry the perception that screening movies is an inadequate form of teaching.

For the more conventional teachers, adopting a new method can be an arduous task. Thus, proper training and support need to be provided to the teachers to ensure they're capable and confident. At the end of the day, proper planning is essential for this method to be an effective tool and the choice of movies needs to be careful and precise for the student to actually learn something by the climax. If this method overcomes the challenges to a certain extent and continues to grow at the current rate, a future dominated by full-fledged cinematic education could well be on the horizon.

When the school film club planned to take an autistic boy on a trip to London's Leicester Square to watch War Horse, his mother was worried. He wouldn't make it through the tube journey, she warned, let alone the cinema experience. Having survived both by keeping his anorak zipped well up over his nose, the boy was asked what he thought of the film. "It was very interesting," he replied. "I put my hand up to my face when the horse was stuck in the barbed wire and it was wet. That's never happened to me before," he added, revealing how for the first time a film had moved him to tears.

The power of film to make an emotional connection and how best to enable people to experience this power through education was the theme of a roundtable discussion hosted earlier this month by the Guardian in association with Filmclub, part of the new charity Film Nation UK, which aims to put film at the heart of children and young people's learning and cultural experience.

Special needs teacher Liz Warne's story of the cinema trip involving the Orchards community middle school in Worthing, West Sussex, was one of numerous examples cited by speakers at the debate of how film clubs had helped break down barriers – emotional and otherwise.

There was the way the film club at Whickham School, Gateshead, had brought together children from very different family backgrounds when culture clashes between them meant their relationships elsewhere could be volatile. There was the showing of the film Duck Soup – its simple narrative and black and white photography allowed children on the autistic spectrum to watch a film with their peers and for the first time laugh at the same moments. There was the thrill of children with severe learning difficulties at Beacon Hill academy in Thurrock, Essex seeing themselves inserted into scenes from You've Been Framed and projected on to the wall. And then there was the elective mute at another school who spoke to her teacher for the first time to ask to audition for a place in a film they were making, and who has since proved a star performer.

Film clubs are being run in more than 7,000 schools, with 220,000 young people watching, discussing and reviewing film. This service provides, for free, a curated catalogue of DVDs, curriculum-linked guides, film-making tutorials and a members magazine. It also offers masterclasses in film-making, reviewing and programming, and gives film club members the opportunity to post reviews on its website.

It merged with the young people's filmmaking charity, First Light in September to form Film Nation UK and is funded by a number of organisations including the British Film Institute, which awarded £26m lottery funding

Jane Fletcher, schools support director at Film Nation UK, said film watching, understanding and making was a fantastic opportunity, and also a cultural entitlement. "At the end of four years of funding we are hoping to show the validity of that, so film becomes accepted alongside literature, art and music in schools and in the broader world."

A key value of film in education, the roundtable agreed, was that it was a leveller. Samantha Evenson, who runs two primary school film clubs, said: "We have children who have no books at home but immediately have confidence talking about film because it is something they have engaged with already. With a book, they may think they don't have the level of experience needed or feel they aren't bright enough to talk about it."

Even children with severe learning difficulties and disabilities who struggle with any kind of academic curriculum can often relate to film, said Andy Terrington, post-16 team leader at Beacon Hill academy: "Film is a universal language."

As a result, it can be used to spark discussions about issues that could be difficult to tackle, such as racism or homophobia said Joe Goff, a year 11 pupil who runs the film club at Lawnswood secondary school, Leeds.

And Malcolm Richards, a tutor at New River college, a pupil referral unit in Islington, north London, said there was a small group of films, such as Bullet Boy and Kidulthood, telling stories that young, urban kids strongly related to. "Those films are really, really important and can act as a gateway to film literacy," he said. While many explored adult themes, so had to be handled sensitively, it was nevertheless valuable to show they were as valid and open to analysis as a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Denise Rose, a facilitator for Mouth That Roars, which helps young people who would not usually have access to media equipment make their own films, said many were misrepresented in the media and saw themselves as victims, or in terms of negative stereotypes. Critiquing the way films were constructed and the decisions made by producers could therefore be empowering, whether it involved analyzing the news or EastEnders.

Popcorn was important as a way of creating a real cinema experience and enticing children to engage, agreed those who ran film clubs, as was giving pupils some kind of ownership of the club, which often meant allowing them to help decide what to watch. But it was also valuable to encourage them to try films they were not automatically drawn to – and feel free to be critical or won-over. Children at one film club were persuaded to watch The Truman Show by the mantra "risk it for a biscuit" – but once the biscuits were finished, they found themselves gripped by the story.

Many cited examples of how skills and teaching techniques employed in film clubs had spilled over into the curriculum, whether it was getting students to produce animation storyboards in literacy lessons or using films to introduce a lesson topic.

This is something the new merged charity plans to develop further, along with training teachers, face-to-face and online, to help them make better use of the film resources available to them.

But the roundtable agreed it was about more than education. Fletcher said the British film industry was booming, and it was important that young people from all backgrounds became involved, for the sake of the industry as well as themselves. "What we are hoping to do is open up the film industry so less traditional young people look behind the scenes and think 'Maybe I could do that,'" she said.

Noel Goodwin, an education programmer for young people at the British Film Institute, said it was also about careers beyond films. "There will be more and more jobs out there that involve the creation of digital content and require basic film-making techniques," he said.

Roundtable participants recognised that unpaid internships remained a problem and that deeper outreach was needed if young people from all backgrounds were to access the opportunities available.

Resources were also an issue for some. Richards said that while he had a projector and a room to show his students films, he had nothing for film-making – something that the new charity hopes will be a bigger part of school life in future.

He said it was important to gather evidence of how valuable watching and making films could be in order to strengthen the case for support. "We all know how Filmclub is fantastic," he said. "But having to convince an executive head teacher or someone from the local council is more difficult."

Goodwin argued that the government also needed lobbying to ensure that film was embedded in the curriculum and that film studies were considered as viable an option for pupils as music and art.

But Abigail Moss, deputy director of the Literacy Trust, pointed out that with the end of both the numeracy and literacy strategies, film was now the only national strategy programme to be supported in schools.

There was another reason for optimism too – the natural film-making talent of many young people. Some of the films posted online by teenagers who had made them with minimal equipment in their bedrooms were of astonishingly high quality, noted several roundtable participants.

Nick Foxell, an independent film-maker, said that regardless of its value for acquiring skills or a future career, film-making could be hugely empowering. "We all know the big screen has a magic," he said. "It bestows authority and validates people's experience."

References.

(Swain)

Bibliography

Swain, Harriet. Film Can Have a Leading Role in Education. 19 November 2013. 05 April 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2013/nov/19/film-education-learning-tool-inclusion>.

Assignment paper no: 14

Paper-14

Name: Ramiz M. Solanki

M. A. Sem:- 04

Roll No. 27

Batch: 2017-19

Enrolment No.2069108420180051

Paper No: 14

Assignment Topic: : Ngugi Wa Thiongo on Resistance

Email Id: ramiz.solanki39@gmail.com

Submitted to: Department of English MKBU

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o believes in the imagination. Perhaps that seems obvious for the decorated Kenyan novelist, scholar and playwright, who’s been publishing for over 50 years. But imagination, and all art, for him, is not just a form of creativity; it’s a form of resistance. In his case, once imprisoned for his political beliefs, it was his most important possession in a brutal environment meant to break him.

His memoir, Wrestling with the Devil looks back at his year-long imprisonment in 1978, when, after being arrested in the middle of the night, he was held without trial, in a maximum-security prison. The memoir is a trimmer version of the original work, Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary, published in 1982. Asked why he chose to publish this updated version now, he replied, “The theme of resistance, and writing in prison, is eternal.”

He committed many acts of resistance while he was jailed, but the memoir deals with the most significant one: the writing of his novel Devil on the Cross on thick, scratchy, prison-issued toilet paper. The legend of the book has become as much a part of its story as the plot itself, about a young woman dealing with racial and gender oppression in neocolonial Kenya.

Because Ngũgĩ was never charged, tried or sentenced, he had no way of knowing how long he would be held. The novel was “a form of spiritual survival”, he says.

“It’s hard to say how I would have reacted after 10 years. But I was scheming as to how I’d survive. I was thinking I’d write the novel in Gikuyu. I didn’t know how long that would take. If it took a year, I thought I’d take another year translating it into Kiswahili or English. I was planning ahead, even then.”

The state’s goal in jailing him, he surmises, was to make an example of an outspoken intellectual. He was arrested for his role in the writing and staging of a play, Ngaahika Ndeenda (“I Will Marry When I Want”), produced by and starring local peasants, who had no previous theatre experience, and limited economic means. For Ngũgĩ, who was openly opposed to the government, it was clear what his jailing meant. In the memoir, he writes, “If the state can break such progressive nationalists, if they can make them come out of prison crying, ‘I am sorry for all my sins,’ such an unprincipled about-face would confirm the wisdom of the ruling clique in its division of the populace into the passive innocent millions and the disgruntled subversive few.”

“They would come and ask me why I was detained. It was very annoying,” he says with a laugh. “They were seeking some kind of confession. They wanted me to confess my sins, and I had no sins to confess, in a political sense.”

He was advised early on in his stay by another prisoner, “Don’t let them break you.” Understanding how dire the situation was – he and others weren’t allowed books, radios, pen, paper; food was often bug-infested; they were kept in their cells 23 hours a day – it’s clear the particular importance for him of maintaining his psychic integrity and beliefs.

For him, those beliefs were rooted in Kenyan independence from the British, the right of the people to live on their own terms, instead of what had come to pass in the late 19th century: British settlers taking over the land and resources, hauling native Kenyans into detention camps, forcing Kenyans to give up their culture and replace it with theirs.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o: 'I don’t think we were meant to come out alive'

Over time, Ngũgĩ worked to decolonize his own mind – renouncing his baptismal James, and Christianity; ceasing to write in English. It’s that last decision that many people still question.

“If I meet an English person, and he says, ‘I write in English,’ I don’t ask him ‘Why are you writing in English?’ If I meet a French writer, I don’t ask him, ‘Why don’t you write in Vietnamese?’ But I am asked over and over again, ‘Why do you write in Gikuyu?’ For Africans, the view is there is something wrong about writing in an African language.”

For years, he’s advocated for African writers to write in their mother tongues, including in his seminal work Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature, because he understands how integral language is to culture and identity.

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“Remember that the first thing that happened to African people [in the Americas] was forced loss of language and names,” he says, speaking of the transatlantic slave trade. He says he’s gained great inspiration over the years from African Americans, in culture and politics. “The resistance of African American people is one of the greatest stories of resistance in history. Because against all those arduous conditions they were able to create … a new linguistic system out of which emerges spirituals, jazz, hip-hop, and many other things.”

It’s hard to hear the word “resistance” and not think of the current US presidential administration, the straining away from it that so many feel. But for Ngũgĩ, though he notes the “rightwing wind blowing over the world”, it goes beyond a single country or a single moment in time. Returning to language, he notes how ideas of Africa, “the so-called developing world” are shaped by western thought.

“Ninety percent of Africa’s resources are consumed in the west. But somehow the vocabulary has turned it the other way around – it’s the west that ‘helps’ Africa. A few things are returned and they call it ‘aid’,” he says. “Africa has been the eternal donor to the west.” He calls it “the way the world normalizes abnormality”.

(Marshell)

Bibliography

Marshell, Kyla. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive'. 12 March 2018. 05 April 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/12/ngugi-wa-thiongo-wrestling-with-the-devil-interview>.

Assignment paper no: 13

Paper-13

Name: Ramiz M. Solanki

M. A. Sem:- 04

Roll No. 27

Batch: 2017-19

Enrolment No.2069108420180051

Paper No: 13 (The New Literature)

Assignment Topic: Historical Propaganda in ‘The Da Vinci Code’

Email Id: ramiz.solanki39@gmail.com

Submitted to: Department of English MKBU

Historical Propaganda

Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code, represents an undeniable publishing phenomenon. Sadly, it also represents a direct attack upon the central truths of the Christian faith — and a misrepresentation of historical fact. Indeed, the novel is really a work of historical fiction, but many readers are deceived by Brown’s all-too-clever recasting of history.

Brown uses the novel’s plot and dialogue as the means of “uncovering” what he presents as long-lost truths about the transformation of Christianity. The Da Vinci Code becomes a literary vehicle for denying the deity of Christ, the reliability of the New Testament, and the essence of the Gospel. In so doing, Brown is not subtle.

The book claims that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene, and that a child was born of this marriage. One character explains that Jesus — “the original feminist” — had intended for Mary Magdalene to lead the church after His death, but “Peter had a problem with that.” So after the crucifixion, Mary and her child fled to Gaul, where they established the Merovingian line of European royalty.

Heard this all before? The main contours of this plot have been found in many books published in occultic literature. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, for example, by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and Richard Leigh (1983), made the same claims, but in what purported to be a non-fiction exposé, not a suspense novel.

None of these theories is credible. When one examines the sources, there can be no serious question about the marital status of Jesus. The canonical Gospels, (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) preclude any option of understanding Jesus as married. He operates as an unmarried teacher with a band of devoted disciples. He is not the head of a household, but builds a household of faith — the church. At the crucifixion, he assigns John responsibility for caring for Mary, his mother. There is no mention of any wife, and certainly no mention of children.

So how can Brown promote such an unfounded theory? Very easily — he simply asserts that the marital status of Jesus was hidden by Christian leaders by means of a vast conspiracy. This conspiracy, we are told, explains the absence of any mention of Jesus’ marriage in the New Testament and the church’s denial of any such suggestion throughout its history.

Devotees of suspense novels read for the sheer pleasure of the intellectual engagement — not so much with the philosophical ideas, but with the conspiratorial theories. In that category, The Da Vinci Code delivers spectacularly, resting as it does on a conspiracy theory involving virtually everyone even remotely connected with Christianity throughout the last two thousand years. One of the central arguments found in The Da Vinci Code is that certain leading figures have always known the truth — including the Knights Templar, the Masons, the Roman Catholic Church, and even Interpol. The “Priory of Sion,” asserted to be a secret cabal of the illuminated ones, is central to Brown’s plot and is claimed to have included as Grand Masters no less than Sandro Boticelli, Isaac Newton, and, of course, Leonardo Da Vinci.

According to Brown’s thesis, Da Vinci hid hints of Jesus’ marriage in works of art such as his famous masterpiece, The Last Supper. Brown argues that one of the figures in the fresco standing next to Jesus isn’t a man at all, but Mary Magdalene. Jack Wasserman, however, a prominent art historian at Temple University, however, rejects that argument. Once we understand the artistic style of the era, Wasserman countered, it becomes clear that the figure does not even begin to look like a woman.

The fact is, art historians have poked holes in most of Dan Brown’s interpretations found in The Da Vinci Code. Of course, if you are promoting a conspiracy theory, you simply fold all this into the conspiracy. When an ABC News reporter asked Dan Brown why so many art historians dismiss his theories “as absolutely bizarre and crazy,” Brown explained: “I think it’s because we see what we’ve been told we see.”

Even more problematic than his dubious art criticism is that Brown has to lay the groundwork for his conspiracy by having his main characters deny the inspiration and authority of the biblical text, replacing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John with a set of Gnostic gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi just after World War II.

He calls these Gnostic texts the “unaltered gospels,” and he dismisses the New Testament texts as mere propaganda. The New Testament, Brown argues, is simply the result of a male-dominated church leadership inventing Christianity in order to control the Roman empire and subsequent world history, and then to oppress women and repress goddess-worship.

In Brown’s mind, the heretics are the heroes, and the apostles are un-indicted co-conspirators. The greatest villain of all is perhaps the Emperor Constantine, who, Brown claims, never even became a Christian, but knew a useful fiction when he saw it. According to The Da Vinci Code, Constantine called the Council of Nicea in 325 to invent the idea of Christ’s divinity (and celibacy) and then turn out the heretics, thus burying the real story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene forever. “It’s all about power,” one character explains. That is why Constantine “upgraded Jesus’ status.”

And the Council of Nicea? There, The Da Vinci Code reveals, the Emperor led the bishops to declare Jesus as the Son of God by a vote — “a relatively close vote at that,” the text elaborates.

For anyone with a real interest in the identity of Jesus and the history of the church, such heresies are easily dismissed. The Nag Hammadi texts are easily identifiable as Gnostic literature, spurious writings of which early Christians were most certainly aware, and which they rightly rejected as sub-biblical and erroneous. Thus, calling them “unaltered” gospels is like reading the official Soviet histories as objective fact — complete with leading figures airbrushed out of the photos. Moreover, the early church did not establish the canon (the official set of New Testament writings) at Nicea, for a general consensus was already evident at that gathering. The New Testament writings were recognized and set apart because of their authorship by one of the apostles and by their clearly orthodox content — in harmony with the other New Testament writings as recognized by the churches spread throughout the Greco-Roman world.

The Da Vinci Code weaves fact and fiction with such recklessness that the average reader will assume all its claims to be factual. There was in fact an ecumenical council at Nicea, but Brown’s account of it is preposterous. The real Council of Nicea adopted a creed in order to reject the heretical teachings of one Arius, who taught that Jesus was not of the same substance as the Father. The council did not “invent” the divinity of Jesus. This was already the declaration of the church, claimed by Jesus Himself as well as by the apostles. The council boldly claimed this as the faith of the church, naming Arianism as a heresy and Arians as heretics. A close vote? Only two out of more than three hundred bishops failed to sign the creed. Not exactly a cliff-hanger.

Much more could be considered, but the main issue is this: How plausible is such a conspiracy? The threshold of credibility for this conspiracy requires us to believe that the entire structure of Christian theology is a sinister plot to fool the masses. Further, we must believe that the leaders of this conspiracy knew that Jesus was not the Son of God, but were willing to die for this cause by the millions. As C. S. Lewis once argued, people might be willing to be martyred for a lie if they are innocently deceived, but very few will die for what they know to be a lie. What is more, it requires one to believe that the truth, known by millions, has been kept secret from the world until now. Specifically, until the release of The Da Vinci Code. Those who want to believe the heresies of The Da Vinci Code will hold to them tenaciously — whatever the evidence. Clearly, the book attacks the Scriptures, the Christian faith, and the Gospel itself, but the truth is unshaken. G. K. Chesterton reminded us that orthodoxy is not only true; it is infinitely more interesting than heresy. It is alive and compelling and life-changing. Heresies come and go by fashion. The truth is unchanged and unchangeable. Caveat emptor, “let the buyer beware.”

(Magazine)

Bibliography

Magazine, Tabletalk. Historical Propaganda. 05 April 2019 <https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/historical-propaganda/>.

Presentation Paper no 14

Post Colonialism in 'A Grain of Whete' from Ramiz39

Presentation Paper no: 13

Presentation paper 13 from Ramiz39

Presentation Paper no 15 (Newspaper as a History recorder)

Newspaper as the Historical Sources from Ramiz39