Friday, May 05, 2006

Why movie critics are not the same as religious scholars

Roger Moore, the movie blogger for the Orlando Sentinel, writes about The Da Vinci Code and Catholic critics thereof:

Frankly, I am REALLY interested in this, now. Yeah, it's fiction. Fact checking it is probably a lot more fun for these religious scholars than say, footnoting the Bible..."This creation myth dates from the Sumerians...and this Flood myth comes from...This 'book' was written hundreds of years after the man died, and edited by idealogues with an ax to grind. So we're not really sure if these quotes are accurate. And really, you DO have to take somebody's word that A) they heard a voice and B) that the voice was a god. PS, King James had his own agenda when his poets transcribed the book into Elizabethan verse."

Yeah, that's all great, except

1. the canonical gospels were not written "hundreds of years" after "the man" (ecce homo!) died, but decades, and

2. The Catholic Church doesn't use the King James Version (obviously, because it was translated by Protestants!) So why are you bringing it up, except to show off your graduate education in "English-Criticism" (hyphen not mine)?

And if you want a Bible with footnotes, they certainly exist. Translated straight from Hebrew and Greek by modern scholars, even! Fancy that!

I'm also a little peeved that people who criticize TDVC are "cashing in" on the phenomenon, while the author who has sold 40 million copies and the movie rights isn't cashing in on stuff he made up. And now you're drawing attention to yourself by writing stuff you made up about church history. How much are you paid as a movie critic to write about things you don't know about?

/rant (brought to you for free by an actual student of religion)

Via Open Book.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I hope he is a better movie critic than he is a bible scholar! Few people can resist the temptation to sound off in areas where they are manifestly ignorant, but they should!