Jerry’s Vids

Nearly a decade ago, the cutlet that would become the Strip made friends with author John Whalen and read the book he cowrote, called The 50 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time. The Strip is happy to see that Whalen’s volume of paranoid alternate histories continues to grow in popularity — its latest edition, 80 Greatest Conspiracies, recently hit the market.

Back in the mid-1990s, one conspiracy among all of Whalen’s others really freaked us out. It was the first time this skeptical sirloin had run across the Holy Blood, Holy Grail phenomenon. (We had somehow completely missed the conspiracy’s initial popularity in the 1980s.) According to this kooky pseudohistory, the Bible’s Jesus was the product of a carefully crafted cover-up. In fact, the Naughty Nabob of Nazareth had actually bedded Mary Magdalene — who wasn’t a prostitute at all, but of royal blood — and fathered one or more children. The theory went on to claim that the descendents of this union later intermarried with a French royal house, and a shadowy organization named the Priory of Sion had spent the last couple millennia protecting the secret location of Jesus’ heirs, whose existence was the actual, long-sought Holy Grail.

The Strip can still remember chuckling over that tall tale. You could drive a truck through the gaps in its logic. But for a wacky conspiracy, the Christ Kids in France story at least was entertaining as hell.

Naturally, when this meat patty realized that someone had turned all this silliness into a mega-popular novel, it was ecstatic. Like the rest of the country, the Strip thoroughly enjoyed Dan Brown‘s book, The Da Vinci Code. We only wish that someone other than A Beautiful Mind‘s moronic duo, Akiva Goldsman and Opie Taylor, had been chosen to write and direct its film version.

But we recently learned that one person in town isn’t looking forward to the movie as much as the rest of us.

This filet was flipping channels on a Sunday night when it happened to see our favorite local evangelical homophobe, Jerry Johnston of Overland Park’s First Family Church, preachin’ on TV. To our surprise, Jer was railing against The Da Vinci Code with as much fervor as he denounces wayward Kansas legislators.

The good pastor showed up on the cover of the Pitch a few weeks ago in a story about how he was leading a movement of Kansas preachers determined to oust certain lawmakers (“Ministers Hate Fags Too,” by Kendrick Blackwood, July 22). Jerry had been peeved that the legislators hadn’t mustered enough votes to put a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on a Kansas ballot, and he’d vowed revenge. Problem was, using a church for political ends should jeopardize First Family Church’s tax-exempt status. But the state’s chief law enforcer, Attorney General Phill Kline, was egging him on, so Jerry knew he had little to worry about.

Jerry apparently is also on a rampage about Dan Brown’s bestselling yarn. And the Strip had fun watching him go off on TV, quoting whole paragraphs spoken by one of the book’s characters, Sir Leigh Teabing, and denouncing it as apostasy and a threat to the church.

Uh, Jerry. It’s, like, dialogue? Spoken by a fictional character? In a novel?

The TV program, it turns out, was essentially an infomercial for a set of Jerry’s sermons on CD about The Da Vinci Code — priced at a low $33.

According to the good reverend, the discs are selling at a brisk pace. “The CDs are selling very well. It’s been a very popular series on television,” Jerry told us after we’d had a chance to listen to a couple of the discs.

Jerry recounted his alarm when he realized how popular Brown’s Bible-bashing book had become. On a Maui vacation with his wife, Christie, last year, Jerry says, he noticed that nearly everyone around the pool had a copy. “I mean to tell you, I thought it was required reading at the hotel.”

Even worse, Jerry noticed how much TV coverage the book was getting — and he cringed when he saw Brown announce that the book was all based on fact.

“The problem with that is that we live in a world of biblical illiteracy. The book is revisionism that could sway people who are not grounded in the Bible,” the pastor warned.

In the CDs, Johnston takes even more swipes at the girlie-man faith of people from other churches. “[The upcoming movie] will challenge the faith of many people, particularly those who, very sadly, go to churches where they are really not taught anything.”

His flock, though, is determined to be “indoctrinated” enough to withstand the assault.

Now, this meat patty doubts that many right-thinking Johnson County Christians, after seeing next year’s movie, will go chasing off across Europe looking at paintings and digging under cathedrals for clues to the location of hidden documents proving Jesus has direct descendents eating baguettes and drinking vin blanc.

No, we figure there’s a helluva better reason for Jerry to be sweating bullets.

Dan Brown’s book delivered ideas to a mass audience that have been scaring the bejesus out of evangelicals for decades. It was in 1945 that a Bedouin nomad named Muhammed Ali discovered ancient manuscripts buried in the Egyptian desert. Word of the monumental find took time to spread but in 1979, Princeton professor Elaine Pagels, in her book The Gnostic Gospels, explained that the manuscripts found near the village of Nag Hammadi were keys to a very different kind of Christianity than is practiced by the likes of Jerry Johnston. The gnostic gospels were long lost, alternate versions of what Jesus had said and taught, transcribed in the third or fourth century but based on material that may have been written down only several decades after Jesus’ death.

The manuscripts contain mind-blowing stuff. Some early Christian gnostics, for example, doubted that Jesus was divine. They considered him more of an enlightened, new-agey philosopher than a miracle worker. “Other sayings in this collection criticize common Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, as naïve misunderstandings,” Pagels writes.

By the fourth century, differences among Christians who disagreed about Jesus’ divinity had risen to the point of causing violent clashes in the streets of Rome. The Roman emperor at the time, Constantine, was a nominal Christian convert who didn’t appear to give a crap one way or the other about the debate over Christ’s nature, but he didn’t like the street fighting. So in 325 A.D., he ordered bishops from throughout Christendom to convene at Nicea (in present-day Turkey) to hammer things out. About 300 bishops attended, their expenses picked up by Constantine, and a vigorous debate ensued. Eventually the “Jesus is God” contingent won out, against only two “no” votes. Naturally, the two doubters were banished.

Brown badly mangles this material in his novel (hey, he’s writing a thriller, not a history), but it doesn’t take a smart-ass sirloin to see why this stuff gives fundies like Johnston the willies. Suppressed ancient histories of Jesus? Early doubters of His resurrection? The Bible as edit-job? A vote on the divinity of Hay-zoos?

Kee-RIST!

It didn’t surprise this porterhouse that pastor Jerry doesn’t think much of the manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi. “They’re fraudulent. They’re spurious. They’re heretical,” he says in the CDs. “I mean to tell you, if you wanted to know what the comic books of the second and third centuries were? They were the gnostic gospels.”

Besides, he points out, there’s no question that the Bible as it exists today is the true word of God. How does Jerry know? Because the Bible says so! Still, he admitted to this ribeye that he’s got a reason to be nervous because The Da Vinci Code has provoked so much curiosity about the underpinnings of his religion.

“Yeah, I’m very concerned,” he said. “Mormons say they can get more people out of evangelical churches in a single year than we can get out of theirs in 40 years.”

The last thing an offering-countin’ vicar like Jerry needs is his flock questioning how the Bible was assembled.

No wonder, then, that Jer plans a big showing when next year’s movie debuts.

“We’ll come back very strong before the movie comes out,” he said, making us wonder if that means blockades in front of theaters à la Operation Rescue. “No, we’re not the picket crowd,” Jerry clarified. “But I’ll do a series of sermons before the movie debuts.”

We can’t wait for the boxed set.