Tuesday, May 26, 2009

The power of fiction... beliefs in Jesus and Mary of Magdalene

Ugh... Here's a depressing statistic. It's a survey question asked a couple of years ago, after the publication of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. About 1/3 of Americans believed his story about Mary Magdalene!

What part of the book being a novel isn't clear?

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How likely do you think it is that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus and had children with him--very likely, somewhat likely, not very likely or not at all likely?

10% Very likely
13 Somewhat likely
12 Not very likely
48 Not at all likely
18 No opinion

Survey by Cable News Network. Methodology: Conducted by Opinion Research Corporation, May 5-May 7, 2006 and based on telephone interviews with a national adult sample of 1,021. [USORC.051106.R28]
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I suppose this effect will last till the next fictional account of his life comes out. Maybe the next one will have him as the first mixed martial artist or something really cool.

6 comments:

Sapience said...

Well, no one believed that he had a pal named Biff or that he traveled the orient when Christopher Moore wrote "Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal."

Which is a hilarious and only slightly blasphemous book by the way. I read it on a plane trip once, and the woman in the next seat leaned over and said she was going to have to get the book because I was clearly having more fun reading it than she'd had when reading a book in ages. Consider it your next book rec. =)

Brad Wright said...

Sounds like a funny book... I'll look for it.

Thesauros said...

Actually, I think the next movie is something called Corpis Cristi. It's a "factual" depiction of Jesus and His merry band of homosexuals.

Brad Wright said...

Sounds very believable, but I think that's an urban myth...

http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/gayjesus.asp

K T Cat said...

I thought we had established that Christ was a reggae singer from Jamaica. All this theology is getting complicated. Is it time for American Idol yet?

Brad Wright said...

LOL