Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia Book

I have no way to rate this "book" at zero stars. It's really not a book, it's a pamphlet.

Despite it being a short book (124 pages), I couldn't read more than a dozen or so pages at a time before having to put the book down out of sheer distaste. So I took to leaving it in the car, reading a few pages at a time at occasional stoplights. This copy was lent to me by a co-worker, who owns two copies. After she found out that I'd not only read Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," but enjoyed it, she really wanted me to read this. I tried.

The subtitle is "The facts behind the fiction of The Da Vinci Code." Despite having finished Amy Welborn's "book," I remain... skeptical. Dan Brown used sources whose scholarship is certainly questionable'I'm not arguing that-but if a text or author is going to dispute the accuracy of another author's work, and criticize it on academic grounds, I have to be able to respect the text and author'in part, by the use of academics and scholarly efforts to disprove the assertions made. I might have had less issue with Welborn's text if it weren't so very defensive. Much of the text had an air of, "Brown says X, and The Bible says Y, so we know that Y is right." Umm, no? She opens with a comparison to a traffic accident. People may have differing accounts of what happened in a traffic accident, but it doesn't mean the accident didn't happen. I agree'to a point. She misses her own irony, though'it doesn't mean that either account is guaranteed to be more-correct than the other. Brown doesn't dispute that Jesus was born, lived, and died, and that people began to worship him, among other things. Her allegory doesn't actually fit what she wants it to fit.

Part of Welborn's criticism stems from her belief about what authors "should" do. She states that writers of historical fiction are beholden to present an accurate reporting of historical detail, and that their characters and plots may diverge from known history. According to Welborn, Brown is an irresponsible author because his recounting of historical detail is intentionally flawed. This is the foundation on which she argues against the common assertion that "It's just a book," or "It's just fiction." Brown is misleading people, she contends, by mucking about with things they should expect to be accurately recounted. She contends that authors of historical fiction promise that a historical framework is correct, and that Brown's writing violates the reader's trust that the author is 'telling the truth about history.' (Ms. Welborn is going to be fighting a losing battle against the entire "speculative fiction" genre. Rage against that machine, Ms. Welborn, rage on.) She feels Brown is also irresponsible because he presents a character, Sir Leigh Teabing, who is "supposed to be" a scholar; she criticizes Langdon, the main character'a fictional character''s credentials: a "Harvard professor of religious symbology (there is no such field, by the way)..." Perhaps she's unfamiliar with iconography? Or semiotics?

I find Welborn's accounting of facts and figures about many topics as questionable as Brown's about the foundations of Christianity. Among her statements:

• "There is ... no mention of a death-resurrection motif in Mithraic mythology."

• "In the Roman world, Isis was strongly associated with promiscuity, and the 'miraculous' conception [alluded to:] happened either by Isis reconstructing the body parts of her dead husband or by magic."

• ... "Most forms of Gnostic thinking were... anti-material (they viewed the corporeal world, including the body, as evil)."

• The truth is that all ancient religions used altars, made of piles of rocks, or wood or stone, for sacrifice."

• "By the second century, Christians in the West had settled on March 25 as the date that Jesus was crucified. Using an old Jewish tradition that the great prophets died on the same day on which they had been born or conceived, in the West, March 25 also came to be understood as the day Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit in Mary's womb.... Counting forward nine months, we arrive at December 25."'This? This is Welborn's "proof" that is supposed to counter Brown's claim that Constantine placed the date of Christ's birth to coincide with an extant pagan practice. ::blink::blink:: For real?

• "... there is no art scholar who thinks that the baby kneeling there with his hands folded isn't John the Baptist." (re: the painting Madonna of the Rocks)

Welborn spends no small amount of this brief text disputing the validity of various other historical writings on Christianity as being historically inaccurate or impossible, for instance, that the Gnostic Gospels must be completely disregarded, as they cannot have any "direct and independent insight into the actual words and deeds of Jesus." The Gospel of Philip is 'reflective of Gnostic thinking,' so must be disregarded in its entirety, along with the Gospel of Mary. Welborn asserts that Brown's mention of the Dead Sea Scrolls is, effectively, both superfluous and specious, because they were written by a Jewish sect called the Essenes, and irrelevant to the development or reporting of Christianity. (Some pages later, Welborn cites the Essenes as an example of Jewish men who did not marry, indicating that Jesus being unmarried was not at all uncommon for a Jewish man at that time. She does not make any indication that Jesus might have been an Essene, mind you'as they're irrelevant, remember?) Despite the word "rabbi" meaning "teacher," and that Jesus was called a teacher by his disciples, contends Welborn; there is no evidence he was a "Rabbi" in the formal institutional sense. Ooookay. The Essenes practiced celibacy, and mostly lived at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and left the Dead Sea Scrolls... But Jesus wasn't from there, likely didn't go there, and the Essenes are irrelevant, as per Welborn's earlier assertions... Which is it?

Welborn spends an entire page criticizing Brown for referring to Leonardo da Vinci as "da Vinci" in his text, and how foolish that is, as it'd be like constantly referring to Jesus as "of Nazareth," this being further proof that Brown is unable to get anything factually correct, ever. I'd be more likely to consider it a modern adaptation of our use of "last names" to refer to people in the third person, and that, while technically a descriptor, many people use whatever comes after a "first name" as a "last name." Oh, and don't forget'Brown is "wrongheaded."

Welborn spends an entire chapter 'discrediting' the concept of the 'sacred feminine,' but in a subsequent chapter defends Catholicism for including it, in the worship of Mary, mother of Jesus. She quotes Charlotte Allen's 2001 Article in _Atlantic Monthly_ about how Western Europe was peopled with nature-attuned, woman-respecting, peaceful, and egalitarian culture for thousands of years, and how Indo-European invaders introduced warrior-gods, human-killing weapons, and patriarchal civilization...

Welborn continues on her own, that "the discovery of weapons and clear evidence of traditional gender-based division of labor in many of these sites has driven a stake into the myth of the Mother Goddess. There is no evidence to suggest that such an era ever existed." Overall, Welborn seems quite happy to discount the entire fields of archaeology, anthropology, and cultural history. Welborn's core assertion is that the only accurate source on Christian history is the New Testament, and that the New Testament, in its modern translation, is infallibly correct. She seems very upset that Brown doesn't cite the New Testament at all in his discussion of Jesus' identity.

Another part of Welborn's writing that was particularly distasteful was stylistic. I was taught, lo these many moons ago, that an educated writer does not begin any sentence with "Well, ..." After Welborn disputes Brown's assertion that the Emperor Constantine picked four Gospels out of eighty or more, and that in the aftermath of Nicaea, writings about Christ's human life were repressed, she opens her criticism on these topics with, "That's so wrong, it's beyond wrong." Academic? Scholarly? Are you joking? This is from someone with a Master's Degree from Vanderbilt? Egads. (That degree, the bio claims, is in Church history. She seems to have more citations from _Atlantic Monthly_ and _New York Times_ articles than from full-fledged books, to compare to Brown's disputed sources.) "Well, that's simply not what happened" doesn't give us much to go on. Welborn states that the four Gospels we have today were considered 'normative' by the Christian community by the mid-2nd-Century, and because of that, any and all other writings are not only irrelevant, but apparently didn't exist. She cites William Lane Craig, who contends that "97-99% of the New Testament can be reconstructed beyond any reasonable doubt." Sure, okay. That constitutes neither concrete proof of her stance, nor outright negation of Brown's claims. (Craig is one of the best-known Apologists writing in modern times.) Welborn ends other sentences with phrases like, "... and anyone who believes that is stupid." Academic? Scholarly? Hardly. Insulting? Absolutely. An assertion such as this is more than enough to dismiss this text on the grounds of academics, and Welborn's own 'credentials' on the grounds of writing that goes beyond 'colloquial' to paranoid.

Summary: Save your money and read a real book.