The Venerable National Geographic Magazine has changed vastly in recent decades. Gone are the politically incorrect photo essays that populated my adolescence with natives who filed their teeth to points, stretched their lower lips to accommodate discs the size of tea plates, and exponentially extended their necks with multiple brass rings.
Today, in place of such embarrassing naiveties, readers are treated to weighty “think pieces” on such subjects as “The Teenage Mind.”
(In my humble opinion, the politically incorrect illustrations of exotic self–mutilations provide a far better insight on the average adolescent mind than long and worthy intellectualizations. But I digress …)
I confess that I cancelled my National Geographic subscription when my teenage offspring failed to echo my adolescent fascination with it. Their interest waned, I suspect, at about the same time that the folks with pointy teeth were banished from its pages.
It was, thus, quite some time since I’d last leafed through the publication when Clark Cochran (9 AM, front pew, Gospel side) drew my attention to an article in a recent edition entitled: In the Footsteps of the Apostles. “Let me know what you think of it,” he said.
Well, for starters, there are no photographs of exotic mutilations—merely a rather unappetizing shot of the skull of Mary Magdalene in its gold reliquary in a French basilica. Roles hitherto assigned to folks with the brass neck extenders have been foisted off on Christian pilgrims—crawling up the stairs of shrines, weeping at altar rails, and prostrate in the dirt at Holy Places.
A map accompanying the article postulates that the expansion of the Church in the First Century AD was rather more modest than the evidence of the New Testament and the Church Fathers would suggest.
There is, for example, good reason to believe that, before planting churches in Crete and Malta and his execution in Rome, Paul undertook a missionary journey to Spain. Persuasive evidence also indicates Christianity arrived in the British Isles prior to the Roman invasion in AD 43.
Happily, the article treats Jesus and his apostles as genuine historic personages and not—as is so often the case in the media these days—quaint and improbable figures of myth and legend. Even so, it was jarring to see Judas Iscariot described as the “alleged traitor.”
If the Gospels are correct, there is nothing “alleged” about it. To be sure, one can speculate about Judas’ motives for betraying Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, e.g., that he was trying force our Lord’s hand—but there is no other way to describe his act than “treachery.”
Indeed, if Judas can rightly be described as an “alleged traitor” then it is no less reasonable to call Jesus Christ the “alleged Messiah,” and Peter, Paul, James, John, etc. “alleged apostles.”
You can bet your bottom dollar that no article in the National Geographic would have the temerity to call Siddhattha Gotama Buddha the “alleged enlightened one” and still less to refer to Mohammed as “an alleged prophet.”
A further genuflection to political correctness is the inclusion of Mary Magdalene as an apostle—indeed, the Apostle to the Apostles. True, she was among the women who delivered the news of Jesus’ resurrection to the apostles, and the Greek for messenger is apostolos, but the rest is speculation. There is no evidence that either she or her fellow disciples considered her to be what the Church has traditionally hailed as an apostle.
For my money, the magazine was more entertaining and educational—and a whole lot less pretentious—when it concentrated on exotic lands populated by folks who filed their teeth to points, stretched their lower lips to accommodate tea plates, and exponentially extended their necks with multiple brass rings. GPH✠
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