Word on Fire is brought to you by Catholic cemeteries, serving the Chicago area since 1837.

This is Cardinal Francis George, and I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to reflect with Father Robert Baron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire.

Father Baron will challenge us to open our hearts to the Word on Fire, which is God's Word of Love for each of us.

If our hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us, who we might speak with love about the one who is love.

The Archdiocese of Chicago, through the generosity of Sacred Heart Parish and Winetka, now presents the Word on Fire.

Peace be with you.

Friends, today I'm going to continue my analysis of the Da Vinci Code.

I know we might be experiencing Da Vinci Code overload, but last week I talked about just one theme from this topic, namely the Divinity of Christ.

I argued that the claim that Jesus is divine can be found in the earliest texts of the Christian tradition, can be found in all the gospels.

The Da Vinci Code suggests that it was invented in the fourth century is ridiculous.

But there are some other important themes from this Da Vinci Code. I wanted to touch on just two of them in the second talk.

The Nastic Gospels.

Where does all this speculation about Jesus and Mary Magdalene come from? Well, a lot of it comes from these texts, these Nastic Gospels.

What are they? They were texts written, maybe the earliest ones come from the middle of the second century, the later ones maybe into the fifth century.

Many were known, by the way, in the ancient church. Others were discovered only in 1945 in the Egyptian desert.

The Nastic Gospels were accounts of the life of Jesus, sayings of Jesus, but shot through with the Nastic philosophy.

Nastic philosophy was a nasty business. It's still around, by the way, in different forms, and it's still a nasty business today.

The heart of Nasticism is the claim that spirit is good, matter is evil. It's a radically dualistic system.

The whole point of the spiritual life for the Nastics is to escape from matter. Some of us, they claimed, had a spark of divinity in us.

The idea is, through a special knowledge, hence Nasticism, ganosis in Greek means knowledge. Through this special knowledge, I could manage to escape from the realm of matter.

Jesus on this Nastic reading is an avatar from the spiritual world, who appears in this physical world, but his whole purpose is to get people out of matter.

Well, when the early church read these texts, it said no to them, for obvious reasons.

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