Questions from “The Da Vinci Code”

Matthew 24:1-14 – April 2004

 

(Originally share in April 2004. Today over 40 million copies of the book have been sold world-wide making it one of the most popular fiction books in history. In fact in April 2006, the book again moved to #1 on the best sellers list. The movie is coming out May 2006. This manuscript is the basis for a spoken sermon – thus some grammar, sentence structure and spelling do not conform with some writing standards. Dan Brown’s historical claims, on his official website, have also changed from what is referred to in this paper.)

 

Described by New York Times as a "riddle-filled, code-breaking, exhilaratingly brainy thriller," The Da Vinci Code has been on their Best Sellers List for almost a year. According to author Dan Brown’s website – 6.5 million copies are now in print. It is quite engaging as a thriller since each chapter leaves someone hanging as the hero & heroine race around Europe – and there are a lot of chapters. ABC News had a prime time TV news special on one part of it and it has been announced that Sony Pictures has acquired the film rights to the book. They are also reported to have assembled a talented group to produce the film, including prominent director Ron Howard. It definitely has become popular.

 

The Da Vinci Code begins with the murder of a museum curator. A Harvard professor and a French code breaker are called in to decipher a cryptic message that he wrote just before he died. They discover that he was protecting a powerful and dangerous secret -- evidence that could disprove the deity of Christ. Although the Church had tried for centuries to suppress the evidence, great thinkers and artists have planted clues everywhere: in paintings by Da Vinci, the architecture of cathedrals—even Disney cartoons. The narrative is driven by the ancient quest for the Holy Grail, only it’s not the cup of the Last Supper they seek like most movies claim. The quest for the Holy Grail in The DaVinci Code ends up as a search for the hiding place of secret documents of Mary Magdalene which contain the “true” gospel—whose foundation is actual goddess worship.

 

Even though the book is simply a fiction novel, in interviews & on his website, author Dan Brown maintains that “The Da Vinci Code” is thoroughly researched and factual in all respects. The novel itself, starts with an opening page entitled "Fact," which states: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." The New York Daily News stated “His research is impeccable” and the Chicago Tribune marveled that the book contained "’several doctorates’ worth of fascinating history and learned speculation." Because many of these claims deal directly with the core truths of the Bible, Jesus and historic Christianity and because some could easily believe that which is fiction is truth instead, we want to examine some of Dan Brown’s spiritual claims that are found in The Da Vinci Code. Are they true? Are they based in truth? Are you currently following a lie? Have you been deceived by the church through the ages? Now don’t worry if you haven’t read the book, because this won’t be a chapter by chapter book review – rather we will take some of the questions that arise about Christianity from the book and examine these. This will help you have confidence in your own life concerning the evidences for our belief and it will also help better prepare you to discuss these questions with others who you are in contact with. Let’s start with Jesus’ own words …

 

In Matthew 24, Jesus takes time, during the final week before His death, to further prepare His disciples for what they will face in the future when He will not be with them. While they want to know the time & date of the proposed destruction of the temple & Jesus’ return in power – what Jesus is clearly more concerned with is preparing them for the many forms of deception that could entangle them. Let me just point out a few in v 1-14.

          - v 2, that even the most magnificent and strongly build human works will be destroyed. This simply wasn’t a natural thought to them. We are more easily deceived when the human work we wrongly trust in is destroyed.  

          - v 4, Jesus straightforwardly tells us that a regular part of our life is to constantly be aware so that no one deceives us – there are many who seek to deceive us.

          - v 5, Jesus tells us there will be people who claim to be the Messiah and many will foolishly follow those false claims – every cult group fits into this category as the leader claims they have the only true way.

          - v 6-8, we are reminded we can be deceived by terrible events around us – when wars, famines or major world problems seem to abound, we should not become overwhelmed with fear or think this must be the end.

          - v 9, we could easily be deceived when we go through opposition or persecution because of our faith. These are going to come, Jesus stated, but it doesn’t mean God is losing or we are following the wrong Jesus

          - v 10, we surely will have to fight the sense of uncertainty that will come when people in the church leave the faith they proclaimed – but it is going to happen

          - v 11, false prophets will arise and deceive many – these are people who claim their picture of who Jesus was is correct and the one shown by the apostles is wrong.

          - v 12, wickedness and lawlessness will increase and that will cause many to give up on loving one another as God commands us: Everyone for themselves. Again the danger of being deceived to ignore the strong commands of Jesus because we are worried we won’t have as much. So clearly it should never surprise us when deceptive challenges to our faith come either through circumstances or other people. We need to be on our guard against deception – whatever its form; and to realize how susceptible people around us are to that deception and how susceptible we are personally to fall for it.

          - Then Jesus ends with two strong encouragements

  FIRST, that victory comes simply by not giving up – READ v 13. We are most useful to God when we don’t become deceived by the popular, easy or convenient. In the end, the most important victory will simply be that we were not deceived by the world, nor did we become worldly.

  SECOND, these types of deception actually make God’s work clearer. The real proof that God is at work around us and that we are rightly holding to the truth is NOT by the numbers of people that hold a particular belief, but that the TRUE GOSPEL, that is the good news of Jesus, keeps expanding where it is being heard. READ v 14. Clearly God doesn’t see these negative happenings or these popular portrayals of deception as a defeat for the advancement of the Kingdom of God. They are tragic for the people deceived, but they are also to be expected just like we know the temperature will drop in winter. With these thoughts in mind, we would be foolish not to consider whether the spiritual claims made in Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” were true facts or false deceptions that believers must guard against and the foolish will believe.

 

PROPOSITION: Modern, popular, convincing attacks on our belief will surely come – don’t let yourself become deceived by these and eagerly watch for the way that God advances the gospel in the midst of them. 

 

I.  Jesus didn’t die single but had married Mary Magdalene & had children     Matt 24:11

The first divergence one finds in the Da Vinci Code is that Jesus was not single as the Bible records but that he married Mary Magdalene and had at least one child.

 

          A. Mary Magdalene was the key disciple

As Brown states, “I was skeptical, but after a year and a half of research, I became a believer. As soon as people understand that the few Gospels included in the Bible are not the only version of the Christ story, they begin to sense contradictions. Magdalene is most obvious.” Her role, he says, was deliberately distorted, a smear campaign by the early church fathers – as one of his characters declares, “the greatest cover-up in human history.”

 

In Brown’s view Jesus (whom he calls "the original feminist") had intended for Mary Magdalene to lead the church after His death, but "Peter had a problem with that." Brown claims that it is Mary Magdalene portrayed next to Jesus in the famous “Last Supper” painting rather than the beloved apostle John. So, Mary Magdalene hit the apostolic "glass ceiling" and was sent off to Gaul (modern France), taking with her, not only her child, but – you guessed it – the Holy Grail – that is this secret of Jesus’ marriage, who He really was and what He really believed which is very different than the Bible says.

 

Brown, like many people today, confuses Mary Magdalene, who was healed of demon possession by Jesus, and who was one of the wealthy women who financially supported Jesus and the disciples, with the woman caught in adultery. That doesn’t come from the Bible but from a sermon by Gregory the Great more than 500 years after Jesus’ death. The legend of her voyage to Gaul is found no where before the 9th century and her relics aren’t reported until the 13th century. So there is no historical independent basis for this. Even in the hundreds of books of false or cultic writings of the first 500 years of Christianity there is only one instance of any physical between Mary Magdalene & Jesus. And it is of the most benign form

 

          B. Children’s descendents

The book claims that when Mary and her child fled after the crucifixion to Gaul. They then established the Merovingian line of European royalty. And, of course, Americans are more gullible than most to conspiracy theories so he claims that two known Catholic groups are really secret societies – one to keep the secret from coming out and the other to keep the secret alive so one day it can come out. While these also are both gross misrepresentations of the facts of history which we can verify, my concern and time limits me just to that which touches the Bible directly

          C. Secret society to protect/keep alive these secrets

 

II. There are other hidden gospels which have the real picture of who Jesus was       Matt 24:5

NONE of this is in the New Testament, in fact the absolute opposite is pictured there. Since there isn’t even the faintest clue of any of this in the gospels, the Bible as we know it must be totally discredited and an alternate historical record must be advanced.  Bible-believing pastors, like myself, have been pointing out that this has been going on for over 150 years in what is often called “modernism” or “higher Biblical criticism” or “liberal theology” (which is not the same as liberal politics). This view of the Bible as less than the inerrant, inspired Word of God has become the main belief system of the denominational leadership of the mainline denominations and also the key reason Judeo-Christian moral values are ignored and people are leaving the church. What Brown does is popularize a newer version of this that has been trying to gain popularity in the past 40-50 years. The depths of its inroads has only been evident to the average Christian since the reporting on the controversy surrounding Mel Gibson’s Passion movie.   

 

Listen to the words written in our local paper just a couple weeks ago, in a March 21st column by ND Batra of Norwich University entitled “A Hindu looks at the ‘Passion of the Christ’.” He states very matter-of-factly and without any proof, “Of course, there have been many gospels, of which only four have survived in the form of the New Testament. Others have been suppressed or destroyed due to the struggle for control over Jesus’ legacy. So we would never know the complete truth about Jesus except through our own representations and misrepresentations that suit our needs.” Remember Jesus’ words that false prophets will arise and deceive many – let’s ask these questions.

 

          A. Are there other books written in ancient times which claim to be gospels, i.e. lost

               books of the Bible? (pseudepigraphal writings, i.e., bearing a false name).

As Brown’s historian claims in the book “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them…The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”

 

The real question is not whether there were other ancient books written about Jesus in the “gospel form” – but when were they written and were they written with direct apostolic link while eye-witnesses were still alive as the NT claims to be. In the ninth century Photius listed 280 writings from the first 500 years of Christianity that claimed to be Christian gospels, epistles or books of Acts. I can’t say it strong enough – this is not something new. They are not “lost books of the Bible.” These works are called pseudepigrapha – which is simply a big word to say “they bear a false name”. NONE of them were definitively written during the lifetime of the eye-witnesses of Jesus. Let me share just a couple …

  - The Gospel of Thomas, a favorite of the Jesus Seminar people written in the early part of the 2nd century. It is a fanciful & Gnostic view of Jesus’ childhood miracles. ("Gnostic" is a Greek word for knowledge. The Gnostics claimed to possess secret knowledge which their followers used to free themselves from the world of darkness. Whereas orthodox Christianity preaches salvation as available to all who accept it, Gnostics thought that only an elite could know the hidden truth.)

  - The Gospel of the Egyptians, 2nd century ascetic teaching against marriage, meat & wine

  - The Gospel of Joseph the Carpenter, 4th century, the writing of the Monophysite cult that glorified Joseph.

  - The Passing of Mary, 4th century writing that shows the bodily assumption and advance stage of Mary worship.

 

By contrast EVERY ONE of the NT gospels we have were written in the 1st century with DIRECT APOSTOLIC CONTACT while eye-witnesses were still plentiful and able to contradict that which was false. We have an actual manuscript of the last gospel written & the most maligned, the book of John, dated around 115 AD which was located on the other side of the Roman empire from where it was written – clearly putting the most contested writing of the Gospels exactly where it claims to be written, in the late 80’s to early ’90’s - the lifetime of the apostle John. That is our earliest manuscript and it precedes the writings of ALL of the pseudepigriphal writings. These pseudepigraphal writings were NEVER accepted by the majority of Christians living at the time, just like the writings of Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses or New Age Movement about Jesus are not accepted by the majority of evangelical Christians today. Can you imagine the false logic that says just because Joseph Smith wrote the book of Mormon, then the New Testament must be false? Jesus said false prophets and false Messiahs would arise – of course, there will be false writings during every period of Christianity. As scholars Geisler & Nix put it “the extra-canonical literature, taken as a whole, manifests a surprising poverty. The bulk of it is legendary, and bears the clear mark of a forgery. Only here and there amid a mass of worthless rubbish, do we come across a priceless jewel” (pg 311). In fact, that “priceless jewel” in almost every instance is a mere repetition of what we find in one or more of the canonical Gospels. 

 

          B. Were they suppressed thus hiding the truth and promoting an erroneous view of Jesus?

So were these other writing suppressed to hide the truth of Jesus – NO they were opposed because they were the false writings of cult groups or self-proclaimed Christians. In order to deliver on his conspiratorial plot, Brown chooses to call the Gnostic gospels found just after World War II at Nag Hammadi "unaltered gospels," and the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John the propoganda for the goddess-bashers. As we’ve already quoted he feels this is "the greatest cover-up in human history." Calling the Nag Hammadi texts "unaltered" gospels is like reading the official Soviet histories as objective fact – including those photos where they airbrushed out leading figures in history when they were no longer convenient. They even misrepresented their own maps. But let’s take a moment to examine the two pseudepigraphal writings the book calls the real truth.

 

The first is the Gospel of Philip, which Brown picks because he says it has a text in which Jesus is said to often “kiss” Mary Magdalene “on the mouth” and thereby invoke the jealousy of Peter. How reliable is this Gospel – listen to the words of Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, hardly an Evangelical school.

 

“It is not a first century document at all. Scholars date the Gospel of Philip to the third century, about 200 years after Jesus lived. Therefore, it can not be a product of the disciple named Philip in Acts, unless he lived to be at least 310! This would be as far removed from us as the American Revolution, and certainly not to be preferred over the canonical Gospels, which even by later dates assigned by some scholars (80-100 AD) are far closer to their source. The Nag Hammadi document was penned no earlier than 350 AD… The Gospel of Philip is a Gnostic text, and Gnostic thought would have no place in first century Palestinian Judaism. A Jesus teaching Gnosticism in this setting would not have been [Brown’s]  influential person – he would have been ignored and shunned.”

 

Then we have The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. This gospel, however, fares no better than Philip under critical analysis. It, too, is a Gnostic document that reflects no reality found among Palestinian Jews of the first century. The earliest fragments, Jenkins notes, are dated to the third century, and most scholars date it no earlier than 180-200 AD, as far from Jesus are we are from the Civil War. Interestingly Brown and the Da Vinci Code characters NEVER mention the most famous & earliest of all the pseudepigraphal gospels – the Gospel of Thomas which I briefly mentioned earlier. But that is probably because its fanciful sayings end with the admonition by Jesus Himself that women must “become male” in order to find salvation. That, of course, violates and undermines Brown’s stated purpose that Jesus meant real Christianity to be for goddess worship – which is our last point.

 

          C. Are we unable to have any solid knowledge of Jesus outside of our feelings &

                     presuppositions?

The presence of the false, never takes away from the confidence of the truth. The real question is not whether there were people in the ancient world who had other thoughts about Jesus – but what is the truth. Because many write that abortion is not wrong or that children in the womb are not really human yet, doesn’t make it true. Jesus promised His apostles that He would lead them into all truth after His death through the Holy Spirit – and He did just that. As the Westminster Confession of Faith reminds us "The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed and obeyed, depends not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof; and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God."

 

          D. What about the Dead Sea Scrolls?

What about the Dead Sea Scrolls – Brown claims that they are a key proof of the truth of what he says. Quoting from the book “Fortunately for historians…some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert.” This is actually a fatal flaw in his work because it shows how incredibly “unhistorical” and “inaccurate” he is.

 

First, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, not in the 1950s. No one contests this fact so even the most surface investigation would have indicated this. Second, the Dead Sea Scrolls did not contain any “gospels” or anything else mentioning Jesus. They overwhelmingly predate the New Testament and are mostly copies of Old Testament books and internal documents for the Qumran community. These claims then could only be made by someone with a total disregard for the facts. There is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls that promotes either traditional or deviant Christianity he expouses. The Dead Sea Scrolls do provide two important substantiations of Biblical record we have. First, they give clear evidence that the Old Testament we have today was the one known in Jesus’ day and it has been accurately copied for a millennium. Second, the Jewish community at Qumran shows that the details of Judaism written about in gospels accurately reflects what was done and believed at the time, while the Judaism we know from more recent history is different and developed after the destruction of the Second Temple in A. D. 70. In simple terms, it shows the background so clearly written about in the New Testament could not be a later invention by Christians. Believe me, if your faith is in the truth & trustworthiness of the scripture, it is very well grounded.  

 

III. Constantine invented Jesus’ divinity                                                        Matt 24:10

The imagination of 20th century ivory tower intellectuals continues for Brown claims that "until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless." The central claim Brown's novel makes about Christianity is that "almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false." Why? Because of a single meeting of bishops in 325 AD, at the city of Nicea in modern-day Turkey. There, argues Brown, church leaders who wanted to consolidate their power base (he calls this, anachronistically, "the Vatican" or "the Roman Catholic church") created a divine Christ and an infallible Scripture—both of them novelties that had never before existed among Christians.

 

          A. The council of Nicea in 325 AD

In fact the book states that the bishops declared Jesus as the Son of God by a vote, "A relatively close vote at that.," As you might guess my now, Brown is playing fast and loose with lots of facts. The Council of Nicaea did not "invent" the divinity of Jesus. Not only is it clearly in Jesus’ words, the reactions of the Jewish leaders who opposed him and the whole New Testament – it is clearly in the gospels, the early church fathers writings and even the every day practice of the ordinary Christian which I will show in a moment. The council of Nicea was to deal with a false teacher & his followers called Arians – just like Jesus said would arise and needed to be challenged. The vote was hardly close – of the more than 300 bishops only 2 failed to sign the creed. Not exactly a cliff-hanger.

 

In reality, early Christians overwhelmingly worshipped Jesus Christ as their risen Savior and Lord. The early writings showed Christians have always believed Jesus to be Lord, God, and Savior—even when that faith meant death. 200 years before Nicea, prominent church leader Irenaeus quoted 1 Corinthians 8:6 in this regard: "Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ."

 

Because you are so use to these terms you may not realize the powerful statement they make. Kyrios (Greek for Lord) was used by the Greeks to denote divinity (though sometimes it was used as a simple honorific title). In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, this term became the preferred substitution for "Yahweh," the holy name of God. The Romans also used it to denote the divinity of their emperor, and the first-century Jewish writer Josephus tells us that the Jews refused to use it of the emperor for precisely this reason: only God himself was kyrios. Then the Christians, who were all Jewish in the beginning, took over this usage of kyrios and applied it to Jesus from the earliest days of the church. This is 250 years before Nicea. In addition, ancient writings show that early Christians prayed to God the Father in Christ's name – showing His deity. Church leaders, including Justin Martyr, a second-century luminary and the first great church apologist, baptized in the name of the triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—thereby acknowledging the equality of each of the three distinct persons in the singular Godhead.

 

          B. Constantine’s role at Nicea

Constantine’s role in Nicea? He just convened it and paid for it, but was not personally involved. He didn’t want church fights, now that Christianity was legal, to undermine the peace in the empire. This council lasted several months. Did they decide what books would be in our Bible? No that had already come together hundreds of years earlier – there was just another confirmation and almost all the arguing had to do with making sure the book of Hebrews and the book of Revelation actually had proof of direct apostolic link. Ironically, the process of collecting and consolidating Scripture already agreed was from God took a step forward everytime a false prophet arose making contrary claims. So around 140 AD, a Gnostic leader named Marcion claimed that the God of the OT (wrath) was different than the God of the NT (love – see there is nothing new under the sun), so he rejected New Testament books that showed the most Jewish influence -- Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Hebrews. How could he reject what was not already accepted – by 140 AD?. Proof! Then in the later part of the 100’s Montanus arose claiming revelation from God about an impending apocalypse. So church leaders decided to take the 4 gospels and Paul’s epistles which had already been accepted and already were in the possession of the church worldwide and put them under the same cover – called the Muratorian Canon – otherwise we might still have them as separate works. All were still considered scripture. Nicea and Constantine did not decide what was in our Bible – they simply reargued the same things decided long before.

 

IV. Is goddess worship what Jesus planned for His followers?

(Deut 4:35; Mark 12:29; I Cor 8:6)

Even though time has quickly passed us, let me just briefly comment on this final issue, because in false teaching, there is always an ulterior motive – there is always something the writer wants to do or believe which is the opposite of what God has said. One writer summed it up this way, “The Da Vinci Code's driving claim is nothing less than that Christianity is based upon a Big Lie (the deity of Christ) used by patriarchal oppressors to deny the true worship of the Divine Feminine.”  As one character in the book put it, “The Grail is symbolic of the lost goddess. When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the Holy Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be “searching for the chalice” were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a Church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned non-believers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine.” (The Da Vinci Code, pages 238-239)

 

          A. NT claims

So is goddess worship what Jesus really believed and intended for His followers. This simply doesn’t fit anything except the bizarre imaginations of modern day radical feminists – which makes sense since the list of “authoritative books” mentioned in the Da Vinci Code has not a single person with an advanced degree in any area they spoke of – and the longer list of authoritative works found on his web site was a who’s-who of the most radical religious feminists, including a favorite of the Jesus Seminar and PBS -- Elaine Pagels, a scholar of Gnosticism. She claims that Thomas is presented as a doubter in the New Testament to discredit “The Gospel of Thomas” which is her favorite. She states she is attracted to Gnosticism because it teaches that "spirituality is essentially within oneself." That is straight New Age thinking not Christianity, yet she calls herself a Christian because Christianity "offers hints and glimpses of spiritual possibility.” To which James Hitchcock, professor of history at St. Louis University, comments, “This is about as weak an act of faith as it is possible to make and, if such an understanding had triumphed two millennia ago, Christianity today would be nothing but a footnote in books written by historians like Pagels.”

 

The idea that religion was originally matriarchal (female centered) and then was changed to be patriarchal (male centered) by the Jews and perpetuated by later Christians is simply NOT true. More incredible is the statements from chapter 74 of the book that “early Jewish tradition involved ritualistic sex” in the Jewish Temple, and that YHWH was worshipped along with a female consort named Shekinah. What Judiasm and Christianity uniquely brought to the ancient world was monotheism (only ONE GOD) in the midst of polytheism (many gods which Brown, Pagel and other moderns want to revive).

 

The OT clear states in Deut 4:35 – “You were shown these things (the powerful workings of God) so that you might know that YWHW or Jehovah (Lord) is God and there is no other.”

Jesus clearly states in Mark 12:29 that the most important commandment is this “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” There is ONLY one God, there has always been ONLY one God, there forever will be ONLY one God.

          B. OT claims

          C. Brown’s “scholarly sources”

 

V. Conclusion

Brown and others aren’t the first to make claims that what we believe simply comes from a vast conspiracy meant to deceived us – nor will be the last. Jesus said this would happen. What is surprising is that so many in America have so uncritically accepted much of what he says in a fictional novel as truth, when even a surface investigation shows an incredible disregard for the facts of history and a powerful ulterior motive. My prayer is that the response of the early church will be ours – we will use these challenges to solidify in our own minds the great evidence and proof God has already given us of the total reliability, inerrancy and inspiration of the entire Bible. As G. K. Chesterton reminded us that orthodoxy (right historic Christian belief) is not only true; it is infinitely more interesting than heresy. It is alive and compelling and life-changing. Heresies come and go by fashion. The truth is unchanged and unchangeable.