Dear Manju,
The truth about Da vinci Code is that its a fiction novel.
The Da Vinci Code: Faith, Fact, or Fiction? by Hal Seed
With so much information available to us today, it’s not hard to get confused
is it?
Two years ago, author Dan Brown wrote a novel that debuted at the top of the NY
Times bestseller list. And it has been at or near the top of that list every
week since.
It’s a book that has become a catalyst for all kinds of questions.
Questions about the church.
Questions about Jesus Christ.
Questions about God.
Dan Brown makes some claims about these sorts of things, and he makes some
claims for historical accuracy. On page 1 he says:
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in
this novel are accurate. – Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, p. 1
As you read the book, you begin to wonder if Mr. Brown has more in mind that
merely making money and entertaining readers. More on that later.
To understand what the book is talking about, you need some background in three
areas. So let me tell you three stories.
The first story is the story of The Crown, the Council, and the Creed.
The story of the Crown, the Council and the Creed is the story of Constantine.
The Crown belongs to Constantine. Constantine adopted Christianity in 312 AD
and legalized it for all of the Western Roman Empire.
The Council is the Council of Nicaea.
As he consolidated his power, Constantine found that there were disagreements
in his realm about the nature of the Son of God. The problem was that a leader
of the church of North Africa, a man named “Arius,” was teaching that Jesus was
God, but a different kind of God than the Father.
As a new Christian, Constantine said, “I can help sort this out.” So he paid
the expenses for 300 bishops from across his realm to come together and council
about what was true and what wasn’t about the nature of the Son of God.
Arius and his followers believed that Jesus was God, but that he was a created
God (as opposed to God the Father, who was eternally pre-existent.) – Are you
following this? This is a little heady, but we’ll lighten up in a minute.
Arius’ phrase was, "There was a time when he was not."
The rest of Christianity disagreed with them, so they came up with this
statement, or creed, as it’s come to be known:
The Creed of Nicaea
"We believe in one God, the Father, Almighty, Maker of all things visible and
invisible; and in the one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the
Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father; God from God,
Light from Light, Very God from Very God, begotten not made, of one substance
with the Father, through whom all things were made…
This is the Creed of Nicaea. This is what the Nicaean bishops came together to
clarify.
Story 2 is The Story of Gnosticism.
These will all become relevant to you in a minute. But for now, follow me for
another 90 seconds.
The word “Gnosis” = “Knowledge”
In the second century AD (after Christ) a broad spiritual movement grew up and
developed several forms over the next 2 centuries. The movement was called,
“Gnosticism,” because the common thread between all of its different groups was
the each of them had special knowledge, which only insiders could possess.
In a nutshell, here’s what Gnostics believed:
Draw on board the emanations hierarchy.
The Gnostics believed that matter was evil and spirit was good. Everything you
touched was tainted, everything immaterial was good. It’s classic dualism.
The problem with this view is, if matter is evil and God is good, how did
matter come into existence. The answer for the Gnostics was, through a chain of
lesser and lesser gods.
Here’s what it looked like.
God, the pure God. Purely spirit, absolutely untainted, created a group of
lesser gods called, “Aeons” who were mostly untainted.
These gods created lesser gods who created lesser gods, who created lesser
gods, until finally, one of these spirits created the world and matter and
people.
Full knowledge of this complete chain of gods can only be revealed to those who
are fully initiated. This is the nature of “gnosis.” You can’t have the
knowledge until you’ve proven yourself worthy.
One problem you can see is when some members of Gnostic communities tried to
blend their gnosis with Christianity. If Jesus was God and came to earth, then
he couldn’t be God anymore, because the true God could never assume material
form, he would stay far from it.
So one Gnostic solution to this was, “Jesus wasn’t actually material. He was
completely spiritual; he only appeared to be material. If you noticed, if you
looked closely, Jesus never cast a shadow.” This explains why Jesus could walk
through walls after Easter – he wasn’t really material. He was immaterial.
An alternative solution was to claim that he was fully human and only fully
human.
Of course, to claim that, you’ve got to explain away almost everything the
Bible teaches about him. That’s what the Da Vinci Code is all about.
Gnosticism pretty much died out by the end of the 4th century, so we only knew
about it through the writings of several early church fathers who lived during
that time.
We only knew about it through them until December, 1945, when an Egyptian
peasant in the town of Nag Hammadi stumbled on a cache of 52 manuscripts, some
of which we written by Gnostics.
These were translated over the next several years, and made a big splash on the
English-speaking world in 1977 when a Princeton professor named Elaine Pagels
published a book called, “The Gnostic Gospels”.
The Gnostic Church is now alive and well in several parts of the world. In
France it’s called, L’Eglise des Inities (Church of the Initiated),
In England, it’s The Pre-Nicene Gnostic Catholic Church in England,
and in the US, The Gnostic Society.
After Dr. Pagels, who is a Gnostic, published her work, three other men
published a book in 1982 called, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
Here’s where these stories intersect with The Da Vinci Code. It’s from these
two works that Dan Brown gets much of what he teaches in “the Code”.
Last year, in an interview of ABC televisions, 20/20, Dan Brown spoke his
“conversion” to a new way of thinking that he’s been introduced to. He
acknowledged that he sees himself as being on a mission to bring this new
religious message to mainstream America.
Holy Blood, Holy Grail is based on documents supplied to the authors by a man
named Pierre Plantard. Plantard was an anti-Semite who spent some time in jail
in 1953, and in 1954 founded a social club called, “The Priory of Sion.” The
Priory of Sion dissolved in 1957, but Plantard held onto the name and in the
1960’s claimed that he was a descendant of Jesus Christ through his wife, Mary
Magdalene.
Dan Brown built his novel around the names and claims of Holy Blood, Holy
Grail. The Da Vinci Code claims that
[Theme #1]
A. Jesus Christ is not divine.
B. Jesus was married.
C. Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children and raised them in the south of France.
That may sound crazy, but if you’ve read the book nod at me: that’s what the
book is about, right?
That’s the first conspiratorial theme.
The second conspiratorial theme. The second conspiratorial theme is that the
church suppressed these facts, starting in the 4th century. According to the
“Code,” Constantine called a council in the city of “Nicaea”, where the
Catholic Church made the deliberate decision to suppress these facts, in 325 AD.
[Theme #2
Under Constantine, the Roman Catholic Church made the deliberate decision to
suppress the facts at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.]
Constantine wanted to suppress the truth about Christ, so he started a campaign
of propaganda, called a council of all the church leaders and spun a new story
about Christ – the story that you’re used to hearing, and collated the Bible to
read differently than it previously did, because Constantine wanted to
subjugate women under his patriarchal ideas about what the world and the church
ought to be.
So his goal was to stamp out the “sacred feminine”. – More on that later.
Before that, Christianity was pure. After that, Christianity was a big cover-up
for the truth.
Third Conspiratorial Theme:
[Theme #3 -]
Constantine rewrote the Bible and therefore the Bible we have today is not true.
So the Bible that we have today is not true. You can’t trust it. It’s a
distortion.
Let’s take these one at a time.
1. Was Jesus married?
Let’s read it directly from the text.
Teabing looked excited now. “The legend of the Holy Grail is a legend about
royal blood. When Grail legend speaks of ‘the chalice that held the blood of
Christ’… it speaks, in fact, of Mary Magdalene – the female womb that carried
Jesus’ royal bloodline.”
The words seems to echo across the ballroom and back before they fully
registered in Sophie’s mind. Mary Magdalene carried the royal bloodline of
Jesus Christ? “But how could Christ have a bloodline unless…?” She paused and
looked at Langdon.
Langdon smiled softly. “Unless they had a child.”
Sophie stood transfixed.
“Behold,” Teabing proclaimed. “the greatest cover-up in human history. Not only
was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father.”
The Da Vinci Code, p. 249
Claim #1, Jesus was married.
Bold statement, where’s the proof?
Dan Brown’s answer is, “The Gnostics.”
What do we know about the Gnostics?
We know that because of their belief that matter is evil, they had to take some
leaps to explain who Jesus was. He couldn’t be fully God and fully man, because
full, spiritual God could never mix with man.
In the book, Teabing says that the Gnostics knew and taught that Jesus was
married. He sights the Gospel of Philip, a Gnostic writing uncovered at Nag
Hammadi, as the source.
The problem with this are:
1) The Gospel of Philip doesn’t say that Jesus was married.
2) The Gospel of Philip was written 250 years after Jesus.
3) The Gospel of Philip wasn’t written by Philip. Philip the Apostle died in
the first century. So, this book we are supposed to trust is written by someone
who makes a false claim about himself before he even begins to write.
Teabing’s supposed case for Philip saying Jesus is married comes out of one
phrase which describes Mary Magdalene as a companion of Jesus.
His disciples were companions. Same word.
Teabing tries to make the case that the word “companion” can also mean, “wife,”
based on the meaning of the word in Aramaic. But the gospel of Philip wasn’t
written in Aramaic, it was written in Greek.
No other Gnostic gospel mentions anything about the marriage of Jesus.
Next question: Was there a cover-up, or suppression of evidence, which is a
central thesis of the book?
Let’s look at the book again:
“Behold,” Teabing proclaimed, “the greatest cover-up in human history. Not only
was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father.” p. 249
A few pages earlier:
“The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was
collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” – p. 231
Constantine was the one who distorted the original, Gnostic teaching and made
it into what we know of as Christianity today by calling the bishops together
at the Council of Nicaea.
Quote:
“At this gathering,” Teabing said, “many aspects of Christianity were debated
and voted up – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration
of the sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus.”
“I don’t follow. His divinity?”
“My dear,” Teabing said, “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His
followers as a mortal prophet… a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.
A mortal.”
“Not the Son of God?”
“Right,” Teabing said, “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially
proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”
- p. 233
We’ve already seen, the purpose of the council of Nicaea was not to decide if
Jesus was God, but in what way Jesus was God.
If you want to look at the records, this was the first great ecumenical council
of the church. Notes were taken and preserved and you can buy and read them
from several books that cover the church councils.
Or, study the historical record. (draw on board)
Here’s what you’ll find
We have all sorts of writings from the first 325 years of Christianity,
including hundreds of scrolls and manuscripts and fragments of the NT. We have
hundreds of these and related documents from after 325 AD.
Dan Brown believes that Christianity was fundamentally altered at the Council
of Nicaea. If that were the case, you would expect to see that these documents
look substantially different than these documents. But they don’t. Why? Because
the Constantine and the Council did not invent anything new. They simply
affirmed what the majority of Christianity already knew.
According to Brown, the purpose of the Nicene Council was to stamp out feminism
and the feminine goddess. This, frankly, is a complete fabrication. Nothing of
the kind ever came up there, nor needed to come up, because pre-Nicene
Christianity never had a goddess or sacred feminine aspect.
It is true that Jesus’ teachings were very progressive and liberating to the
women of his day. But search all of the pre-Nicene documents and you won’t find
any mention of this type of theology.
And look at the OldTestament of Bible and you will find that the Jews and their
practices abhorred the idea of temple prostitution.
Check this out.
The Jewish Tetragrammaton YHWH – the sacred name of God – in fact derived from
Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine “Jah” and the
pre-Hebraic name for Eve, “Havah”. – p. 309
The word “Jehovah” is a German word that didn’t exist until the 13th century.
The word for Eve in Hebrew is “Havva” – No “H” at the end. “Havah” as it is
spelled here is the nickname for Eve, not the real name at all.
Or this:
“Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple housed not
only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah. Men seeking spiritual
wholeness came to the Temple to visit priestesses… with whom they made love and
experienced the divine through physical union.” – p. 309
That is a blatant lie. Shekinah is a Hebrew word for glory. The Jews never
allowed anything but the Arc of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies. They
never thought of a female god, and abhorred the practice of their neighbors of
temple prostitution.
One more question: Did Constantine rewrite the Bible?
Or, really, at the root of every theory behind the book is the question:
Is the Bible reliable?
Teabing, p. 231:
“…everything you need to know about the Bible can be summed up by the great
canon doctor Martyn Percy…. ‘The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.’”
“…the Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God…. Man created it as a
historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless
translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive
version of the book.” – p. 231
Here’s how the New Testament(NT) developed. (draw Mediterranean basin)
a. – Books written from various places (Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Rome)
b. – Books copied and circulated
c. – Books recognized as bearing the marks of God were kept, those that weren’t
were tossed.
d. – Books were copied carefully.
e. – We have 15,000 manuscripts.
f. – We always copy from the Greek.
g. – NT is the most reliable book in history because of
1. the care in copying
2. the number of copies to compare
3. the closeness of the copies to the original.
But I want to encourage all of you to do the research you need to come to a
definitive conclusion about the two things spoken of in this book:
1. Is Jesus the Son of God?
2. Is the Bible reliable?
I hope the above passages will enlighten you with some facts.
D Remmei
