“Almost everybody I know is reading The Da Vinci Code and talking about it. Either that or they’ve seen the movie. From what little I can gather, it sounds like some whole new interpretation about who Jesus really was. Exactly what is the Da Vinci Code and why do Christians seem so concerned about this book?”

 

The Da Vinci Code is a very well written novel, but unfortunately the author claims that his novel is based on sound historical research. Artistically, I give it a B+. As for the accuracy of the beliefs?  One could defend unicorns more easily.

 

I’m not going to discuss the fictitious plot of the novel, but rather the background information the author claims is accurate. The author is Dan Brown. He is not an historian, nor does he claim to be, but he does claim to have done his homework.

 

Da Vinci, of course, stands for none other than Leonardo Da Vinci, the famous painter who supposedly belonged to a secret society called Priory Of Sion. According to Brown, this society has labored since the time of Christ to protect itself from the Catholic Church which was trying to bury their big secret. Clues to unlocking this secret are found in some of Da Vinci’s paintings such as The Mona Lisa or The Last Supper. What is the big secret? Jesus Christ got married! He married none other than Mary Magdalene, one of his female followers. They had a daughter who was taken away and hidden, and whose family survives to this day. In fact, Mary Magdalene is actually the Holy Grail you always hear about. Got that? The Holy Grail is not a cup, but rather, a symbol for the holy bride of Jesus.

 

Now, some might freak out at the idea of the son of God being married, but it gets even better. The society Priory of Sion is also guarding the fact that Jesus wanted his wife Mary to be the head of the church. They teach that Jesus was not God, that his deity was invented by Fourth Century  Christians. In fact, the church was commanded to deify Jesus by the first Christian Emperor, Constantine.  The “secret information passed down by Jesus’ true followers” teaches that we should worship many gods and goddesses. They particularly emphasize goddess worship, and these goddesses are often worshiped in the same manner as some of the ancient cultic rituals, through communal sex as a high point of the religious service.

 

They claim that the Catholic church tried to suppress the truth about Mary Magdalene being the head of the church, because the church was run by a male dominated society.  For this reason, teachings of The Da Vinci Code may sound appealing to some radical feminists.

 

As ancient sources,  Dan Brown sites(among other documents) a scroll rejected by the early church entitled The Gospel of Mary.

 

 

Response

 

Even though he’s only writing a novel, Dan Brown, claims that this secret society, Priory Of Sion, really exists, that their practices and rituals really exist, that all documents referred to are real, etc.  For the sake of time, let’s stipulate this.  All we’ve proven is that a genuine society honestly believes Jesus got married. This does not prove that what they believe is actually true. To evaluate such a claim, we must go to the source of their beliefs, ancient history.

 

 

1) There is an ancient document called The Gospel of Mary which supposedly hints at this relationship Jesus had with Mary Magdalene.  Now, if the church really thought that Mary wrote the Gospel of Mary, or Thomas wrote the Gospel of Thomas or Philip wrote The Gospel of Philip, they would have included them in the New Testament canon, for they included everything truly written by apostles or other close companions of Jesus. But in those days, Christianity had become so popular, it was common for anyone wanting to fabricate a document to write the name of an apostle (or other well known figure) on it. The church was wiser than this and they didn’t blindly accept any document with a famous person’s name scribbled on the top.

 

 A copy of The Gospel of Mary and many of these other extra biblical gospels was discovered in Egypt in the year 1945 as part of  a whole collection of Gnostic writings.

 

Gnosticism was an early heresy refuted by the early church. Gnosticism taught that Jesus did not resurrect from the dead (at least not physically) and that God did not create the earth. The earth was created by lower beings called Aeons. Gnosticism also taught that anything physical or material was evil. Only the spiritual and immaterial was good. This makes the Priory Of Sion’s high view of communal sex a bit contradictory because most ancient Gnostics tended to frown upon sexuality. And when they did  engage in sex for procreation purposes, they still believed it was something negative.  Yet these same Gnostic documents are appealed to as evidence of the priory’s claims about Jesus and Mary.

 

Gnostic documents date many years after the books of the New Testament. The New Testament was completed by the end of the first century. The Gnostic gospels date no earlier than the mid to late second century.

 

 

2) The Bible is not anti- woman or anti “woman in leadership”. We don’t need alternative scriptures to find a higher view of women. In Gal 3,  Paul tells us that as far as status in the church is concerned, there is “neither male nor female” but all are one in Christ.

 

In fact, Mary Magdalene, herself is portrayed very positively in the New Testament. She is the first to encounter the resurrected Christ and report the meeting to Jesus’ male disciples, who at first, did not believe her (John 20:10-20, Luke 20:9-12).  Although the Bible is not a chauvinistic book, it was written in a chauvinistic culture. Reporting that a woman had been the first to witness the resurrection, would not have been the shrewdest way to commit fraud and generate a legend. This says something about the integrity of the gospel writers.

 

Let me also say a word here about the Catholic Church. Although I am not a Catholic myself, I at least want to defend the fact that Catholics over the ages had no incentive to oppress positive views of women.  If they had such an anti-female agenda, why did they not omit these resurrection passages about Mary and Jesus?  And of course, there’s the other Mary, the mother of Jesus. Catholics pray to the Virgin Mary. Now I don’t believe in praying to Mary, but they do and this practice hardly shows a low view of women.

 

3) Brown claims Emperor Constantine demanded that Jesus be deified. As a matter of fact, Christians were calling Jesus, God all the way back to the first century when the New Testament was written. This same New Testament reports Jesus Himself making the claim.

 

John 14:9-11

9 Jesus answered: "Don't you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, `Show us the Father'? Don't you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.  Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me;

 

See also (John 1:1, John 8:58)

 

True, some Christians still argued about the nature of Jesus, because many of those New Testament verses were hard to fathom. And so, the church did not officially ratify this belief until the Council of Nicea,(325AD) and yes, this counsel was sponsored by Constantine. But all Constantine said was, “Settle this question about whether or not Jesus is God. I don’t care how you settle it, just settle it.”

 

Brown also claims that Constantine decided which books would make it into the New Testament cannon. Allow me to make the obvious, obvious. Constantine was dead when they chose which books would go into the New Testament cannon.  This council (Council of Carthage) was held in 390AD. Constantine died in 337AD. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math.   

 

Conclusion

 

We all get fascinated with secrets and mysteries. I submit that the real Jesus in the real scriptures can satiate our appetite for holding life in awe. The God of the universe loves you so much that He took the form of a man and visited our world. He died on the cross for our selfish natures. If you had been the only person alive, He would have come down and died just for you. That’s how much He loves you.  Shortly after His execution, He rose from the dead so that we too could rise from the dead someday and live forever in paradise. What could be more awesome than that?  And He didn’t need a code to tell us about it.

 

 

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE

New International Version  NIV

Copyright ©  1973, 1979, 1984 by International Bible Society

Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.

All rights reserved.

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So What If He's A Mormon? Posted at 4:05:11 AM on Sunday, December 16, 2007

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Oh, That Horrible Christianity!

Posted at 4:53:43 AM on Thursday, December 13, 2007

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