Davinci Code

What did

The Da Vinci Code

by Dan Brown

get right?

1. Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute.

The first reference to her as such comes in a sermon by Pope Gregory the Great in AD 591. This error probably arose because she was confused with another woman mentioned in the gospels. All we know about Mary Magdalene’s past before she met Jesus is that she was tormented by seven demons (Luke 8:2).

2. Alternate understandings of Jesus and His message did arise. Second and third century Gnostics (from gnosis the Greek word for knowledge) claimed to possess secret knowledge about Christ, knowledge that did not square with the books of the New Testament.

THAT IS ABOUT IT!!

The number of errors Dan Brown has made is truly astounding. I am not referring to matters of interpretation over which well-informed people may honestly disagree. Many statements in The Da Vinci Code are contrary to well-established historical facts. This tract explores a few of the more egregious ones.

1^st Error: The so-called “Lost Scriptures” are more credible than the New Testament.

Brown asserts that the Nag Hammadi papyri and the Dead Sea Scrolls were the “earliest Christian records” (Code, p. 245). The facts are these:

¨ The Dead Sea Scrolls (discovered 1946 through 1956 near the Dead Sea in Israel) were not Christian documents at all. They do not even mention Jesus. They formed the library of a pre-Christian Jewish sect at Qumran that probably existed up until the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. There is no solid evidence that Jesus was ever connected to the sect.

¨ The Nag Hammadi documents (discovered 1945 in Egypt) are a library of Gnostic texts. The Encyclopedia Britannica says that they were written in the second or third century after Christ.

¨ Bart Ehrman’s Lost Scriptures: Books that Did not Make It into the New Testament provides complete texts or lengthy selections from 42 so-called “Lost Scriptures.” With only a couple of exceptions, Ehrman places all these documents in the second, third or fourth centuries after Christ. The few earlier exceptions do not contain the strange teachings on which Dan Brown bases his story.

¨ By contrast, the New Testament documents were written before AD 100, and the letters of Paul were written before AD 70. While the dates of some New Testament books have been disputed, the four gospels and Paul’s major letters were so widely copied and quoted shortly after AD 100 that they must have been in existence well before AD 100.

¨ In the second century, when Gnostic heresies began to creep into the church, bishops in the larger cities pointed out that their congregations had been founded by the apostles and that there had been a clear continuity of teaching between the time of the apostles and their own time. The Gnostic teachers were not able to make or substantiate similar claims.

¨ Conclusion: There is no reason to trust documents that were first composed one or two hundred years after Jesus, over the New Testament reports of His teaching which were written during the lifetime of those who knew him.

2^nd Error: The church covered up the marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene because it was contrary to the doctrine of His deity.

¨ There is no solid evidence that Jesus was married. Several women traveled with Jesus and his disciples. Some, like Mary Magdalene, had been healed by Him. Others, who were wealthy, supported His ministry (Luke 8:1-3). Nothing sets the Magdalene apart from the others until after the resurrection of Christ, when He appeared first of all to her (John 20:11-18).

¨ Brown asserts that Jesus must have been married because “according to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned” (Code, 245). Brown is either ignorant or deliberately lying. As a matter of fact, it was not unusual for a Jewish man to remain single if his ministry demanded it. Jesus taught that some men should remain single (Matthew 19:10-12). Paul and Barnabas were also unmarried (1 Corinthians 9:5-6). According to the first-century Jewish author Josephus, the Essenes (a Jewish sect) were unmarried (Jewish War ii.8.2). Philo, a Jewish contemporary of Jesus, wrote that the freedom of the Essenes from marriage and its entanglements caused them to be highly regarded (Hypothetica 11:14-17). So Jesus did not need to be married in first century Jewish society.

¨ The only evidence Brown offers for the marriage of Jesus comes from The Gospel of Philip (3^rd century? AD). Brown’s interpretation of this isolated text includes several factual errors, but instead of refuting them I pass on to my main point.

¨ It would not matter if Jesus had been married!! The Bible teaches that Jesus was both God and Man. His body had all of the normal human organs, and He could easily have married and fathered several children without compromising His deity one bit. The Bible presents marriage in a very positive light. The Song of Solomon is filled with erotic imagery, showing God’s approval of marital relations. 1 Timothy 4:1 condemns those who forbid marriage, and Hebrews 13:4 says that “marriage is to be held in honor among all.” Sexual union is a picture of the close relationship between Christ and His people (Ephesians 5:22-33). So the early church had no reason to cover up the marriage of Jesus in order to protect His holiness or His deity. Negative attitudes toward sex did not begin to infiltrate the church until over a hundred years after the death of Christ. By then the major books of the New Testament were too well known to have been deliberately altered in order to hush up His marriage. Jesus knew He was headed for the cross, and that is the reason He chose not to marry.

3^rd Error: Jesus was never considered to be divine until after the 4^th century Council of Nicea in AD 325 (Code, 233).

¨ Many passages in the New Testament teach that Christ is divine, for example:

q In the beginning was the Word, and the word with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1-2, 14).

q Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed (John 20:28-29).

q For in Him [Jesus] all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form (Colossians 2:9).

¨ Several copies of the New Testament written in the century before Nicea survive, so we know that the council did not tamper with the text.

¨ Many books written before the 4^th century, both by orthodox Christians and by their Gnostic adversaries, speak of Christ either as God or at least as more than human. Some Gnostics even denied that Christ had a human body. Here, for example are two quotations from the Gnostic work, The Acts of John (late 2^nd century?):

q John stretched out his hands and prayed . . . “Glory be to you, my Jesus, the only God of truth” (chp. 43).

q Sometimes when I meant to touch him, I met a material and solid body; and at other times again when I felt him, the substance was immaterial and bodiless and as if it were not existing at all" (chp. 93).

The very books that Dan Brown values above the New Testament speak often of the deity of Christ.

¨ Even pagans knew that Christians regarded Christ as divine. About AD 110 a Roman governor named Pliny the Younger wrote to Emperor Trajan. In his letter, he described what he had been able to learn about Christians. He noted that “They sing a hymn to Christ as to a god.”

¨ Conclusion: The Council of Nicea was not called to determine whether Christ is divine, but rather what kind of divinity to ascribe to Him. Some were contending that Christ was like God--a super-angel, perhaps--but not equal with the Father. The orthodox party, resting its case on the earliest Christian documents, rightly concluded that He is fully God, equal in power and glory with the Father.

4^th Error: Jesus, as described in Gnostic writings, exalted the “divine feminine.”

Gnostics were quite uneven in their treatment of women. Some promoted free love; others insisted on celibacy even for married people. In some texts Mary Magdalene is exalted above the other apostles, but according to the 2^nd century Coptic Gospel of Thomas, an early Gnostic text found in the Nag Hammadi Library: Simon Peter said to them, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven” (saying 114). Brown’s agenda is to use a distorted picture of Jesus to encourage goddess worship and ritualistic sex, but even the Gnostic writings he values do not uniformly support his claims.

References: Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament & Darrell L. Bock, Breaking the Da Vinci Code.

Grace Community Church

1290 Minesite Rd., Allentown, PA.

610-398-9250