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The Da Vinci Code
by novelist Dan Brown was on the
New York
Times
hardcover
fiction
best-seller list for more
than two years. It is a fast paced murder mystery shrouded in a conspiracy
theory, a novelistic thriller, an easy read with short chapters, the kind of
book you read when you want to waste time.
What’s
wrong with The Da Vinci
Code?
Many people are reading
author Dan Brown’s
latest
novel,
a work of
fiction,
as if it accurately
portrayed the facts about
Christ, the New Testament, the Church and Christian history. Nothing could be
further from the truth. But sadly, like one of my son’s roommates at Boston
College,
many
people reading
The Da
Vinci Code
come
away from the book with
their faith in Christ and the Church shaken.
The
definition of
fiction
according to the
American
Heritage Dictionary:
An imaginative
pretense. 2. A lie. 3. A
literary work, such as a novel, whose content is produced by the imagination and
is not necessarily based on fact. The confusion about this book begins on the
opening page where the author, prior to actually beginning his story, states
that: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals
in this novel are accurate.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact,
there is so much that is historically false in this book that it’s hard to know
where to begin. One of the main characters in the book is an Englishman named
Sir Leigh Teabing who is actually the bad guy, the mysterious “Teacher”
responsible for ordering the murder of the curator of the Louvre with which the
book opens. But Mr. Brown never lets the fast paced action of the book stand in
the way of a good lecture and beginning with chapter 55, that’s exactly what the
Teabing character delivers. Let’s begin by looking at some of the things
that are
said there about the Bible and the 1st
Ecumenical Council.
The Lord Jesus, the
Bible and the
1st Ecumenical Council
according to
The Da Vinci Code
“The Bible did not arrive
by fax from heaven” declares Teabing. “The Bible is a product of man, my dear.
Not of God. The Bible did not magically fall from the clouds. The Bible, as we
know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. In
325 AD, he decided to unify Rome under a single religion: Christianity.
Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian
tradition and held a
famous gathering known as the Council of Nicea. 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. Jesus’ establishment as the Son of God was
officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicea. A relatively close
vote at that. Nonetheless, establishing Christ’s divinity was critical to the
further unification of the Roman Empire and to the new Vatican power base.
Constantine commissioned and financed a new
Bible, which omitted
those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels
that made him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and
burned.”
Let’s look at several of
these assertions.
First:
“The Bible
as we know it today was collated
by…Constantine the Great
[who] commissioned and financed a new Bible.” This leaves the impression that
Constantine determined which books would constitute the New Testament. This is
totally and completely false. As a matter of historical fact, although there was
a great deal of consensus among the Churches as to what constituted the
New Testament well before the Council of Nicea, the first person to list the 27
books that all Christians today accept as the New Testament was not Constantine
the Great but Athanasius the Great, the bishop and patriarch of Alexandria in
Egypt, in a circular letter to all the Churches
in Egypt written in 367AD, 42 years after the 1st
Ecumenical Council. It
was not Constantine who determined the canon of the New Testament as part of a
political power play but the Church, in the persons of its bishops and teachers.
Second:
We would
agree that the New Testament
“did not arrive by fax
from heaven.” The books of the New Testament were written by the apostles in
order to get the story about Jesus straight. This is made clear, for example, in
the opening verses of the Gospel of Luke 1: 1-4, where Luke, a friend and
disciple of the apostle Paul, states that he wrote his gospel as “an orderly
account” of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus after
having “carefully studied” and consulting “eyewitnesses.” Virtually all scholars
agree that Luke’s gospel was written sometime between 80 and 90 AD
at the
latest.
Some scholars theorize that his
gospel was written even
earlier. Mark’s gospel was certainly written earlier, no later than 65AD,
probably in Rome, within only a few years of the execution of Peter and Paul
during the persecution of Christians under Nero.
All of the Gospels proclaim that Jesus was
not
“a mortal prophet” and
the disciples understood that Jesus was far more than just a man. When the
disciples are asked by Jesus, “Who do you say that I am?” the apostle Peter
responds: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” (Matthew 16:16).
Nathaniel, another one of the 12 apostles, declares to Jesus, “Rabbi, you are
the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:49). After Jesus calms a
storm and walks on water, the Gospel of Matthew records that the disciples
“exclaimed: Truly you are the Son of God!” (Matthew14:33). In fact, Jesus is
called “the Son of God” more than fifty times in the books of the New Testament!
It would certainly be a surprise to the apostles (including Paul) to learn that
they did not proclaim Jesus to be the Son of God and that
this had to wait until the 1st Ecumenical Council.
It is therefore
utterly false to assert that “Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal
prophet….a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless” prior to the Council
of Nicea. Just
the
opposite is true: the 1st Ecumenical Council
was held in Nicea to
uphold the New Testament teaching that Jesus is the Word and Son of God against
the false teaching of an Egyptian man named Arius, a priest who taught that
Jesus was more than a man but less than God – a kind of super angel. Athanasius,
the future patriarch of Alexandria,
attended
the 1st Ecumenical Council as a young
deacon. And, by the way,
the vote was not “relatively close” at all. Of the 318 bishops who attended, all
but 2 sided with the New Testament and the apostles and not Arius.
Third:
In the 4th
century, during the reign of Constantine, there was no such thing as “the new
Vatican power base.” This is little more than an
anti-Roman Catholic slur,
one of many contained throughout the book. In fact, there was no such thing as
the Vatican as we understand it today.
For Mr.
Brown, the author of
The Da
Vinci Code,
the only Church is the
Roman Catholic Church
and he
reads back into the 4th century the medieval
rise and development of
the papacy in the West. This is anachronistic. The Vatican, as we understand it
today, is the result of the fall of the Roman Empire in
western Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries, the
increasing civil
responsibilities of the papacy during the early Middle Ages, the emergence of
the papal states and a number of other historical processes stretching over many
centuries, long after Constantine’s death. And finally, the modern
Vatican
state is a creation of the 19th century and
the rise of Italian
nationalism.
The Lord
Jesus and Mary Magdalene
Perhaps the most
outrageous and ludicrous assertion made in this novel is the character of Sir
Leigh Teabing’s statement that “the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part
of the historical record.” Two reasons are then given for this amazing
assertion. First, according to Robert Langdon, the novel’s main character,
“Because Jesus was a Jew and the social decorum during that time virtually
forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was
condemned.” Second, Teabing insists that the marriage of Jesus and Mary
Magdalene is mentioned specifically in
two
ancient documents,
The
Gospel of Philip
and
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene,
which he calls,
together with the Dead
Sea Scrolls, “the earliest Christian records.” There is not one shred of
evidence accepted by any credible historian stating that Jesus was married to
Mary Magdalene.
First, while it is true
that “Jewish custom” encouraged marriage, it was not at all unheard of for Jews
to practice celibacy. Perhaps the two most famous cases are Jeremiah, the Old
Testament
prophet of the 7th century B.C. who
abstained from marriage
as a sign to the Jewish people that the end of the kingdom of Judah was near
(Jeremiah 16:1-9); and the Qumran community, a proto-monastic sect within
Judaism at the time of Jesus responsible for producing and probably preserving
the Dead Sea Scrolls so often
mentioned
in
The Da Vinci Code
as part of
the
“earliest Christian
records.” Actually, the Dead Sea Scrolls, initially discovered in 1947, contain
no “Christian records” whatsoever because they are the products of an ancient
Jewish community. Rather, they contain – among other things – some of the oldest
known manuscripts of the Old Testament. Ironically, the Dead Sea Scrolls were
produced by a community of male Jewish celibates, precisely the kind of people
Langdon asserts couldn’t have existed within Judaism at the time of Jesus.
Second, both
The
Gospel of Philip
and
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
are
commonly called
“gnostic” gospels by New
Testament scholars and historians today. They are pseudonymous works notoriously
unreliable as historical documents and in fact contain no historical outline of
events in the life of Christ whatsoever, in stark contrast to the canonical New
Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that clearly speak in
historical terms of the birth, baptism, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection
of Christ. Gnosticism is an umbrella term that modern scholars use to describe a
number of religious movements in the ancient Roman world, many of which were not
at all related to Christianity, all of which had several common themes: that
members of the various Gnostic sects had a secret knowledge not available to
others; that there were a series of lesser mediating divinities sometimes called
Archons, sometimes called Aeons; and a dualistic outlook, an antithesis between
matter and spirit, body and soul and a hatred of the physical world that was
often believed to have been created not by God but by a lesser, evil demigod to
imprison the souls of human beings. None of these beliefs are Christian.
To take only one example from
The Da
Vinci Code,
The Gospel of Philip
cited by
Teabing as
proof that Jesus and Mary
Magdalene were married
was
produced at the end of the 3rd century
AD, almost two hundred
years after the Gospel of John, the last of the four New Testament gospels to be
written. It is hardly part of “the earliest Christian records.” Scholars today
agree that it was produced within circles faithful to the teaching of a man
named Valentinus, an Egyptian gnostic teacher who taught in Rome between 135 and
168AD and who is one of the few gnostic teachers whose subsequent disciples -
Ptolemaeus and Markus - and theological views we know anything about.
Their Christian
contemporaries in the ancient world, like St. Irenaeus, the bishop of the city
of
Lyons in
what was then the Roman province of
Gaul but is today France,
wrote a series of books refuting the teachings of Valentinus, his disciples and
other gnostic teachers, as well. These books,
like
The Gospel of Philip,
have survived to this
day and I, as a
seminarian, had to read both these Gnostic documents and the response to these
documents by various bishops and teachers of the Church like Irenaeus and
Clement of Alexandria.
Paganism
and the Days of the Week
“Even Christianity’s
weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans,” the Teabing character declares.
“Originally,” Langdon adds, “Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of
Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration of
the sun. To this day, most churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning with no
idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun god’s
weekly tribute –
Sunday.”
Nothing could be further
from the truth. As a matter of pure and simple fact, the New Testament records
quite clearly that Christians gathered for worship on the day of Christ’s
resurrection
from the
dead, the day
after
the Sabbath the Sabbath
(Mark 16:2) or the Lord’s Day (“Kyriake” in the original Greek) as it is
described in Revelation 1:10. This ancient practice is also referred to in
Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 16:2. Furthermore, a number of post-New Testament
writers like St. Ignatius of Antioch (executed in 115AD) and St. Justin the
Martyr (executed in 155AD) to name only two, confirm the practice of Christians
gathering for worship on Sunday.
Constantine “shifted” nothing. All that Constantine
did in the year 321AD was
grant legal status as a holiday within the Empire to a centuries-old apostolic
practice of the Church. But we also need to look at the question of language. It
is true, as the Langdon character asserts, that Sunday is indeed the “Day of the
Sun” in English. And Saturday, by the way, is “Saturn’s
Day” in English and
not
the Jewish Sabbath.
Thursday is “Thor’s Day.”
It is true that the names for the days of the week in modern English have all
been adapted from ancient mythologies. But in Greek, things are very different.
Only three days have names in Greek: Paraskevi, the Day of Preparation for the
Sabbath; Savvato, the Sabbath day; and Kyriake, the Lord’s Day. After the Lord’s
Day, the days of the week are merely numbered: Devtera, the Second Day (Monday);
Treetee, the Third Day (Tuesday) and so on. In the Greek of the New Testament as
well as in modern Greek to this day, there is no confusion regarding the
Judeo-Christian origins of the names for the days of the week.
The Name
of God: YHWH
“The
Jewish tetragramaton YHWH – the sacred
name of God – derived
from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the
pre-Hebraic name for Havah.” This is completely false! As any first year
seminary student can tell you, Jehovah is actually
a 16th century rendering for the King James Version
of the Hebrew YHWH using
the vowels for the word “Adonai” or “Lord,” the word which was read by devout
Jews whenever they came across God’s name in the text of the Old Testament
because they felt the actual name of God was too awesome to be pronounced by
human lips.
Witch
Hunts
“During 300 years of
witch hunts the Church burned at the stake an astounding 5,000,000 women”
Langdon, the Harvard professor, says to his French love interest, Sophie. In
fact, even non-Christian historians now agree that the number of people – both
men and women – executed between 1400-1800 for suspected witchcraft was
somewhere between 30,000 to 50,000. Modern scholars suggest that perhaps 100,000
such trials were held between 1450 and 1750, with somewhere between 30,000 to
50,000 executions, of which 25% - 7,500 to 12,500 – were men. It is also clear
that despite the involvement of Church authorities, the vast majority of those
condemned as witches were, in fact, condemned by local secular courts. Of
course, here, as throughout the book, whenever Mr. Brown uses the word “church”
he is always referring to the Roman Catholic Church and this book contains a
clear anti-Roman Catholic bias. But it is a simple fact that many witch-hunts
took place in Protestant countries like England and her colonies (for example,
one need only recall the infamous witch trials in
Salem, MA).
Interestingly enough, in the Orthodox
Church, there never
developed an Office of the Inquisition as in the Roman Catholic Church; nor were
there ever any witch-hunts or trials.
A
Conspiracy?
“Everyone loves a
conspiracy,” thinks Langdon
and
indeed, this is perhaps one reason why
The
Da Vinci Code
fascinates
so many people and still dominates
The New
York Times
bestseller
list.
Brown’s conspirators in
this two millennia long cover-up include the Roman Catholic Church, the Knights
Templar, Opus Dei (a Roman Catholic
organization that in fact does
not
have monks
nor do its members wear a
monastic habit of any kind, much less go around murdering people) the Masons,
Interpol and a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, that is an actual
organization officially registered with the French government in 1956 that most
likely originated after WW II and first came to public notice in 1962. So much
for being a “secret” society! With the exception of French film maker Jean
Cocteau, its illustrious list of Grand Masters as presented in the novel –
Leonardo, Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo – is simply not credible and no historian
takes such claims seriously.
The
Relics of Mary Magdalene
But perhaps the most
fantastic claim of all is that the Holy Grail of Arthurian legend and
popular
movies like
Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade
is not the
chalice that Christ drank from
at the Last Supper but
Mary Magdalene herself and a tomb that contains her remains. The main character
in the novel, Robert Langdon, cracks the mysterious code left behind by Sauniere,
the murdered curator of the Louvre and discovers that the bones of Mary
Magdalene are buried in the Louvre. Where are the relics of Mary Magdalene
today? Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians know that they are certainly not
buried in the Louvre! According to the historical tradition of the Church, Mary
Magdalene died in the city of
Ephesus
and was buried there. Her body, an
object of veneration by
Christians, was transferred
to
Constantinople in the 9th century by the
Byzantine emperor Leo the
Wise, an event that is still commemorated on our liturgical calendar
each year
on May 4th. Following the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, most
of
her relics were carried
back to Rome and placed under the altar in the Lateran Palace (the papal
chapel). Some of her relics are located in Vezelay, a small town near Marseilles
in France, and are housed in St. Maximin’s Basilica. Her arm is kept at the
Monastery of Simonos Petra on Mt. Athos.
To conclude:
The Da Vinci Code
is a fast
paced
but poorly written murder
mystery full of ridiculous errors of fact. It is, after all, a work of fiction.
Whatever the claims concerning his research in preparation for writing this
novel, the simple fact is that author Dan Brown knows little about Leonardo,
little about art and virtually nothing about Jesus, the Bible and Christian
history.
Source:
Ascension Cathedral
