U.S. News

Special Section

The Da Vinci Code: A Biblical Response

Da Vinci Code: Dull to Critics, a Challenge to Christians

Critics Pan Da Vinci Code

CBN News USNews

culture

The Da Vinci Code: Truth Behind the Lies

By Paul Strand
CBN News

CBN News -- HOLLYWOOD, California - Now that The Da Vinci Code has opened, millions of people around you may suddenly be wondering if everything the church has told them is based on a lie.

CBN News talked to some of Christianity's leading scholars about the answers you can give on why your faith is built on solid facts.

"Seek the Truth" is the movie's motto. And the book starts out saying, “FACT: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

But then it goes on to make the most outrageous claims about Christianity based on these supposed facts.

"It goes right to the core of Christianity: was Jesus Christ the Son of God or not?" said Christian author Lee Strobel.

The clever presentation of twisted facts makes many people doubt the faith. Strobel saw this up-close and quite painfully after he had been wooing a famous Muslim-American towards accepting Christ.

"He's read this book called The Da Vinci Code, and he said, 'This has confirmed all my worst suspicions about Christianity,' Strobel said, “And all of a sudden he wasn't interested anymore in investigating the claims of Christianity."

The story's boldest charge -- that for two millennia now the church has conspired to hide the fact that, for the first three centuries of Christianity, Jesus' followers just considered him a mortal prophet – and that it wasn't until 325 A.D. that the emperor Constantine called together the Council of Nicea with the express purpose of suddenly declaring Jesus divine.

But Gregory Koukl of the organization 'Stand to Reason' says all the evidence shows that Christians considered Jesus the divine Son of God from the beginning.

"The early Christians, from Ignatius at the beginning of the second century on, all defended the divinity of Christ,” Koukl said. “Now, if this idea was introduced at the Council of Nicea, how is it that early Christians in their extant writings that we possess now -- you can Google them up and find them on the Internet -- how is it that, to a person, they all defended the divinity of Christ, if they didn't hold this view?"

Da Vinci Code creator Dan Brown also claims that Constantine tossed out some 80 gospels about Jesus, and then handpicked the other books of the present-day Bible because they deified Jesus.

But that's far from the truth.

William Edgar is a professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. Edgar said, "The gospels that were rivals had long been dismissed as having no light to shine whatsoever on the New Testament events. They were rival gospels because they had a very different theology, so the church never really recognized them."

The book and movie claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and their descendants formed one line of the kings of France.
New Testament studies professor Darrell Bock has written Breaking the Da Vinci Code. He said Brown depends on two murky passages from two rejected gospels to come up with Jesus' marriage.

“[According to these rejected gospels], ‘Jesus loved Mary more than He loved the 12,' and out of that, the inference comes that He was married to Mary Magdalene. One of them has a reference to her being His companion, but that term can mean everything from a spouse to a spiritual sister," Bock said.

Josh McDowell is one of Christendom's leading apologists and author of The Da Vinci Code: A Quest for Answers.

"There is not a wisp of evidence anywhere that Jesus Christ was married,” McDowell said, “but there's an abundance of evidence that he wasn't."

The Da Vinci Code states that Jesus intended to make Mary the leader of his new religion, but a sexist church hid that truth and then slaughtered anyone who tried to uncover it.

Brown and the film claim that a secret group created in 1099, called the Priory of Sion protected Jesus' descendants from a wrathful Catholic Church, and secret members of Priory, like Leonardo Da Vinci, hid clues in their art to lead people to the supposed truth about Jesus, Mary, and their descendants.

Strobel went to France with a film crew to investigate these claims. "I have in my hand the actual filing with the French government to create this organization the Priory of Sion, and it is dated May 7, 1956 -- not 1099,” Strobel explained. “And it's signed by a guy named Pierre Plantard as the secretary general of this organization. And Pierre Plantard was a convicted con man, who did time for counterfeiting and fraud."

So Jesus wasn't divine, he was married, he had children, and the church has been lying about and killing people to cover this up for the last 2,000 years? Well, what else did The Da Vinci Code get wrong?

Brown couldn't even get the little details right.

Strobel said, "To call the book The Da Vinci Code -- nobody would call Leonardo 'da Vinci.' You don't call him 'da Vinci' -- that means 'from the town of Vinci.' His name is Leonardo. Art historians refer to him as 'Leonardo,' not 'da Vinci.'"

In his book, Brown said the Council of Nicea’s vote to make Christ divine was a perilously close vote. Koukl points out the vote was not to suddenly make Christ divine, but to affirm the centuries-old belief in his divinity, and it wasn't a close vote at all.

"The fact is, we know what the vote was,” Koukl said. “It was 316 to two."

Brown also claims that Mary Magdalene's bones are buried beneath the Louvre pyramid. "And he adds this bit of conspiracy by saying that if you count up the number of panes of glass on this pyramid, there are 666,” Strobel said. “Like, 'ooh, Satan's number, this is a big conspiracy.' Well, if you go over there and you investigate it, what you find out is there are 673 panes of glass."

But Brown and the movie sound so confident in their claims, it can rock the faith of those who aren't educated in the facts.

Edgar said, "We have a gullible culture and a gullible church. One of the reasons is that we are simply biblically illiterate."
"Why would you want to reward Hollywood for producing anti-Christian propaganda?" Strobel questioned.

He thinks that few believers should lay their money down to see The Da Vinci Code.

"I think frankly, the only Christians who should go this movie are Christians who have, number one, done their homework so they cannot be susceptible to the lies of the movie,” Strobel said, “number two, their motivation is to reach out evangelistically to neighbors and family members who are going to go to the movie anyway."

Still, if you're armed with the truth- the real truth- Strobel and others say, engage in this fight that the film and book have begun.

McDowell said, "We better be ready to give an answer for those who ask you for the hope that you have in you: 'Why do you believe the Bible is true, why do you believe Christ was the son of God, why do you believe Christ wasn't married?'...we better be ready."

"'Because it's going to be very easy to talk about Jesus as a result of this book and this movie, it's good to be familiar with that which you're criticizing," Bock said.

"We have history on our side,” Strobel said. “There's nothing for us to be afraid of with The Da Vinci Code. So, let's seize this opportunity, take advantage of the people's spiritual curiosity, and help bring them the real gospel about Jesus."

Some say that Sony Pictures' The Da Vinci Code is Satan's answer to The Passion of the Christ. But others see this as a divine opportunity to talk about Jesus and set the record straight.

Translate Page