The Testimony, August 2005 313 Turning to fables What the Da Vinci Code is all about (1) Tony Benson Two-part article The publishing sensation of the last two years has been a thriller called The Da Vinci Code, which has as its background strange ideas about Jesus Christ and original Christianity. This two-part article shows that, despite the author s claim to have based his book on factually accurate material, it is full of errors, and presents a strange mishmash of religious ideas which have no connection with Bible truth. IN 2003 A NOVEL by an American thriller writer called Dan Brown was published. He called it The Da Vinci Code. It has proved to be a publishing phenomenon. According to the Sunday Times best-seller list of 22 May 2005, over 2.5 million copies of the paperback edition had been sold in the UK. Worldwide sales are apparently more like 25 million. Americans are flocking to Europe to visit the scenes where the book takes place, and an illustrated version of the novel has appeared picturing these scenes. A film is being made and will no doubt attract audiences of many millions. Attractive ideas But what does this matter to us? It matters because at the centre of the plot of The Da Vinci Code are strange ideas about Jesus Christ and the Bible which many find attractive in this age. Here is what one writer says about this book and the ideas on which it is based: Today, those who promise to reveal secrets about Jesus secrets long suppressed by the church and other religious institutions, secrets that may be scandalous or at least debunk traditional views of Jesus and early Christianity have an instant audience. Throw in a conspiracy theory and take an anti-establishment approach, and the audience is hooked... While many traditional Christians might be tempted to scoff at and dismiss such books as either mere fiction or the opinion of a few fringe scholars, this would be a serious mistake. We are facing a serious revolution regarding some of the long-held truths about Jesus, early Christianity and the Bible. 1 The author of this quotation is an orthodox Christian, and what he regards as long-held truths are not necessarily those held by us. Yet in opposing the sort of ideas put forward in The Da Vinci Code he, and others like him, are on the same side as us, just as in opposing evolution we are on the same side as many whose view of Christianity is not ours. There are some passages in the Apostle Paul s letters to Timothy which seem to read aptly regarding this tendency to be attracted by the ideas found in The Da Vinci Code: charge some that they teach no other doctrine, neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies (1 Tim. 1:3,4); [avoid] profane babblings and oppositions of the knowledge which is falsely so called (6:20, RV); For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables (2 Tim. 4:3,4). Paul is not, of course, writing of people today, but, as we shall see in Part 2, there is a closer connection between what he is writing about 1. Preface to The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci, Ben Witherington III, Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, ISBN 0-8308-3267-X. Witherington is Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, Kentucky, USA. He is co-author with Hershel Shanks, editor of Biblical Archaeology Review, of the book The Brother of Jesus, about the controversial find of an ossuary bearing the inscription, James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus, which has been dealt with several times in this magazine.
314 and the ideas found in The Da Vinci Code than we might think. The plot Before going any further, however, it would be as well to say what The Da Vinci Code is about. It begins with the murder of the curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris, who is the possessor of an important secret and who in his dying moments manages to leave some enigmatic clues to this secret. An American professor of religious symbology and a cryptographer from the Paris police (who happens to be the niece of the murdered man) get involved with trying to solve the mystery. The clues begin at what is perhaps the Louvre s most famous exhibit, Leonardo Da Vinci s painting of the Mona Lisa, hence the title of the book. The couple embark on a frantic chase to solve the mystery, while eluding both the Paris police, who suspect the professor of being the murderer, and the murderer himself, who is an agent of the secretive Roman Catholic organisation for lay people, Opus Dei, 2 which wants to suppress the secret and will stop at nothing to do so. During the chase they arrive at the mansion of a wealthy English historian with a particular interest in the subject of the secret, and he assists them by taking them by private plane and fast car to London. During this prolonged chase the code which reveals the secret is slowly unravelled and is finally revealed at a rather mysterious chapel at Rosslyn, near Edinburgh, the police having in the meantime called off the chase, having discovered who the real murderer is. The secret But what of this secret which is at the centre of the book? If Dan Brown had simply chosen to make it up out of his own imagination we should, of course, have no reason to deal with his book; but he has not done this. Instead he has made use of ideas which have been floating around for several decades and which he claims are true. The basic idea is that the New Testament is false, and that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and had children by her, descendants of whom are still alive today. Dan Brown has in fact got his ideas from a book entitled The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, first published in 1982 and written by three men, Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh. An updated version has recently been published, probably to cash in on The Da Vinci The Testimony, August 2005 Code phenomenon. None of these men is a scholar. In their book they claim to have discovered the existence of a secret society called the Priory of Sion, based in France, which has existed for many centuries and is dedicated to preserving this secret knowledge and the identity of those today who can trace their descent back to Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. This secret society has supposedly been headed by various prominent men such as Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton. This, of course, sounds wildly improbable, and one wonders whether there is some elaborate hoax here. There is, of course, much else involved, which there is no point in mentioning, except to explain the reference to the Holy Grail. This is supposedly the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, which was brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea and carefully preserved by his descendants. Stories about the Holy Grail did not emerge till the Middle Ages and are linked with legends about the semi-mythical Celtic King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table at the court of Camelot. The new version of the story is that the Holy Grail is in fact the female line running from Mary Magdalene in which the descent from Jesus is preserved, the Holy Blood of the title. The Priory of Sion supposedly has very ancient documents proving all this, and the actual bones of Mary Magdalene; and the organisation is allegedly dedicated to keeping them safe, ready to reveal to the world some day. In the meantime, it seems, the world is being gradually prepared for this revelation by the seeping out of this supposed secret. In The Da Vinci Code the murdered Louvre curator is the head of this secret organisation, and the descendants of Mary Magdalene are found at the mysterious Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, with the heroine of the story turning out to be part of the line herself. The book seems to end with an indication that the bones of Mary Magdalene and the documents themselves are in fact hidden at the Louvre. 2. Opus Dei really exists, being an organisation set up in 1928 for lay Roman Catholics. It has separate sections for men and women, and its 80,000 members across sixty countries are expected to dedicate themselves to promoting Roman Catholic principles in everyday life and work. Ruth Kelly, the current Secretary of State for Education in the British Government, is said to be a member.
The Testimony, August 2005 315 False claims to be historical As it happened I read The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail when it first came out (it was much hyped at the time) and wondered if it would have any impact. It seemed, however, to have sunk without trace, until Dan Brown came along and gave these ideas such a boost. Had he merely used them as the basis for an entertaining story then we would have no need to write of them, but unfortunately claims are made that the story is based upon long-concealed facts. There are three elements to this: 1 There is a page at the beginning of the book headed Fact which claims that the Priory of Sion is a real organisation with people like Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci having been members. He has the general statement: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. In fact there are numerous inaccuracies. In a television documentary about the book Brown apparently claimed to be a believer in the theories he uses in his book, having, he alleges, tried to disprove them. 2 Halfway through the novel the hero and heroine reach the house of the above-mentioned historian with an obsession about the Holy Grail. There follow several chapters in which the historian explains the supposed historical facts on which the story is based. By this device the impression is given that there is real historical fact involved, but this is far from being the truth. The professor who is the hero of the book adds other points. 3 The paperback edition of the book has four pages of extracts from favourable reviews of the book, including such statements as these: perfect for history buffs ; a compelling blend of history and pageturning suspense ; transmitting several doctorates worth of fascinating history and learned speculation ; extensive research on secret societies and symbology add intellectual depth ; enough medieval history to please any historian ; a collection of fascinating esoterica culled from 2,000 years of Western history ; massive amounts of historical and academic information. In fact the book contains many factual blunders and inaccuracies, and the supposed history at its The glass pyramid outside the Louvre in Paris. According to The Da Vinci Code the bones of Mary Magdalene are buried here. This, of course, has no foundation in fact. core is not recognised as history at all except by a small minority. Yet many readers of the book are likely to be deceived by all this acclaim into thinking there is really something of substance behind it all. 3 Errors exposed It is time to move on, however, and expose the errors contained in The Da Vinci Code. There are simple factual errors, showing that the claim that 3. Some scenes in the novel take place in Westminster Abbey. At the time when I was writing this article I read a brief paragraph in a newspaper saying that staff at the abbey have been issued with briefing notes about the factual errors to do with the abbey that are found in the book so that they can respond to enquiries from visitors. The abbey authorities have refused to allow scenes from the film of the book to be shot there because of these inaccuracies; Lincoln Cathedral is being used instead. JULIAN BARKWAY
316 the book is based on careful research is wrong. Jesus is said to be descended from the lines of King Solomon and King David as if they were two separate lines. Sheshach is said to occur repeatedly in Jeremiah as a code for Babylon, but it occurs only twice (25:26; 51:41), and it is stated that scholars have discovered that the same method of coding words occurs right through the Bible, which is completely unfounded. 4 Mary Magdalene is said to have been of the tribe of Benjamin, and the Star of David is said to have been adopted as a symbol by the ancient kings of Israel, neither of which are Biblical statements. These errors are incidental ones but they demonstrate Dan Brown s cavalier attitude to getting facts right. The more serious errors occur, however, when the characters in the book explain the truth about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, especially since this now-revealed secret is then presented as the basis for a new religion, or rather, a revival of what is said to be the original Christian religion. This original religion is said to have been suppressed by Constantine, who completely changed Christianity, a view which we, of course, have more sympathy with than do the traditional churches. The sort of changes which are put forward by the characters in The Da Vinci Code as having occurred at the time of Constantine are, however, not on the whole those which we point to. We will now look at assertions made in the book that are clearly wrong: 1 It is said that it was the Council of Nicea, called by Constantine in 325, that decided that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and only by a close vote. Before then the early Christians regarded him as a mere man. What the Council of Nicea in fact debated was whether Jesus Christ was a created being or an eternal part of the Godhead, and all except two of the delegates agreed on the latter, thus establishing the doctrine of the Trinity as a key belief of the Church. 2 The following statement is made about the Bible: Man created [the Bible] 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. The only sense in which the Bible has been the subject of additions is that it is a compilation of various writings given through a variety of authors by inspiration over many centuries. Once this process The Testimony, August 2005 finished at the end of the first century A.D. there have been no further revisions. The Dead Sea Scrolls show that the text of many Old Testament books has been accurately transmitted from ancient times. The abundant manuscripts, ancient versions and citations in early Christian writings of the New Testament books have established the reliability of the New Testament texts, far more reliable than any other ancient work. There have, of course, been countless translations of the original Hebrew and Greek Bible into other languages but only from the established texts. 3 Regarding the New Testament, the following statement appears: More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them. Note that Brown does not even seem to know that there are only four Gospels in the New Testament. There are possibly as many as fifty other gospels known from ancient Christian writings but little or no manuscript evidence for most of them. More importantly, there is no evidence that any of them were around anywhere near the time when the New Testament books were written, and scholars universally accept them as being the writings of heretical sects that arose in later centuries. 4 Later the previous statement is amplified: Because Constantine upgraded Jesus status almost four centuries after Jesus death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling his life as a mortal man... 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. This has no foundation in fact. According to The Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Intervarsity Press), the Canon of Scripture (the definitive list of books which make up the New Testament) was agreed at the Council of Carthage in 397, long after Constantine. Before that, for centuries there had been disputes over whether certain books should be included, but extensive quotations in the works of early 4. The coding method here is that the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet is substituted for the first, the last but one for the second, and so on through the alphabet.
The Testimony, August 2005 317 Christian writers show that the books as we know them were regarded as canonical from early times. In reality, since we cannot believe that God would have left human councils to decide what books make up His Word to man, the books to be included in the New Testament would surely have been authenticated as such by spirit-guided elders, with disputes only arising when the church started to go astray. 5 It is then stated: Fortunately for historians some of the Gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. And, of course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. The Dead Scrolls were actually found in the 1940s and have nothing to do with Christianity, not even mentioning Jesus Christ. One or two maverick scholars have tried to assert that parts of the scrolls refer to Christianity, but their ideas have not been accepted, and others say that some scrolls have been suppressed because they negate Christianity as presented in the Gospels, but there is no evidence for this. The Nag Hammadi find was a cache of Gnostic writings discovered in Egypt which include some of the apocryphal gospels referred to above, in whole or part. Having seen in this part that Brown s claims to have founded his book on fact are wrong, we will look in Part 2 at two aspects of this supposed rediscovered Christianity: the ancient Christian heresy of Gnosticism, and the great mother goddess religion. (To be concluded) Gideon and his three hundred The Book of Judges was not written to glorify the military exploits of men but to show how God used weak, fallible human beings to give victory to His people. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Gideon, where God expressly instructs Gideon to reduce his forces down to 300 men for the initial attack upon the enormous host of the Midianites and their allies: By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand (Judg. 7:7). The means by which this was achieved is one of the well-known stories of the Bible. The 300 men, divided into three companies, silently surrounded the Midianite camp in the depth of night. Together they blew their trumpets, broke the pitchers which concealed the light of their torches, and shouted, The sword of the LORD, and of Gideon (v. 20), causing widespread panic amongst the Midianite hosts. I was interested to find out recently that military experts have studied this incident and pointed out that in several respects the tactics employed by Gideon are acknowledged to be the best that could be used in the circumstances: 1 Three hundred men are reckoned to be about the maximum number that can be effectively controlled by one leader. 2 A force of three hundred men divides readily into three companies of a hundred men each, as in the case of Gideon and his force, giving a centre and two wings. 3 A carefully co-ordinated attack by a small force of picked men at night is the best possible tactic to use when a small army is faced by a large one. The tactics employed by Gideon have caused him to be praised by military experts as a general of supreme ability. However, according to the Biblical record the defeat of Midian was not due to the cleverness of one man, for the whole incident was under the control of God, Who directed Gideon what to do. We have here another example of the Bible as a book ahead of its time because it is the Word of God and not the word of man. Tony Benson Source: The Battles of Armageddon: Megiddo and the Jezreel Valley from the Bronze Age to the Nuclear Age, Eric Cline, University of Michigan Press, 2002.