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.
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:
1. 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 FIRST ECUMENICAL COUNCIL
ACCORDING TO "The DaVinci 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."
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 367 AD, 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 65 AD, 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!" (Matthew 14:33). 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.
JESUS & MARY MAGDELENE
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
is 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. 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. He was an Egyptian gnostic
teacher who taught in Rome between 135 and 168 AD and who
is one of the few gnostic teachers whose theological views
and subsequent disciples, i.e. Ptolemaeus and Markus, that
we know anything about. Their Christian contemporaries in
the ancient world, like St. Irenaeus, (the bishop of the city
of Lyons) 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.
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 (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 115 AD) and St. Justin the Martyr (executed
in 155 AD) 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" 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: Deutera, the Second Day (Monday);
Trete, 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.
YHWH
The DaVinci Code claims: "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. In Holy Scripture, this is the Divine Name which is
revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai when he asks for the name
of the One Who was speaking to him from the burning bush --
"I AM" is the English translation of the Hebrew
"YHWH."
Then Moses said to God, "If I come to the people of Israel
and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,'
and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"
God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM." And he said,
"Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me
to you.'" God also said to Moses, "Say this to the
people of Israel, 'The LORD, the God of your fathers, the
God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has
sent me to you': this is my name for ever, and thus I am to
be remembered throughout all generations. (Exodus 3:13-15)
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.
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.
