Thousands of people revere Jesus Christ as saviour, messiah, Lord, the first born of every creation, the one who is called wonderful, counsellor, mighty God and prince of peace. By picking on a subject so close to people’s heart, this movie has attacked the centrality of the Christian faith.
Not that the value of faith is diminished but that the wrath of God on the perpertrators is going to be severe and anhiliating. I am worried about this more than the impact it can have on people who watch it. As far as believing it is concerned, it is at one’s own risk.
What worries me most is that the book and movie is based on lies and factual error:
Let’s consider some examples: Dan Brown writes on page one of The Da Vinci Code:
“FACT:
The Priory of Sion – a European secret society founded in 1099 – is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci….
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
On p. 113 he writes:
“In fact, they are one of the oldest surviving secret societies on earth….The Priory has a well-documented history of reverence for the sacred feminine.
p. 157:
“The brotherhood’s history spanned more than a millennium…an astonishing chronicle of secrets, blackmail, betrayal, and even brutal torture at the hands of an angry Pope.”
p. 206:
“After all, previous Priory Grand Masters had also been distinguished public figures with artistic souls. Proof of that fact had been uncovered years ago in Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale in papers that became known as Les Dossiers Secrets.
Every Priory historian and Grail buff had read the Dossiers. Catalogued under Number 4 lm 249, the Dossiers Secrets had been authenticated by many specialists and incontrovertibly confirmed what historians had suspected for a long time: Priory Grand Masters included Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and more recently, Jean Cocteau, the famous Parisian artist.”
But none of this is true.
`
The Priory of Sion was created in 1956 by a fraudster named Pierre Plantard, who with some friends falsified documents and recorded them in France’s national library (Le Bibliotheque Nationale). These “secret dossiers” have been unequivocally revealed as fraudulent. Thus, not only is there no historical basis whatsoever for Dan Brown’s “FACT” claims, but they are incontrovertibly false.
In Breaking the Da Vinci Code, Darrell L. Brock, of Dallas Theological Seminary, builds the case that The Da Vinci Code does not match historical evidence at all, either as to the history of the canon and the church, or with regard to the Gnostic Gospels.
On page 256 of The Da Vinci Code, Brown writes:
[Sophie:] “Historians could not possibly confirm [the authenticity of a documented geneology of Christ’s bloodline.]” Teabing chuckled. “No more so than they can confirm the authenticity of the Bible….As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon?’….By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account….The Sangreal [(royal blood)] documents simply tell the other side of the Christ story. In the end, which side of the story you believe becomes a matter of faith and personal exploration, but at least the information has survived….”
But Dr. Brock demonstrates clearly that the documents relied upon in the four gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John) are the most reliable, and were accepted as the primary sources of Jesus teachings:
1) The canonical texts were all written by 90 A.D. The Gnostic gospels were written in the second and third centuries.
2) These original gospels, written by the apostles, all embraced Jesus’ divinity, contrary to Brown’s claims that Christ’s divinity was not accepted until the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.
3) The early canons embraced Christ as God, whereas the Gnostics claimed to have secret knowledge of Christ, (Gnostic = “knowledge”), that Christ was one of many spirits, that all flesh was evil and separate from the spirit world (dualism), that there were two Christs, and other bizarre concepts.
4) Thus the orthodox texts were egalitarian, and open to all who turned to Christ; whereas the Gnostics were elitist, holding that only those gifted with high intellect and special insight (which only they possessed) could achieve spiritual growth to heaven.
The movie portrayed the Council of Nicea as having been a hot dispute between many rival sects, wherein corrupt church officials selected the canonical texts (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) in a very close vote. In fact, the Council of Nicea was convened as an effort to preserve what had long been considered the “true” teachings of Christ from further cultish confusion, and the vote was in fact 298 to 2.
This movie seeks to combine what Paul and other early Christians sought to divide: Christ’s true teachings from the corrupting, worldly, crackpot efforts to pollute His word.
For example, the Gospel of Philip states: “God is a man eater. On account of this the Man was killed for him. Before they killed the Man they killed animals, for those were not Gods for whom they killed.” Those who seek to combine these different schools of Christian thought seek to pollute the pure with the false, and thereby reintroduce the dispute which Paul was fighting – the effort to personalize Jesus into whatever one wants Him to be, not an absolute but a debatable figure.
Dan Brown’s sensationalist ploy to paint the early church as misogynous is also unfounded, for Mary and several other women are specifically related in the canonical texts as having traveled and taught with Jesus; Mary was the first to see the resurrected Christ; and Jesus gave special respect and recognition to women. The Catholic tradition also exalts the Virgin Mary to almost god-like stature. All of this is wholly inconsistent with Brown’s assertion that the Church opposed the recognition of women as equals. Christ specifically taught that all of us are equal, including women.
In the Gnostic view of women, which Dan Brown argues worshipped women as divine, women were taught that they “needed to become males in order to enter God’s kingdom” (The Gospel of Thomas, chapter 114). Jesus is reputed in the Gnostic texts to have 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.” (Brock, p. 75)
About the Movie:
In Hollywood, where The Da Vinci Code is being enlarged to entertain the movie-viewing audience, the psychological concept relied upon is “suspended disbelief, ” whereby the viewer “suspends” his or her awareness that the subject of a film is fictitious