by Matt Kaufman
The popular Da Vinci Code claims to set the record straight on Christianity. But it’s Da Vinci’s claims that need to be set straight.
Here, in a nutshell, is the history of Christianity according to Dan Brown, author of the phenomenally bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code (soon to be a movie directed by Ron Howard): It’s all been one big sexist plot to empower men and oppress women.
Now here’s The Da Vinci Code’s version of history in a slightly bigger nutshell: Jesus was never God at all. He was a man who married Mary Magdalene, had children with her and left her in charge of the church. (He was, Brown says, “the original feminist.”) But Peter got jealous of her, as did the men who followed him in later generations. So they buried the evidence of her elevated status, made sure only male-oriented gospels made it into the Bible, drove her descendants into hiding, and embarked on a centuries-long, sometimes-murderous crusade—up to the present day—to discredit not only Mary Magdalene but all women, everywhere. In short, the entire church has been built on lies.
Such claims aren’t new; they’ve floated around the cultural fringe for some time. But now, thanks to Brown’s Da Vinci Code, a lot more people are taking them seriously.
Why? Well, Brown weaves them into a modern-day suspense thriller about attempts to discover or destroy evidence of our “true” history. But beyond that, he insists that his work is thoroughly researched—that, though his stories are fiction, the history on which they’re based is unvarnished fact. His characters make their claims with such confidence, and swamp readers with so many plausible-sounding details (historical documents, art, architecture, secret societies and rituals) that many people are buying into the credibility of the entire book.
But as biblical and historical scholars are pointing out in numerous books and articles, The Da Vinci Code itself is built on—well, lies.
Among those scholars is Darrell L. Bock, Ph.D., a research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. In Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Nelson Books, 2004, 188 pages), Bock calmly, professionally exposes just how sloppy Brown’s work really is.
It doesn’t take a Ph.D. To spot some of the sloppiness that Bock points out. Take Da Vinci’s allegation that Jesus must have been married and had children. It’s based on the notion that singleness was unthinkable for a Jewish man, especially a rabbi. But Jesus wasn’t a rabbi (though His disciples occasionally used the word to mean “teacher”), and singleness wasn’t unheard of among Jewish men. Moreover, Bock adds, “We can never overlook a basic fact about Jesus: He did not follow the culture. He often cut a distinctive path.” His own high regard for women is one of many examples; in fact, it’s part of the reason Dan Brown dubs Jesus “the original feminist.” So Brown can hardly sell us a Jesus who’d never dream of breaking with tradition.
Other parts of Bock’s work reveal that Brown distorts even the sources he himself cites as reliable. Consider his portrait of the Jesus-Mary Magdalene romance. It’s based entirely on two passages from the Gnostic gospels, whose reliability is highly doubtful (more about them in a moment). One, in the Gospel of Philip, claims Jesus kissed Mary—but it turns out large numbers of words are missing from the Philip passage in question, and other parts of the same book suggest this may have referred to the platonic “kiss of fellowship” between believers. The other passage, from the Gospel of Mary Magdala, says Jesus loved her more than the other disciples, but in context appears to be speaking of her wisdom, not some “special relationship.” Bock comments:
In my office are 38 volumes of early church documents, each … several hundred pages, double columns, in small print. The fact that out of all this material, only two texts could be brought forward as even ancient candidates for the theory shows how utterly unlikely it is.
But Bock devotes the largest chapters of his book to showing what is wrong with Brown’s sources. Da Vinci relies heavily on several books of those aforementioned Gnostic gospels, written one to two centuries after the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The timing alone suggests that, where the books clash, the original Gospels are likely to be the ones that are authentic.
More important, though, is the fact that the books do clash, at a fundamental level. The Gnostics, for those not familiar with them, stressed not the message of salvation that Jesus and His apostles conveyed to all people, but secret knowledge—supposed new revelations about angels, devils, the supposed hierarchy of spirits, and other exotic topics. To the Gnostics, salvation rested on that sort of knowledge, not on the death of Christ.
And what “knowledge” it was. In the Gospel of Thomas, for example, we learn that women can’t enter the kingdom of heaven except by being turned into men, for “every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Somehow Dan Brown’s thorough research missed that part.) And in the Apocalypse of Peter, Jesus didn’t really suffer on the cross at all; He sent an earthly substitute version of Himself, while He sat in heaven and laughed at the world’s ignorance. So much for the Suffering Servant.
Thus it’s clear the Gnostic gospels weren’t merely minor variations on the Gospels, and everyone who lived during the early centuries of the church knew it. “Neither group could regard both expressions as Christian,” Bock writes. “One was claiming its roots in the past for understanding the faith in the apostolic testimony and tradition, while the other was claiming access now to a direct kind of revelation that was of more significance than past revelation.”
You’d never know this from The Da Vinci Code. In Dan Brown’s world, Christianity was stolen in the fourth century, when the power-grabbing church picked out a handful of books to be in the Bible and discarded large numbers of worthy contenders. But in the real world, Bock reports (and amply documents), “the books were not so much selected as recognized for their importance to the church”—affirming the longstanding judgement of Christians, who had used them widely since the time of the apostles. If the Gnostics had been included, Scripture would have been schizophrenic.
A two-page book review can’t get into much more detail about Bock’s work. (It’d take that much space just to recount the detailed twists and turns of The Da Vinci Code.) Bock’s calm dissection doesn’t always make for the most gripping reading, but that’s also his strength: His scholarly integrity comes through far more strongly than it would have if he’d devoted his book to passionately denouncing Brown’s.
He easily could have, though. Bock sticks to his specialty (church history) and declines to get into some of the most outrageous aspects of Da Vinci. For Dan Brown doesn’t stop at trying to undermine Christianity. He also tries to substitute an alternative spirituality centred on the “sacred feminine”—the notion, seen in goddess-worshipping pagan religions, that female sexuality is a crucial element of the divine. Brown even tries to rehabilitate the ancient rituals of temple prostitutes, presenting the sex act as the way to touch the divine. Pagans had a beautiful thing going, he invites readers to believe, living in harmony with the rhythms of Mother Nature—until (who else?) Christians came along to slander and slaughter them.
Thus, while containing hardly any sex in its pages, The Da Vinci Code tells readers they can devote themselves to sensual self-indulgence and be “spiritual” at the same time. In fact, it tells them they should. Needless to say, this means they can forget about sin, and forget about any need for a Saviour—there was no need for God to become man (Jesus) to pay the penalty for our sin.
You can see why this message sells so many books. You also can see why it’s the biggest lie of all.
- Courtesy Focus on the Family