The Da Vinci Con
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The Da Vinci Con |
Bible Truth Communion: |
One of the most recent attacks on Christianity in General and on Catholicism in particular has come from a best selling mystery novel by Dan Brown. Called The Da Vinci Code, the book has sold millions of copies across the globe, and has been made into a major Hollywood motion picture. WHY HAVE A SPECIAL ARTICLE ON A WORK OF FICTION? Because although the plot of the novel is fictional, the novel also claims to present real truths about the life of Jesus and the history of the Church. Many serious allegations are made in the book, which are claimed by the author to be not fiction, but verifiable fact, and which many readers of the novel have been led to believe are actually factual. This is seriously misleading. So let's deal with some of these claims: 1. The Gospel Story is a Falsification Invented by the Church, who hid the "Real" Story of Jesus's Marriage to Mary Magdalene, and the birth of their child. This is the central allegation of the book, which the writer tries to back up by making dozens of subsidiary allegations. This is the Grand Conspiracy theory, which initially may sound appealling, but in fact relies on a number of extremely unlikely events. * The entire Christian Church in all its many forms and factions across the world, all went corrupt in exactly the same way at exactly the same time. * This corrupt Church was able to completely eliminate every trace, everywhere in the world, of the "true" gospel story, even though there were many places where the Church had no power, and its writ did not run. * No "true" Christians survived anywhere in the world. or left any writings behind that survived anywhere in the world, despite the fact that the writings and claims of numerous insignificant ancient heresies have survived to the present day. We will return to this main allegation at the end of the article. But first let's look at a few more specific allegations made in the book. 2. There is a Secret Organistion called the Priory of Sion that secretly protected the "True" Story of Christ and Mary Magdalene down the Centuries. This is a claim which is proclaimed as "fact", at the very start of the book. It is also claimed that Grand Masters of the "Priory of Sion" included major historical figures such as Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo Da Vinci. It is claimed that this is verified by documents known as Les Dossiers Secrets that were found in the French Bibliotheque Nationale in 1975. While it is true that such documents were indeed found in 1975, the book's other claim (in Chapter 48) that these documents "had been authenticated by many specialists and incontrovertibly confirmed" is anything but true. In fact the documents are universally acknowledged to be poor quality fakes produced in the 1960s by an eccentric fraudster called Pierre Plantard, who actually founded the Priory of Sion in 1956. No historical luminaries were ever members. 3. The Knights Templar were founded by the Priory of Sion, to seek out secret documents supposedly hidden beneath the Temple in Jerusalem.  Since the Priory of Sion was not formed
until the 1956, this cannot be true. In fact the Knights
were formed by Hugh de Payens in 1118 as a military order
to protect the pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem. They
have, however, featured as the foils in a hundred
different paranoid conspiracy theories. In fact it is
very difficult to find a work about Medieval conspiracies
that does not feature the Templars in one role or other.4. The Knights Templar were Destroyed by the Catholic Church. Again wrong. Brown alleges in Chapter 37 of the Da Vinci Code that the Pope ordered the arrest and torture of the Templars because they knew too much. He says: "In a military manoeuvre worthy of the CIA, Pope Clement issued secret sealed orders to be opened simultaneously by his soldiers all across Europe on Friday October 13th 1307." This is nonsense on several counts. The order for the arrest of the Knights came not from the Pope but from King Philip IV of France, who wanted to destroy the Templars to increase his own wealth and power. The Pope was actually against this. The arrests took place only in France, not "across Europe", and the Pope in any respect did not have "soldiers all across Europe," as Brown ludicrously claims. The Pope was lucky to have a guard of his own at the Papal residence. Meanwhile church councils outside France found verdicts in favour of the Templars. The archbishop of Magdeburg in May, 1308, arrested a number of Knights but released them in November of the same year. The king of Portugal boldly defended the order; Edward I of England proceeded against the Templars in a half-hearted way; James of Aragon and Ferdinand of Castile imprisoned a few Knights, but the council of Salamanca pronounced the order innocent in October, 1310. The same judgment was rendered by the council of Ravenna in June, 1310, and at Mainz in July 1 of the same year. Curiously, according to brown the Priory of Sion supposedly had enough warning of this onslaught to smuggle its hoard of documents out of France via the port of La Rochelle, but carelessly failed to pass on this information to its loyal Knights, who therefore died horribly. In Chapter 82 Brown goes on to allege, contrary to history, that Pope Clement killed "hundreds" of Templar knights, tossing their ashes "unceremoniously into the Tiber River." Brown here makes a classic schoolboy howler of an error. Apart from the fact that it was King Philip of France who executed the Knights, the Pope at this time did not live on the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, but many hundreds of miles away, and on the other side of the Alps, in Avignon. This major slip-up serves to illustrate the low level of the historical research in the book. 5. The Christian Church Turned Feminist-friendly Pagan Society into a Patriarchal, Male-Dominated Society that Increased Female Oppression. This is one of the major subtexts of the Da Vinci Code, and is returned to again and again throughout the story. The reason the early Church wanted to suppress the Marriage of Jesus and Magdalene was supposedly because its leaders hated women. The leaders of the official church wanted to suppress sexuality and the power and equality of women, which supposedly flourished in the pre-Christian world. The Church then invented a new gospel to accomplish this. Like much else in the book, the argument is drivel. A cursory look at the status of women in much of the pre-Christian world (or even in the recent past in much of the non-Christian world) is enough to show that Christianity, with its doctrine that all are equal in Christ, greatly raised the status of women. The pagan Huns, Assyrians, Goths and Hittites were not known for their touchy-feely feminine side. Even the Greeks and Romans considered women to be second class citizens, and not worthy of any high office. Pagan Rome never had a female ruler. The very idea was unthinkable, but the Christian successor states to Rome and even the Christian Eastern Empire began to accept women as capable of governing a state. In Chapter 28 of the Da Vinci Code, Brown piles in with a mass of garbled, inaccurate and blatantly false misinformation to try to support his anti-female theory. * He claims that the "Catholic Inquisition" wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, an infamous guide to the torture and exposure of suspected witches. False. The book was written by two renegade priests, and was condemned by the Inquisition soon after it was written. The Catholic Church never used it. In fact the Inquisition rarely got involved in witchcraft cases. * He states that "the Church burned at the stake an astonishing five million women." Astonishing indeed, since this would be the entire female population of much of Europe at the time! This lie is a three way misrepresentation. 1) In no way does the total death figure for witchcraft executions for the whole 300 year period of the "witchcraft craze" in both Catholic and Protestant Europe even approach the millions. This is a legend borne of exaggeration upon exaggeration. Modern scholars put the number of witchcraft executions across Europe in the thousands at the most. 2) The Church itself burned very few people for witchcraft. Most witchcraft executions were ordered by local and civil courts. 3) "The Church" used to imply the Catholic Church, is again a misnomer, since just as many witches were killed in protestant countries as catholic ones. * Brown ludicrously adds that "Those deemed witches by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any woman suspiciously attuned to the natural world. Midwives were killed for the heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of child birth." !!!! This passage beats all the rest as it becomes a mindless rant in which Brown flies right off the edge of reality. All female scholars were deemed witches?  What
nonsense. Most female scholars at the time worked for the
Church. Where is there any hint of verification for such
a preposterous claim? The same goes for the similar
charge about "nature lovers" and "herb
gatherers", all of whom, according to Brown were
declared witches! And as for the use of medical knowledge
being a heresy - Brown clearly does not know that
modern European medicine was founded by the Church, which
ran the only hospitals and medical schools. One can only
assume that Brown just made up his "facts" on
the basis of his own prejudices.6. The Church as we Know It was founded by the Pagan Emperor Constantine. According to the Da Vinci Code, the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine invented the Christian Church as a political tool. The incredibly busy Constantine, as well as running the Empire and fighting off barbarian invasions, also apparently had the time and energy to: create a new religion, mixing sun worship and Christianity, divise new symbols for the religion, establish a priesthood, re-edit and re-write the bible, suppress all previous forms of Christianity, and turn the previously human Jesus into God Incarnate. All this is set out in Da Vinci Code Chapter 55. According to Dan Brown, the Council of Nicea decided on the basis of a close vote that Jesus was divine and not just human! This allegation alone shows to what lengths Brown will go to twist history to fit his anti-Church agenda. In fact, as any reading of history will show, Jesus' divinity was a core doctrine of Christianity from the very beginning. It is there in the gospels and letters of the New Testament, and appears in the writings of the Early Church Fathers centuries before Constantine. [A.D. 110] For the Son of God, who was begotten before time began, and established all things according to the will of the Father, He was conceived in the womb of Mary, according to the appointment of God, of the seed of David, and by the Holy Ghost. (Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 18:2). Generations of Christians went to their deaths in the arena rather than deny this fact. So what happened at Nicea? Quite
simply a heresy had arisen in Christianity in which one
group, known as the Arians said that
Jesus was Divine but not as great as the Father, while
the Orthodox Christians said that Jesus was Divine and co-equal
with God the Father. The divinity of Jesus was never in
question. The Orthodox Christians triumphed at Nicea, and
Arianism gradually faded. |
However, again, a closer look completely
refutes Dan Brown's agenda. The Dead Sea Scrolls
actually contain nothing that contradicts the Bible
accounts of Jesus's life. The Egyptian Nag-Hammadi
Gospels, do contain works produced by the secret Gnostic
sect, but most are merely lists of sayings implying a
secret knowledge held by the sect. Much is made in the Da
Vinci Code of the so-called "Gospel of Mary",
which purportedly shows Mary Magdalene as a leader among
the Apostles. In fact this too is a very short work which
contains little to support Brown's theories. It can be
easily found on the internet.