Christian Living

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Da Vinci Code

Da Vinci Code book includes controversies blasphemies and historical inaccuracies, having as its theme that Jesus Christ had children with Mary Magdalene and that their bloodline continues, says a spokesman for the Church.

The book portends that there are clues ingeniously disguised in the works of the world famous painter Leonardo Da Vinci to this effect , hence the "Da Vinci Code"
Ideas in the book go directly against the Catholic Church and indirectly against most traditional Christian beliefs and these are:

* Jesus is not God; he was only a man.

* Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.

* She is to be worshiped as a goddess.

* Jesus got her pregnant, and the two had a daughter.

* That daughter gave rise to a prominent family line that is still present in Europe today.

* The Bible was put together by a pagan Roman emperor.

* Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was deified by the emperor Constantine.

* The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.

* In the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church.

* There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and is trying to keep the truth alive.

* The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed. It often has committed murder to do so.

* The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing.

The author of the book Dan Brown is a former English teacher in the US; he authored Digital Fortress, Deception Point that became techno-thrillers followed by Angels and Demons; with the latter he turned to writing thrillers involving religion and the Vatican, Da Vinci Code follows in that vein.

He acknowledges several for the research done in writing the book, these include;

Project Gutenberg, this is an online library, and Brown's "acknowledgement" may signify no more than that he looked at a text on one of the Project Gutenberg web sites.

Catholic World News: they have stated--we were surprised and bemused to learn that Catholic World News had been listed in the acknowledgments of this book.

The same may well be true of others included in the list. The acknowledgements of museums, libraries, and similar institutions may mean no more than that he used their facilities and that they did nothing special to assist his research.

The major sources inspiring the book have been works of New Age speculation that run counter to established history; these writings focus on alleged secret societies and conspiracy theories, attempting to reinterpret the Christian faith, and contain radical feminist agendas. Historians and religious scholars do not take these works seriously, says a spokesman for the Church.

Dan Brown borrows ideas from;

Margaret Starbird- she refers in her books to a secret union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and calls herself a "Roman Catholic Scholar", not so recognized by the Church.

Beigent and Lincoln, they are both Masonic historians, Masons being a long banned organization by the Catholic Church.

Brown associates two institutions in propagating his fallacies, namely;

Priory of Sion, calling it a secret society founded in 1099 and adverting to various controversial literatures pointing that the society includes membership of Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo Da Vinci. He says that this society defends the blood line of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and that this tribe will capture political power in the future. The factual Priory of Sion is;

A club founded in 1956 by four young Frenchmen, one of them being Pierre Plantared later found to be a confidence trickster. This organization broke up after a while but Plantared revived it. The society does not exist anymore.

Although the false history of the Priory has been repeatedly exposed in France and on the BBC in 1996, not to mention tireless debunking by researcher Paul Smith since at least 1985, Dan Brown wants his readers to think its real and that its preposterous claims are genuine, says the Church.

Opus Dei, it is a deeply devout Catholic sect at the butt end of various controversial accusations such as brain washing etc, the lot that goes for most Catholic organizations. The Da Vinci Code describes Opus Dei as "a Catholic Church" with an order of monks serving as assassins and brain washing Catholics as to the wrong impressions of Jesus Christ But;The real Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by a Catholic priest with the purpose of promoting lay holiness, and is an accepted function of the Church.

In respect of the fallacies represented in the book with regard to Opus Dei, relevant authorities had sent a letter of protest to the publisher, perhaps this will be followed by legal action.

As regards the bible, the book states, the bible is a product of man, not of God, the Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. The Church denies this and, this is a matter for all bible reading Christians to ponder about.

The Church maintains that, in the first century the apostles and their associates wrote the books of the New Testament and drew up a list of the authentic books that had been handed down from the apostles and this list is known as the Muratorian Canon; this was largely complete by the time of Constantine (the early fourth century). Dan Brown is simply wrong!

According to Brown until the First Council of Nicaea, which took place in A.D. 325, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet but that Constantine turned Jesus into a deity.

It is true that Constantine, following his conversion to Christ, presided over the First Council of Nicaea, but it is not true that Constantine "turned Jesus into a deity" or that Christians had not viewed Jesus as God prior to this event.

Jesus' opponents sought to kill him because he "called God his Father, making himself equal with God" (John 5:18).

Jesus had said, truly truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am, thus invoking and applying to himself the personal name of God, "I am".

In John 20:28, Thomas falls at Jesus' feet, exclaiming, "My Lord and my God"
Paul tells us that Jesus chose to be born in humble, human form even though he could have remained in equal glory with the Father, for he was "in the form of God".

How does the Church respond to Dan Brown's claims?

* It is irresponsible and offensive for Brown to impugn the faith of countless Catholics in this fashion. He has no solid evidence to support these contentions.

* Claiming that Catholics have been killing the descendants of their God is a vile and unacceptable assault on their faith.

* It is impossible to take this claim seriously: that Brown and some New Age authors try to identify Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus is obvious, as she was the only woman who was unmarried, prominently associated with Jesus. The New Testament bible mentions nothing of this.

* Jesus himself said things that indicated he wasn't married to any one, he said that some, have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake (Matt 19:12)

* He portrays voluntary abstention from marriage as the highest form of consecration, and as the spiritual leader of the Christian movement, it would be strange for him to hold up such a standard if he himself did not meet it.

* The authors of the New Testament regularly depict the Church as the bride of Christ; this metaphor would never have developed if a flesh-and-blood "Mrs. Jesus" was living just down the street. Only if Christ was celibate would the Church have come to be depicted metaphorically as his bride.

What was Mary Magdalene's role in the early Church according to Brown?

* That she rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church, there is no basis for this claim in the New Testament Bible, and;

* There is no evidence that Constantine ordered any copies of Scripture to be changed, if so there must be a citation from a contemporary source, but no such passage can be found.

* None of the surviving records of the period-or even the records of later centuries-record Constantine or any one else attempting to alter the texts of the existing canon to change this or any other doctrine.

* Brown simply has no evidence to back up his claim.

* It would have been a practical impossibility to change Scripture, because thousands of copies were in existence all across the Mediterranean world, from Europe to North Africa and they all spoke of the same doctrine.

* Even if all of the copies then known to exist had been tracked down and altered, this would not have affected the copies of Scripture that by this time already had been lost. Many of the early manuscripts of Scripture that we now have had been lost, in the desert until their discovery by modern archaeology. But when we look at these copies, they teach the same doctrines as later copies and show no evidence of having been censored.

Catholics believe in the living tradition of the Church together with the bible, this tradition had an unbroken period since the time of Jesus. There would have been parallel popes or parallel churches but the fact remains that the seed of tradition would have resided in any one of the locations, put to right with passage of time. Catholics have faith in this living tradition.

The world has two certain philosophies in addition to several others; these are philosophies of faith and of logic. To those who dwell in faith it would seem the most logical thing on earth, and to those who dwell on logic it could yield to an eternal quest in this imperfect world.

Dan Brown seems to have got mixed up with both faith and logic and his book reaches no logical conclusion to the reader but to join in the euphemism that, no one ever kicks a dead dog!

Most contents of this article are culled from the "Special Report-Cracking the Da Vinci Code" by Catholic Answers, which is a Catholic Institution in the US found on the internet.

Oscar E V Fernando
25th May 2006

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