Da Vinci Code: A Faith Of Our Design Or God's? - Part One Of Series Series

Decoding The Da Vinci Code – pt. 1

“A Faith of Our Design Or God’s?”

Picture of book

Exerpt from “Breaking The Da Vinci Code”

By Collin Hansen | posted 11/07/2003/CCN online

“Perhaps you’ve heard of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. This fictional thriller has captured the coveted number one sales ranking at Amazon.com, camped out for 32 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List, and inspired a one-hour ABC News special. Along the way, it has sparked debates about the legitimacy of Western and Christian history.

While the ABC News feature focused on Brown’s fascination with an alleged marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, The Da Vinci Code contains many more (equally dubious) claims about Christianity’s historic origins and theological development. The central claim Brown’s novel makes about Christianity is that "almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false." Why? Because of a single meeting of bishops in 325, at the city of Nicea in modern-day Turkey. There, argues Brown, church leaders who wanted to consolidate their power base (he calls this, anachronistically, "the Vatican" or "the Roman Catholic church") created a divine Christ and an infallible Scripture—both of them novelties that had never before existed among Christians.”

It has been a phenomenon. And it is a thrilling suspense novel. It has spent a long time on the top of the New York Times best seller list and has been published in multiple languages as well. But it has a fundamental problem. It was written with just enough factual claim to cause many Christians and non Christians alike to take too much of it as factual.

How historically accurate is this book? Why are people so quick to accept Dan Brown’s fictional book as an accurate portrayal of many historical events?

Remember the song “What A Wonderful World” by the Supremes? It had that line, "Don’t know much about history.” That’s surely the condition of the church today. We need to understand something about church history in order to understand and guard against false teachings that come our way.

Notice these two separate review bites from the New York Daily News.

“His Research Is Impeccable” – The New York Daily News

“A gripping mix of murder and myth”. – The New York Daily News

Which is it?

Is his research accurate and free of bias? Or is there an agenda – a presupposition – that taints his findings – stretches and even denies the truth?

Give description of the book

If you don’t read books, don’t worry, it will be a movie. Ron Howard is said to be working on the movie even now with Tom Hanks caste as the heroin Robert Langdon. It is set to be released in May of 2006. The controversy is sure to reignite at that time again.

It is a murder mystery suspense thriller as well as a conspiracy theory – interwoven with a belief system in the sacred feminine religion.

The novel relates how a conspiracy is uncovered through clues encoded in paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Picture of Last Supper

The conspiracy is about the alleged suppressing of Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene. The Holy Grail (of medieval lore) is not the cup from which Jesus drank at the Last Supper as long supposed. Instead the Holy Grail is Mary Magdalene herself. Her womb is considered the holy grail or vessel. She and Jesus had a child together and Mary and the child Sarah fled to Egypt and eventually to Western Europe. There, her descendants became the Merovingian royalty of France. As the book tells it, Mary Magdalene’s diaries of her life with Jesus, the family tree of the Merovingians and many other significant facts about the “sacred feminine” are hidden in her tomb. The crusades and the purpose of some secret societies have all been about seeking and protecting the contents of the Holy Grail until a specified time they are to be revealed.

The story claims that these “facts” have been suppressed even by use of violence by a female denigrating religion that replaced the original Christianity. Such a feat was pulled off by the church (Roman Catholic Church), more specifically by Constantine, the Roman Emperor who legalized the Church in the fourth century. Constantine is said to have manipulated and dictated the canon of Scripture we have today. He chose the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John over supposedly more reliable and older gospels that he had destroyed. Some of these lost gospels were found, though, with the Dead Sea Scrolls and another find at the Nag Hamadi library. Such lost gospels allegedly reveal the real Jesus and his humanity but not his divinity. They also allegedly reveal his relationship with Mary Magdalene and his desire for the church to be founded upon her authority. If this Holy Grail could be found, it would be the key to proving the historical church wrong and redefining the Christian faith as worship of the sacred feminine.