(I began this message with a clip from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indy discovers the Grail)
Let’s start by saying that the Da Vinci code focuses on a subject that many of us know little about and that is the Holy Grail, as a matter of fact the sum total of most of our knowledge comes from two movies, you just saw a clip from the first one, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Our other source for information concerning the Holy Grail is Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, which I watched numerous times as a teenager and a few times since then, thus qualifying me to speak as an expert on this topic. At least as much of an expert as author Dan Brown who wrote “The Da Vinci Code”
The difference being that my sources have never pretended to be anything but fiction. Brown’s main source of information concerning the Grail comes from a 1982 book entitled “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”. The authors of that book drew primarily on documents provided to them by a French citizen by the name of Pierre Plantard.
The problem here was that Plantard had created these documents in a rouse to prove that he was actually Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair a direct descendent of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Plantard had also farbricated documents that showed that he was the true King of France.
Plantard is also responsible for The Priory of Sion, which Dan Brown claims is one of the oldest secret societies in existence. In both Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the Da Vinci Code the Priory of Sion is said to have been established in 1099 when the Knights Templar discovered trunks full of documents buried beneath Solomon’s Temple which not only revealed the location of the Holy Grail but contained evidence that would totally discredit Christianity. You still with me?
The book tells us that Leonardo Da Vinci, which by the way is not his first and last name it is instead his name and his place of origin, Leonardo of Vinci, was actually the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Brown maintains that other notable Grand Master’s through the years have been Isaac Newton, of apple fame and Victor Hugo the French author.
In Paris however you can discover the true origin of the Priory of Sion because on June 25 1956 official paperwork was filed establishing the Priory of Sion as a society to lobby the French Government for more affordable housing. The Person who filed the papers was none other then Pierre Plantard. The society folded in 1957 but Plantard held on to the name.
And I know that you are sitting there thinking: Get a life Denn it’s just a novel and a movie. True it is, and if it were simply presented as a novel then I would have no problem with it. So first let’s look at the story. 1) The Story Actually it’s not a bad story, as stories go. I quite enjoyed the book. In my personal opinion Dan Brown isn’t a great writer but he’s a pretty good story teller, and that’s not a slam, some of my favourite authors fit into that category.
The story begins in France where Robert Langdon the noted symbologist from Harvard University has been visiting as a guest lecturer. Now if you thinking I’ve never met a symbologist before that’s because there has never been one before Robert Langdon, but that’s simply artistic licence. Langdon is disturbed at his hotel room by the French Police who take him to the Louvre to assist in a murder investigation. It would appear that one of the curators of the museum, Jacques Sauniere has been brutally murdered. However before dying Sauniere is able to leave a variety of clues scattered around the gallery he has locked himself in as an unsuccessful bid to escape his killer.
Unbeknownst to our hero he is actually a suspect in the murder and only escapes with the help of the beautiful police cryptographer Sophie Neveu. Langdon discovers that the murdered Sauniere not only is Sophie’s estranged Grandfather but he is also the Grand Master of Priory of Sion, a secret society entrusted with a secret which if revealed would destroy the Christian church as we know it. Still with me?
Their quest for clues to break the Da Vinci Code leads them to Leigh Teabing, a former British Royal Historian, who is one of the foremost authorities on the Holy Grail. Their ensuing journey takes them through France, across the English Channel on an illicit flight, all the while staying one step ahead of the police, an albino killer monk name Silas and the “teacher” a mystery man who appears to be orchestrating the entire story. It’s during the trip that Langdon and Teabing are able to lecture Sophie about the fallacies of Christianity and the Bible as well as the evils of the church.
But Denn you say: “it’s just a novel” True, but here’s 2) The Problem. You see before the novel begins there is a page included in the book entitled “Facts” which states and I quote “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” The same statement is included on Brown’s website.
Some would go so far as to describe the book as faction. That is fiction based on fact.
So Brown begins by saying “trust me, I’ve done my homework.” But the question is has he? It’s not just Christians who have problem with that claim, here is a quote from Bruce Boucher who is the curator of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. “It is also breathtaking to read that the heroine, Sophie Neveu, uses one of Leonardo’s paintings, “The Madonna of the Rocks,” as a shield, pressing it so close to her body that it bends. More than six feet tall and painted on wood, not canvas, the “Madonna” is unlikely to be so supple” So, you have to wonder, if he can’t even get something that simple right how accurate are Brown’s descriptions of other things in the book? The book claims there are 666 panes of glass in the pyramid addition to the Louvre, which would be a fairly significant number. There are in fact 673, a less then significant number. So let’s see, Brown isn’t accurate about art, or architecture we seen with the Priory of Sion that he doesn’t get it right with documents, he’s not doing real good.
By claiming up front that all the documents are accurate the reader is left with the impression that Brown in a historian on par with the characters in his novel. The truth is that Dan Brown is a school teacher and novelist who writes fiction. He’s not an art expert, he’s not a historian and he’s certainly not a theologian. As sociologist and author Andrew Greeley stated “Brown knows little about Leonardo, little about the Catholic Church, and little about history.”
So where do we start? For most Christians the source of their faith is the scriptures and their knowledge of Jesus is based upon the four synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is the foundation that Brown begins to attack and really, if the Gospels are untrustworthy then we have no foundation.
2) The Truth about the Gospels The premise of the Code is that there are more reliable gospels then the ones we know. In particular Brown’s characters refer to The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary. These were in their opinion part of more then eighty gospels that were considered for the New Testament but were turned down by the church and then destroyed. According to Langdon and Teabing Coptic scrolls found near Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 are indeed the earliest Christian records and disprove the Gospels which the church accepts today. These fifty-two Coptic scrolls, only five which were referred to as Gospels in general and Gnostic Gospels in particular, have been the subject of much study since their discovery. And in 1977 an English translation of them was published. That much is true.
However, most scholars, even liberal scholars, will concede that the four Gospels which we hold to were in all probability written between 50 and 100 AD. Those same scholars tell us that the earliest of the Gnostic Gospels was written at least a generation later and some of them as much as two to three hundred years after the event and even after the early church had established the Canon of the scripture, which is our Bible Hmmm?
In reality, there weren’t eighty gospels being considered there were five or six. And the four agreed on had been accepted in practice if not officially since early in the second century. Around 150 A.D. both Justin Martyr and Tertullian spoke of the four gospels, remember this is at least a hundred years before the gospels of Philip and Mary were written. Not very long after that another of the Early Church Fathers, Irenaeus, wrote, “It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are” he then goes on to name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. By the time the earliest of the gospels found at Nag Hammadi was written the church had already settled on Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the Gospel account of the life of Christ. And this was at least 150 years prior to Constantine and the Council of Nicaea who Brown asserts masterminded the entire conspiracy of the New Testament. This must have been quite a feat seeing it happened at least 100 years before any of them were born.
In their book “Cracking Da Vinci’s Code” Jim Garlow, who by the way is a Wesleyan Pastor and Peter Jones wrote “The New Testament Canon is not the invention of Constantine in the fourth century. It is an essential part of the teachings of Jesus and his apostles from the start. In the first century the Canon was in organic form and functioned without formal church declaration.”
That is the truth about the Gospels. Next we have to look at 2) The Truth about Jesus
You aren’t very far into the Da Vinci Code when you discover the theological beliefs of the main characters; they tell us that Jesus was simply a mortal prophet, a great and powerful man but a man nonetheless. The book maintains that the early church hijacked Jesus’ message and shrouded it in divinity and that very same divinity was simply the result of a vote of Bishops.
What the Da Vinci code wants us to believe is that the Divinity of Christ was something not believed by the early church, it was an invention of the Council of Nicaea in 325 and not only that but we are told that it was a relatively close vote at that council. I suppose in Brown’s mind it may have been a close vote. The 300 bishops came together to discuss the teachings of a prominent preacher named Arius who had proclaimed that Jesus was a created being, just like the rest of us and wasn’t actually the “begotten Son of God.” From that discussion the Nicene Creed was adopted affirming the churches belief in the divinity of Christ, the vote? 298 in favour 2 opposed, not all that close.
The earliest Christian writings that we have come from Paul, whom even the most liberal critics will concede wrote the epistles between 48 and 60 A.D. This is one thing that liberals and conservative scholars agree on. What did Paul teach about the Divinity of Christ. Well Louise read a portion of Paul’s writings earlier, Romans 1:3-4 It is the Good News about his Son, Jesus, who came as a man, born into King David’s royal family line. And Jesus Christ our Lord was shown to be the Son of God when God powerfully raised him from the dead by means of the Holy Spirit. And that isn’t an isolated incident Colossians 1:15 Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before God made anything at all and is supreme over all creation. And 1 Corinthians 8:6 But we know that there is only one God, the Father, who created everything, and we exist for him. And there is only one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom God made everything and through whom we have been given life. Throughout the letters that Paul wrote to the church he spoke of Jesus as God.
If we read through the Gospels we see that Jesus allowed people to call him the Christ, and the son of God, he said he could forgive sins, he never stopped people from calling him the Son of God, he promised to rise from the dead and said he would be the ultimate judge at the end of time.
History tells us that all of the original disciples died martyr’s deaths; they were killed for their faith, and all they had to do to save their lives was to say that Jesus was just a man, that he wasn’t God. Would you die for a lie? And that is the truth about Jesus.
The third thing we need to look at then is the 3) Truth about Mary Magdalene. This is where the book becomes really bizarre. Brown, through his characters, claims that Mary Magdalene, not Peter, was Jesus’ chief disciple and that she and Jesus were not only romantically involved but were married had a daughter named Sarah and their descendents are still around today. As a matter of fact Teabing the Historian in the book says at one point “the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record.” Don’t know what history he’s been reading.
What do we know about Mary? In Luke 8:2 we are told that Jesus cast seven demons out of her. In Matthew 27:32-56 we know that she was one of the five people named who watched the crucifixion. We know that she was there when Jesus was buried Matthew 27:57-61, that she was one and of three woman who went to anoint Jesus body after his burial Mark 16:1 and we know that she was the first person to see Jesus after his resurrection, John 20:10-18. And that’s all we know about Mary Magdalene. And while the book maintains the church was responsible for this huge plot to discredit Mary by making her out to be a prostitute there is really no evidence of that.
Some people assume because Mary is mentioned right after the story about the prostitute who washed Jesus feet with her tears, in Luke 7, that they are one and the same. But you know what happens when you assume? That’s right sometimes you’re wrong.
In the book, Mary is identified as Jesus’ closest disciple and lover based on Da Vinci’s rendition of the last supper. If we pull it up on the screen we discover that the person on Christ’s right that has been identified as John throughout history is in fact Mary. Ok, the guy in the picture does look a little girly, but then look at the way Leonardo draws John the Baptist as a young man. Oh you know what Peter said at the Last Supper don’t you? “Hey everyone, you gotta get on this side of the table if we want to be in the picture.”
The biblical accounts of the Last Supper tells us it was attended by Jesus and His twelve apostles, so even if the great conspiracy theories are right and Leonardo did actually draw Mary in the picture, so what? Next week we’ll be looking a little closer at Who Mary was and who she wasn’t.
So there you have it the truth about the gospels, Jesus and Mary Magdalene. For fun let’s take a look at the 4) Truth about the Grail. As I mentioned earlier most of us have learned all we know about the grail either from Indiana Jones or from Monty Python. But what does history actually teach us about the grail? Nothing, zip, nada, nothing.
For twelve hundred years after the death of Christ, nobody mentions anything about the cup that Christ drank from at the last supper, nor about his plate or bowl or his knife. They were just utensils. And then in the late 1300’s legends started being told about King Arthur and his quest for the cup, which was said to not only have been present at the last supper but was used to catch the blood of Christ while he was hanging on the cross. Nope sorry, pure conjecture and fiction. The Roman Catholic Church which has promoted many relics through the years has never promoted the grail as a holy relic.
In the Da Vinci Code we are told that the church has spent two thousand years trying to suppress the true identity of the chalice, once again sorry never happened.
And there are some things I’m wondering about the novel. As most of you know I am a prolific reader. I try to read a couple of novels a week, on vacation I have been known to go through a novel a day. I don’t like to read, I love to read. And it has been like that all my life, when I went to college at 19 I sold a personal library of hundreds of paperbacks. In doing that math I suspect that over the past thirty years I have read over 4000 novels, and that doesn’t take into account the non-fiction I’ve read, which unfortunately is considerably less. Now I’m not bragging, I just love to read. And I love to read mysteries, murder mysteries, legal mysteries, spy mysteries. I love mysteries. The problem is that I’ve become jaded and tend to look beyond the mystery and ask “Why?” Things like: The mysterious Priory of Sion is charged with protecting the descendants of Jesus and Mary. Must be a big organization. I’m no mathematician but you can do the math. In Brown’s book Jesus and Mary had a child named Sarah. If Sarah married and had only 2 children and they each married and had only 2 children and they each married and had only 2 children and they each married and had only 2 children and they each married and had only 2 children you are now approximately 100 years after the death of Christ and there are 76 descendants, 20 years later there are 148, 20 years later there are 296, 20 years later 592, 20 years later 1184 and in anther 20 years there are 2368. That’s two hundred years, another hundred years there are 75,776. If that number only doubled every 100 years the direct descendants of Jesus would number over 100 million people today. If only 1% survived it would still be a Million people, but according to the book and movie there is only one surviving descendant. You gotta figure the Priory of Sion really stinks at the job of protecting these people.
And I wonder, if Jesus wasn’t really divine, if he wasn’t God if he was a just a good man then who cares? Why are they still protecting the descendants of a Galilean preacher and his wife two thousand years later? If Jesus was just a man and Mary was just his wife then what’s the big deal?
And my biggest question of all, if’n what Brown was saying was true then I can understand the church hiding the truth but why is the Priory of Sion hiding the truth. If it’s that important why have they been keeping it hidden away for two thousand years? Just wondering.
Margaret M. Mitchell is Associate Professor of New Testament at the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Chair of the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Literature and I love what she says about the Da Vinci Code. “It was a quick romp, largely fun to read, if rather predictable and preachy. This is a good airplane book, a novelistic thriller that presents a rummage sale of accurate historical nuggets alongside falsehoods and misleading statements.”
Are you into secrets? Probably we all love secrets, here’s one for you Ephesians 1:9-14 God’s secret plan has now been revealed to us; it is a plan centered on Christ, designed long ago according to his good pleasure. And this is his plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because of Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us from the beginning, and all things happen just as he decided long ago. God’s purpose was that we who were the first to trust in Christ should praise our glorious God. And now you also have heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago. The Spirit is God’s guarantee that he will give us everything he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. This is just one more reason for us to praise our glorious God.
And because a good story wouldn’t be complete without a warning let me leave you with this one: Galatians 1:9 I will say it again: If anyone preaches any other gospel than the one you welcomed, let God’s curse fall upon that person.
So here it is, watching or reading the Da Vinci Code is not a sin, believing what it says about Jesus is.
I hope you enjoyed this message. There is a free PowerPoint presentation available for it at www.powerpoint4preaching.com
