Truth and Error in the Da Vinci Code
Part 1:
Jesus and the Gospels
This message contains excerpts from the book
Truth and Error in the Da Vinci Code
by Mark L. Strauss
This book may be ordered at DaVinciCodeErrors.com
The Da Vinci Code – first the book and now the movie – has made a huge cultural impact in the United States and around the world. Dan Brown’s mystery novel has not only met with massive popular success, but has shaken the faith of many with its astonishing claims about Jesus Christ and the origins of Christianity.
The Da Vinci Code claims that almost everything the church says about Jesus Christ is a lie. Jesus was not the Son of God, as the New Testament claims, but merely a human prophet. He taught a form of religion called Gnosticism, which (supposedly) extolled the sacred feminine and practiced goddess worship. He married Mary Magdalene, who bore a child to him after his death, and his descendants are still around today – a truth kept hidden by the secret society known as the Priory of Sion. The “Holy Grail” was not the cup Jesus passed to his disciples at the Last Supper, but Mary herself, who carried the blood offspring of Jesus.
According to The Da Vinci Code, Jesus intended Mary Magdalene, not the Apostles, to be his successor. The early church, which was anti-women, suppressed the earliest writings about Jesus and Mary and created its own version of the facts. The Bible we have today was written by these “winners” and so presents just one side of the story, an inaccurate and distorted view of Jesus. More than eighty other gospels were suppressed by the church. It is these other gospels that tell the real story about Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
No wonder the book is controversial! If these claims were true, the Christian faith would be a fraud. But The Da Vinci Code is not in fact true. Its fundamental claims have no historical foundation, and the book is full of historical and factual errors. Yet many Christians do not have the knowledge or resources to respond to these errors. My purpose here is to help to equip you with historically reliable evidence concerning the claims of The Da Vinci Code and the origins of Christianity.
Peter said in 1 Peter 3:15-16 that we should “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” But then he added, “But do this with gentleness and respect.” My desire is that this message will help you to answer the challenges of The Da Vinci Code with clarity, gentleness and respect.
In this first message, we will discuss the claims of The Da Vinci Code concerning Jesus Christ and the Bible. In our next message we will talk about Jesus’ supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene and the church’s view of women. Finally, in our third message, we will talk about the appeal of The Da Vinci Code in our culture today.
Isn’t The Da Vinci Code just a novel?
I have heard a number of people ask why everyone is making such a fuss, since The Da Vinci Code is simply a work of fiction. Just enjoy the story, they say – a thrilling murder mystery – and stop your whining!
In fact, The Da Vinci Code claims to be much more than a work of fiction. The opening page states in large letters “FACT,” and affirms the existence of the secret society known as the Priory of Sion, founded in AD 1099. This society supposedly kept the secret about the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The FACT sheet also says that “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” In fact, the descriptions are inaccurate and misleading.
But it goes deeper than that. Dan Brown has chosen as his literary form historical novel. In historical novel, the author makes an implicit covenant with the reader. While the characters in the book are fictional, the world in which they live is real, and certain characters are presented as trustworthy and reliable. Yet in The Da Vinci Code, this covenant is repeatedly broken, as supposedly reliable characters make blatantly false statements. Characters like Robert Langdon, a Harvard Ph.D., and Leigh Teabing, a British Royal Historian, end up sounding more like the National Enquirer than real historians. Unfortunately, the uninformed reader has trouble distinguishing fact from fantasy.
But there is another reason we cannot simply dismiss The Da Vinci Code as “just harmless fiction.” Whether from lack of knowledge or from gullibility, many people are believing it. I have heard people say, “I never knew that about Jesus and Mary Magdalene!” Others report that friends or family members have had their doubts about Christianity confirmed by the book’s claims. Whether or not Dan Brown truly believes his revisionist history (his public comments suggest that he does), many people are taking it very seriously. And this demands a response.
Let me illustrate this: When someone sits down to read H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, he or she will immediately identify it as science fiction and will not panic about space aliens tromping through their living room. It is harmless and entertaining science fiction. Yet when Orson Welles read the book on live radio on October 30, 1938, many people thought it was real and poured into the streets in terror. Someone had to stand up and say, “Wait! It’s not true!” In the same way, although The Da Vinci Code is just a story, many people are taking it very seriously. And this demands a response.
Was Jesus’ Deity Created by the Council of Nicea in AD 325?
The most controversial of all the claims in The Da Vinci Code is that the early church considered Jesus to be merely a human prophet until the Council of Nicea (AD 325) voted to make him a god. Teabing claims that until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mere mortal.” (DVC, p. 233). If this claim were true, it would mean that the fundamental tenets of Christianity – the deity of Christ, his incarnation as a true human being, and his sacrificial death on the cross for our sins – are false teachings with no basis in reality. Christianity would be a sham.
In fact, however, this claim is so outlandish one wonders how Dan Brown’s book got through its editorial review at Random House. Any historian of the early church knows that the Council of Nicea (AD 325) did not create the deity of Christ, but only confirmed and clarified what Christians had been teaching for centuries. Consider the exalted statement of Christ’s deity at the beginning of the Gospel of John (written before the end of the first century):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. (John 1:1-3)
This passage identifies Jesus as the pre-existent “Word” who was at the same time distinct from the Father (“with God”) yet fully divine (“was God”). Similar statements appear throughout the New Testament. The letter to the Hebrews (c. AD 67) states that, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Heb. 1:3). The apostle Paul, writing around AD 62, opposed false teachers at Colosse by affirming the supremacy of Christ: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Col. 2:9).
It is important to note that these are not isolated statements, but affirmations spread across the range of early Christian authors and communities (and dozens more could be cited). Dan Brown shows complete disregard for the historical record when he claims that the early church deified Jesus at the Council of Nicea.
Was the Bible compiled by the Emperor Constantine?
If the New Testament so strongly affirms the deity of Christ, how can The Da Vinci Code claim that Jesus was nothing more than a mere mortal? The answer, according to the book, is that the Roman emperor Constantine chose those books that supported his own political agenda and suppressed other gospels that presented the real human Jesus (DVC, p. 231). History, it is said, was written by the winners. And when Constantine established Christianity as the state religion, he suppressed other gospels (i.e., the Gnostic ones) which taught a different view of Jesus Christ.
In reality, Constantine had nothing to do with which books were included in the Bible, and he did not commission a new Bible. The New Testament Gospels were considered inspired Scripture long before Constantine was born. Constantine had no part in discussions concerning the canon of Scripture.
The word “canon” means a rule or standard and refers to those books considered by the church to be authoritative Scripture. It is certainly true that official recognition of these books was a gradual process that took place over several centuries. Yet while there were discussions concerning the exact limits of the canon continuing into the fourth century AD, the core of the New Testament – and the four Gospels in particular – attained unquestioned authority by the middle of the second century. The claim made by The Da Vinci Code – that the New Testament was a large amorphous body of literature (containing over eighty gospels!) until Constantine and his cronies cut out the books they didn’t like – is simply false. The four canonical Gospels were firmly established as the church’s gospels centuries before Constantine and decades before the so-called Gnostic gospels were written.
Were the Gnostic Gospels the Earliest Christian Writings?
According to The Da Vinci Code, when Constantine chose his books for the Bible, he excluded many gospels – what we call the Gnostic gospels – which were in fact “the earliest Christian records” (DVC, p. 245).
While scholars debate the precise age of the so-called Gnostic gospels, they are certainly not the earliest Christian records. While all of the New Testament gospels can be confidently dated to the first century AD, none of the Gnostic writings can be dated before the middle of the second century. And most were written much later.
The earliest New Testament documents are the letters of Paul, written in the 50s and 60s of the first century. The letter of James may be even earlier, written around AD 45. Mark’s Gospel was probably the first gospel written, in the 50s or 60s of the first century. Matthew and Luke likely followed in the 60s or 70s, and John was probably written last, sometime in the 90s. Quotations and allusions from the four Gospels in the so-called “apostolic fathers” (the generation of church leaders after the apostles) confirm their first century date, and there is good evidence that they were circulating as a collection by the early second century. Justin Martyr, in the mid-second century, quotes frequently from them and refers to the four as the “memoirs of the apostles.” The Muratorian fragment, a canonical list dating from about AD 160, identifies the four as authoritative Scripture. By the late second century, the fourfold Gospel is so firmly established that Irenaeus argues that there can be neither more nor less than four Gospels, comparing them to the four winds and the four points of the compass.
It is also significant that when Irenaeus writes against various second century heresies, he does not accuse them of producing their own gospels, but of selectively using these four Gospels. The Ebionites used only Matthew; the heretic Marcion edited Luke to suit his purposes; those who separated the humanity of Jesus from the deity of the Christ were using Mark; and the Valentinians favored John’s Gospel. This confirms that even these opponents of the church recognized the authority of the four canonical Gospels, and so tried to draw on them to support their own beliefs.
In contrast to the first century dates of the four New Testament Gospels, experts date the Gospel of Thomas – probably the earliest of the Gnostic gospels – to the mid-second century. Thomas appears to be dependent on the canonical Gospels, drawing on them as sources. The two gospels that The Da Vinci Code refers to with reference to Mary Magdalene are even later than the Gospel of Thomas. The Gospel of Philip and Gospel of Mary were probably written in the late second or third century.
In summary, the church did not remove the Gnostic gospels from the New Testament, because they were never seriously considered for inclusion in it. This is because these writings had no direct link to Jesus and his earliest followers and because they taught doctrines contrary to the teachings Jesus had passed on to his disciples.
What do these Gnostic gospels teach?
Gnosticism is the name given to a variety of religious groups that flourished in the Middle East in the second century AD. Gnostics taught what is called a dualistic worldview, where the pure realm of spirit was good, while the physical or material world was evil. The supreme spirit – the god of Gnosticism – was wholly transcendent and pure spirit and so could not have created this material world. Emanating (coming forth) from this supreme spirit were many aeons, or lesser spirit beings. One of these lesser beings created the evil material world. In contrast to Judaism and Christianity, where God’s original creation was “very good” and (though now fallen because of human sin) will one day be restored, for Gnostics the material world and the physical body are something evil to be escaped.
Gnostics taught that people gained salvation through secret knowledge (gnosis) of their true spiritual identity and heavenly origin. Salvation was not a gift from God on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ, as Christianity teaches, but was the discovery within oneself of this spark of divinity. The goal of Gnosticism was to return to the realm of pure spirit. Jesus Christ became in Gnosticism one aeon or emanation, sent to teach humans about their true spiritual identity. Gnostics rejected the incarnation (that God took on human flesh) and the saving significance of Christ’s death on the cross. There are striking similarities between Gnosticism and the New Age movement today, where the goal is to achieve self-enlightenment and to recognize the god within.
Gnosticism became a major rival to Christianity in the second and third centuries, and many Gnostic writings were produced. The church rejected Gnosticism because its beliefs were contrary to the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. Various early church leaders labeled the movement heretical and wrote treatises against it, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and others.
Was Jesus a Gnostic teacher?
All the evidence says “no.” The claim that Jesus was originally a Gnostic simply does not fit his life setting. Jesus was a first century Jew (all scholars agree on this), and his earliest followers were Palestinian Jews. The New Testament Gospels place Jesus accurately in this Jewish world. He moves around in first century settings like Galilee, Capernaum, Jerusalem, and Samaria. He interacts with groups and people we know from first century Palestine: Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, synagogue officials, tax collectors, a Roman centurion, Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, etc. He discusses Jewish issues like the interpretation of the Law, the kingdom of God, ceremonial cleanness, dietary laws, disputes about marriage and divorce.
All of these things place Jesus squarely in the Jewish context in which we know he lived. The Gnostic literature, by contrast, does not fit this historical context. In these writings Jesus has esoteric conversations with his followers about Gnostic themes and theology, far removed from his Jewish world. This suggests that the Gnostic interpretation of Jesus was a later development that arose under the influence of Greek philosophical thought and a pagan pantheistic worldview.
Why does all this matter?
The New Testament identifies Jesus as the fulfillment of the Old Testament, the Son of God who came to earth to suffer and die as a sacrifice for our sins, and to reverse the results of the Fall. The Gnostic view of Jesus is very different. Jesus is a teacher of secret knowledge which enables the recipient to find the god within. These two worldviews are polar opposites. They cannot both be true. For those trying to decide which is true, my counsel is to read them both. God has spoken through his Word, and its power to transform lives through the gift of his Son goes far beyond the self-enlightenment or esoteric wisdom that any human philosophy can bring. As Paul said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes…” (Romans 1:16-17). Only this message has the power to transform lives.
