The Da Vinci Code

At the time of this writing, a novel with the above title by Dan Brown has been atop the New York Times bestseller list for some 40 weeks. Ordinarily we would not even mention a fictional work in this journal, but this book makes claims about being based on facts and is hostile to the Bible and to the whole Christian system. The claim of the book is that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene. Mary and her followers are then alleged to have fled to France to avoid persecution from Peter and the Apostles.

The so-called facts that are claimed by the book are not even close to the historical truth in any way, but those uneducated in the historical evidence may feel that Brown's book has some credibility, which it does not. In the May/June 2004 issue of Biblical Archeology Review there is an excellent critical review of the facts by Ben Witherington III. He points out massive errors in the book, but lists seven of these, some of which we feel may be useful to our readers. They are:

• Jesus is portrayed as simply a man or as a great prophet in the earliest historical sources, but was later proclaimed divine by the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.
• Constantine is portrayed as the bad guy who suppressed the earlier (Gnostic) gospels and imposed the canonical gospels and the doctrine of the divinity of Christ on the church.
• Jesus was married--and to Mary Magdalene at that.
• Jesus must have been married because he was a Jew (and all Jews had to marry).
• The Dead Sea Scrolls along with the Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, are the earliest Christian records.
• The Church suppressed the idea that Jesus was married and had children because of its ascetical piety and assumption that a divine person or a truly holy person would not be involved in such activities.

These are just some of the major errors, but the book is totally fiction with virtually no historical or factual truth. We recommend the article in Biblical Archaeology Review if you want to know why the above errors are not factual, and there is also a good article in the May/June 2004 issue of Skeptical Inquirer on a host of other factual errors. It is one thing to write a fairy tale, but when you claim it is based on facts when it is totally fictitious and is an attack on Christianity you have stepped over the line.

Back to Contents Does God Exist?, JulAug04.