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What’s
wrong with The Da Vinci Code? As I
mentioned last week, far too many people are reading author Dan
Brown’s latest novel, a work of fiction, as if it
accurately portrayed the facts about Christ, the New Testament, the
Church and Christian history. Nothing could be further from the truth.
But sadly, like one of my son’s roommates at Boston College, many
people reading The Da Vinci Code come away from the book with
their faith in Christ and the Church shaken.
There
are simply so many assertions of “fact” in The Da Vinci Code
that are totally and utterly false that, once again, it’s hard to
know where to begin. Let’s take a few more of these assertions,
beginning with the most controversial of all, and then moving quickly
through several others.
Assertion:
Perhaps
the most outrageous and ludicrous assertion made in this novel is the
character of Sir Leigh Teabing’s statement that “the marriage of
Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record.” Two
reasons are then given for this amazing assertion. First, according to
Robert Langdon, the novel’s main character, “Because Jesus was a
Jew and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish
man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was
condemned.” Second, Teabing insists that the marriage of Jesus and
Mary Magdalene is mentioned specifically in two ancient documents, The
Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which he
calls, together with the Dead Sea Scrolls, “the earliest Christian
records.”
There
is not one shred of evidence accepted by any credible historian
stating that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
First, while it is true that “Jewish custom” encouraged marriage,
it was not at all unheard of for Jews to practice celibacy. Perhaps
the two most famous cases are Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet of
the 7th century B.C. who abstained from marriage as a sign
to the Jewish people that the end of the kingdom of Judah was near
(Jeremiah 16:1-9); and the Qumran community, a proto-monastic sect
within Judaism at the time of Jesus responsible for producing and
probably preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls so often mentioned in The
Da Vinci Code as part of the “earliest Christian records.”
Actually, the Dead Sea Scrolls, initially discovered in 1947, contain
no “Christian records” whatsoever because they are the products of
an ancient Jewish community. Rather, they contain – among
other things – some of the oldest known manuscripts of the Old
Testament. Ironically, the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced by a
community of male Jewish celibates, precisely the kind of people
Langdon asserts couldn’t have existed within Judaism at the time of
Jesus.
Second,
both The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
are commonly called “gnostic” gospels by New Testament scholars
and historians today. They are pseudonymous works notoriously
unreliable as historical documents and in fact contain no historical
outline of events in the life of Christ whatsoever, in stark contrast
to the canonical New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
that clearly speak in historical terms of the birth, baptism,
ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
Gnosticism
is an umbrella term that modern scholars use to describe a number of
religious movements in the ancient Roman world, many of which were not
at all related to Christianity, all of which had several common
themes: that members of the various gnostic sects had a secret
knowledge not available to others; that there were a series of lesser
mediating divinities sometimes called Archons, sometimes called Aeons;
and a dualistic outlook, an antithesis between matter and spirit, body
and soul and a hatred of the physical world that was often believed to
have been created not by God but by a lesser, evil demigod to imprison
the souls of human beings. None of these beliefs are Christian.
To
take only one example from The Da Vinci Code, The Gospel of
Philip cited by Teabing as proof that Jesus and Mary Magdalene
were married was produced at the end of the 3rd century AD,
almost two hundred years after the Gospel of John, the last of
the four New Testament gospels to be written. It is hardly part of
“the earliest Christian records.” Scholars today agree that it was
produced within circles faithful to the teaching of a man named
Valentinus, an Egyptian gnostic teacher who taught in Rome between 135
and 168AD and who is one of the few gnostic teachers whose subsequent
disciples - Ptolemaeus and Markus - and theological views we know
anything about. Their Christian contemporaries in the ancient world,
like St. Irenaeus, the bishop of the city of Lyons in what was then
the Roman province of Gaul but is today France, wrote a series of
books refuting the teachings of Valentinus, his disciples and other
gnostic teachers, as well. These books, like The Gospel of Philip,
have survived to this day and I, as a seminarian, had to read both
these Gnostic documents and the response to these documents by various
bishops and teachers of the Church like Irenaeus and Clement of
Alexandria.
Assertion:
“Even
Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans,” the
Teabing character declares. “Originally,” Langdon adds,
“Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but
Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration of
the sun. To this day, most churchgoers attend services on Sunday
morning with no idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun
god’s weekly tribute – Sunday.”
Nothing
could be further from the truth.
As a matter of pure and simple fact, the New Testament records quite
clearly that Christians gathered for worship on the day of Christ’s
resurrection from the dead, the day after the Sabbath (Mark
16:2) or the Lord’s Day (“Kyriake” in the original Greek) as it
is described in Revelation 1:10. This ancient practice is also
referred to in Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 16:2. Furthermore, a number
of post-New Testament writers like St. Ignatius of Antioch (executed
in 115AD) and St. Justin the Martyr (executed in 155AD) to name only
two, confirm the practice of Christians gathering for worship on
Sunday. Constantine “shifted” nothing. All that Constantine did in
the year 321AD was grant legal status as a holiday within the Empire
to a centuries-old apostolic practice of the Church.
But
we also need to look at the question of language. It is true, as the
Langdon character asserts, that Sunday is indeed the “Day of the
Sun” in English. And Saturday, by the way, is “Saturn’s Day”
and not the Jewish Sabbath. Thursday is “Thor’s Day.” It
is true that the names for the days of the week in modern English have
all been adapted from ancient mythologies. But in Greek, things are
very different. Only three days have names in Greek: Paraskevi, the
Day of Preparation for the Sabbath; Savvato, the Sabbath day; and
Kyriake, the Lord’s Day. After the Lord’s Day, the days of the
week are merely numbered: Deutera, the Second Day (Monday); Trete, the
Third Day (Tuesday) and so on. In the Greek of the New Testament as
well as in modern Greek to this day, there is no confusion regarding
the Judeo-Christian origins of the names for the days of the week.
Assertion:
“The
Jewish tetragramaton YHWH – the sacred name of God – derived from
Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and
the pre-Hebraic name for Havah.”
This
is completely false!
As any first year seminary student can tell you, Jehovah is actually a
16th century rendering for the King James Version of the
Hebrew YHWH using the vowels for the word “Adonai” or “Lord,”
the word which was read by devout Jews whenever they came across
God’s name in the text of the Old Testament because they felt the
actual name of God was too awesome to be pronounced by human lips.
Assertion:
“During 300 years of witch hunts the Church burned at the stake an
astounding 5,000,000 women” Langdon, the Harvard professor, says to
his French love interest, Sophie. In fact, even non-Christian
historians now agree that the number of people – both men and women
– executed between 1400-1800 for suspected witchcraft was somewhere
between 30,000 to 50,000. Modern scholars suggest that perhaps 100,000
such trials were held between 1450 and 1750, with somewhere between
30,000 to 50,000 executions, of which 25% - 7,500 to 12,500 – were men.
It is also clear that despite the involvement of Church authorities,
the vast majority of those condemned as witches were in fact condemned
by local secular courts. Of course, here, as throughout the book,
whenever Mr. Brown uses the word “church” he is always referring
to the Roman Catholic Church and this book contains a clear anti-Roman
Catholic bias. But it is a simple fact that many witch-hunts took
place in Protestant countries like England and her colonies (for
example, one need only recall the infamous witch trials in Salem, MA).
Interestingly enough, in the Orthodox Church, there never developed
an Office of the Inquisition as in the Roman Catholic Church; nor were
there ever any witch-hunts or trials.
A
Conspiracy?
“Everyone
loves a conspiracy,” thinks Langdon and indeed, this is perhaps one
reason why The Da Vinci Code fascinates so many people and
still dominates The New York Times bestseller list. Brown’s
conspirators in this two millennia long cover-up include the Roman
Catholic Church, the Knights Templar, Opus Dei (a Roman Catholic
organization that in fact does not have monks nor do its
members wear a monastic habit of any kind, much less go around
murdering people) the Masons, Interpol and a secret society known as
the Priory of Sion, that is an actual organization officially
registered with the French government in 1956 that most likely
originated after WW II and first came to public notice in 1962. So
much for being a “secret” society! With the exception of French
film maker Jean Cocteau, it’s illustrious list of Grand Masters as
presented in the novel – Leonardo, Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo –
is simply not credible and no historian takes such claims seriously.
The
Relics of Mary Magdalene
But
perhaps the most fantastic claim of all is that the Holy Grail of
Arthurian legend and popular movies like Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade is not the chalice that Christ drank from at the Last
Supper but Mary Magdalene herself and a tomb that contains her
remains. The main character in the novel, Robert Langdon, cracks the
mysterious code left behind by Sauniere, the murdered curator of the
Louvre and discovers that the bones of Mary Magdalene are buried in
the Louvre. Where are the relics of Mary Magdalene today? Roman
Catholic and Orthodox Christians know that they are certainly not
buried in the Louvre! According to the historical tradition of the
Church, Mary Magdalene died in the city of Ephesus and was buried
there. Her body, an object of veneration by Christians, was
transferred to Constantinople in the 9th century by the
Byzantine emperor Leo the Wise, an event that is still commemorated on
our liturgical calendar each year on May 4th. Following the
sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204, most of her relics
were carried back to Rome and placed under the altar in the Lateran
Palace (the papal chapel). Some of her relics are located in Vezelay,
a small town near Marseilles in France, and are housed in St.
Maximin’s Basilica. Her arm is kept at the Monastery of Simonos
Petra on Mt. Athos.
To
conclude: The
Da Vinci Code is a fast paced but poorly written murder mystery
full of ridiculous errors of fact. It is, after all, a work of
fiction. Whatever the claims concerning his research in preparation
for writing this novel, the simple fact is that author Dan Brown knows
little about Leonardo, little about art and virtually nothing about
Jesus, the Bible and Christian history.
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