The Da Vinci Code:
Fact or Fiction?

ICPF Mangalore Unit

What is The Da Vinci Code?
The Da Vinci Code is a novel. Its publisher, Doubleday claims that it is “the bestselling adult novel of all time within a one-year period.”

What is The Da Vinci Code About?
It is a thriller story involving secret societies, conspiracies, the Catholic Church, and the fictional “truth” about Jesus Christ. Here is the author’s own summary:
A renowned Harvard symbologist is summoned to the Louvre Museum to examine a series of cryptic symbols relating to Da Vinci artwork. In decrypting the code, he uncovers the key to one of the greatest mysteries of all time . . . and he becomes a hunted man.

During the course of the novel it is alleged that the Catholic Church is perpetuating a major, centuries-long conspiracy to hide the “truth” about Jesus Christ from the public, and it or its agents are willing to stop at nothing, including murder, to do so.

What does Leonardo Da Vinci have to do with the story?
Da Vinci is portrayed as a former head of the conspiracy guarding the “truth” about Jesus Christ. In the novel he is said to have planted various codes and secret symbols in his work, particularly in his painting of the Last Supper. According to the novel, this painting depicts Jesus’ alleged wife, Mary Magdalene, next to him as a symbol of her prominence in his true teaching.

What are the main messages of the book?
·Jesus is not God; he was only a man.
·Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
·She is to be worshiped as a goddess.
·Jesus got her pregnant, and the two had a daughter.
·That daughter gave rise to a prominent family line that is still present in Europe today.
·The Bible was put together by a pagan Roman emperor.
·Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was deified by the emperor Constantine.
·The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.
·In the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church.
·There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and is trying to keep the truth alive.
·The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed. It often has committed murder to do so.
·The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing.

What claims does the book make about the research that was done for it?
On the acknowledgements page of the novel, Brown issues extensive thanks designed to convey the impression that he has done thorough research:
For their generous assistance in the research of this book, I would like to acknowledge the Louvre Museum, the French Ministry of Culture, Project Gutenberg, Bibliothèque Nationale, the Gnostic Society Library, the Department of Paintings Study and Documentation Service at the Lourvre, Catholic World News, Royal Observatory Greenwich, London Record Society, the Muniment Collection at Westminster Abbey, John Pike and the Federation of American Scientists, and the five members of Opus Dei (three active, two former) who recounted their stories, both positive and negative, regarding their experiences inside Opus Dei.

He also thanks a bookstore for “tracking down so many of my research books” as well as a long list of specific individuals.

It is not clear how many of these acknowledgements represent Brown padding the list to make it sound more impressive and enhance his credibility. For example, Project Gutenberg is an online library of public domain texts, and Brown’s “acknowledgement” may signify no more than that he looked at a text on one of the Project Gutenberg web sites. The same may well be true of others included in the list. The acknowledgements of museums, libraries, and similar institutions may mean no more than that he used their facilities and that they did nothing special to assist his research.
This, in fact, appears to be the case regarding his acknowledgement of Catholic World News. When contacted by Catholic Answers, the editor of Catholic World News, Phil Lawler, stated:
“We were surprised and bemused to learn that Catholic World News had been listed in the acknowledgments of this book. We cannot recall any contact whatsoever with Dan Brown. He is not listed among our past or present subscribers. Since many of our stories are free and available to anyone who visits our web site, it is possible that he received some information from Catholic World News-just as anyone can receive information from any public news service. Certainly we never did any research for him or answered any questions from him.”

What is the real story on the Priory of Sion?
The Priory of Sion was a club founded in 1956 by four young Frenchmen. Two of its members were André Bonhomme (who was president of the club when it was founded) and Pierre Plantard (who previously had been sentenced to six months in prison for fraud and embezzlement).
The group’s name is based on a local mountain in France (Col du Mont Sion), not Mount Zion in Jerusalem. It has no connection with the Crusaders, the Templars, or previous movements incorporating “Sion” into their names.

According to The BBC:
There’s no evidence for a Priory of Sion until the 1950s; to find it, you go to the little town of St. Julien. Under French law every new club or association must register itself with the authorities, and that’s why there’s a dossier here showing that a Priory of Sion filed the proper forms in 1956. According to a founding member, this eccentric association took its name not from Jerusalem but from a nearby mountain (Col du Mont Sion, alt. 786 m). The dossier also notes that the Priory’s self-styled grand master, Pierre Plantard, who is central to this story, has done time in jail.

What is the history of the real-world Opus Dei?
According to Opus Dei’s U.S. communications director, Brian Finnerty:
The real Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by a Catholic priest, St. Josemaría Escrivá, with the purpose of promoting lay holiness. It began to grow with the support of the local bishops there and was approved as a secular institute of pontifical right by the Holy See in 1950. Opus Dei’s work has been blessed and encouraged by Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II. In 1982, John Paul II established it as a personal prelature of the Catholic Church after careful study of its role in the Church’s mission. The culmination of the Church’s support for Opus Dei and its message came with the 2002 canonization of its founder. Pope John Paul has called Opus Dei’s founder “the saint of ordinary life.”

What does The Da Vinci Code claim regarding the origin of the Bible?
The book states: “The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. . . . The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great” (231).
This is false. The process by which the Bible formed was one that took time; it was not collated at any one time. Nor did Constantine have anything to do with the process, either before or after he converted to Christianity.

What evidence is there that the Bible formed independently of Constantine?
The Old Testament canon had been forming for centuries. Jesus and the apostles already recognized the authority of the Old Testament writings that existed in their time.

In the first century the apostles and their associates wrote the books of the New Testament, which were passed down to succeeding generations of Christians and read in the churches. In the second and third centuries, Gnostic heretics began to manufacture writings that falsely claimed to be from the apostles, but since they had not been passed down in the churches from the beginning, they were rejected. In response to these new, false writings the churches drew up lists of the authentic books that had been handed down from the apostles. A famous list of the sacred writings from the mid-second century is known as the Muratorian Canon.

The process by which the canon of Scripture was formed was largely complete by the time of Constantine (the early fourth century), and he made no contribution to it. No Bible scholar holds that Constantine played such a role in the development of Scripture. Dan Brown is simply wrong.

What does The Da Vinci Code claim regarding the early Church’s recognition of Christ’s divinity?
Referring to the First Council of Nicea, which took place in A.D. 325, The Da Vinci Code states:
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 mortal…  By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity.

It is true that Constantine, following his conversion to Christ, presided over the First Council of Nicea, but it is not true that Constantine “turned Jesus into a deity” or that Christians had not viewed Jesus as God prior to this event.

Constantine had called the Council together to settle a dispute that had arisen when a priest from Egypt named Arius began to deny that Jesus was God, causing a scandal by repudiating the faith of Christians everywhere. Arius gained a number of followers (known as Arians) and the controversy between the Arians and traditional Christians grew so sharp that the emperor called the Council to settle the matter. Personally, Constantine tended to support the position of the Arians, but he recognized the authority of the bishops in articulating the Christian faith, and the bishops of the Council reaffirmed the traditional Christian teaching that Jesus was fully divine. It was thus the bishops of the Council of Nicaea who reaffirmed the historic Christian position against Arius and his followers. Constantine recognized their authority to do so in spite of the fact he would have preferred a different outcome.

What evidence is there that Christians regarded Christ as God before the Council of Nicea?
Christ’s divinity is stressed repeatedly in the New Testament. For example, we are told that Jesus’ opponents sought to kill him because he “called God his Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18).

When quizzed about how he has special knowledge of Abraham, Jesus replies, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), invoking and applying to himself the personal name of God-”I Am” (Ex. 3:14). His audience understood exactly what he was claiming about himself. “So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple” (John 8:59).
In John 20:28, Thomas falls at Jesus’ feet, exclaiming, “My Lord and my God!” And Paul tells us that Jesus chose to be born in humble, human form even though he could have remained in equal glory with the Father, for he was “in the form of God” (Phil. 2:6).

Plus, why were the early Church persecuted if not for worshiping Jesus rather than Caesar? Would the early converts to Christianity have given themselves for persecution and possible death by embracing a sect that was founded by ‘just another good man?’

The Da Vinci Code asserts that the canon of Scripture was altered at the order of Constantine to support his new doctrine. How do you answer this?
Brown is asserting this in order to deny the evidence that exists against his position. He cannot back this claim up, for there is no evidence for it whatsoever. No Scripture scholar-Christian or non-Christian-supports this position. There are a number of reasons for this, but one reason is that the writings of the Church Fathers (and even non-Christian historians) before the time of Constantine show that Christians regarded Jesus as God.

If Constantine or anyone else had tried to change Scripture, Christians would have refused. The Christian Church had just come through an age of persecution in which Christians had been burned at the stake for refusing to deny their Lord and the Scriptures he gave them. To allow those writings to be mutilated would be unthinkable, and any attempt to change them would have resulted in an enormous controversy that would be mentioned in the writings of the period.

It would have been a practical impossibility to change Scripture, because thousands of copies were in existence all across the Mediterranean world, from Europe to North Africa. There was no central registry of who had copies of the Bible, so there was no way to track them down and edit them. There were simply too many copies floating in circulation.
But even if all of the copies then known to exist had been tracked down and altered, this would not have affected the copies of Scripture that by this time already had been lost. Many of the early manuscripts of Scripture that we now have were waiting, lost, in the desert until their discovery by modern archaeology. But when we look at these copies, they teach the same doctrines as later copies and show no evidence of having been censored.

Moreover, the writings of the early Church Fathers from before the time of Constantine show the same teachings and quote the Gospels as saying the same things as in the canonical Gospels.

What is one to make of The Da Vinci Code’s specific claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene?
It is impossible to take this claim seriously. The early Church was unanimous in regarding Jesus as unmarried. This is not a later doctrine of the Church Fathers but something found in the New Testament itself. The authors of the New Testament regularly depict the Church as “the bride of Christ” (2 Cor. 11:2; Eph. 5:21-33; cf. Rev. 21:9-10). This metaphor would never have developed if a flesh-and-blood “Mrs. Jesus” were living just down the street. Only if Christ were celibate would the Church have come to be depicted metaphorically as his bride.
If Jesus were married, the Jews would have certainly used that as an evidence to argue that He was just another human being. Though they made up a story about the disciples stealing Jesus’ body, they never said anything about Jesus’ bloodline!

Conclusion:
Christianity was never afraid of intellectual attacks. Though the Da Vinci Code is very popular now, it will only be a matter of time before it is lost in the wastebasket of pseudo-history. Truth, and truth alone, stands the test of time. Reality, by the way, may not be as attractive as fabrication, but falsehood never sets the lives free – only Truth does.