BOOKS: Debunking DaVinci_61404

Posted: 6/11/04

BOOKS: Debunking DaVinci

By Mark O'Keefe

Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)–After reading “The Da Vinci Code,” Holly Jespersen wondered if Jesus Christ did in fact wed Mary Magdalene and father her child, as the novel claims.

“It definitely made me question all that I have been brought up to believe,” said Jespersen, a Presbyterian who lives in Chicago.

Alarmed by that kind of reaction, defenders of traditional Christianity have launched a counteroffensive on author Dan Brown's fast-paced thriller, which has been atop The New York Times' fiction best-seller list for the last year, has sold more than 6 million copies, is being translated into more than 40 languages and will be made into a Columbia Pictures film directed by Ron Howard.

Books and articles with titles like “Dismantling the Da Vinci Code” and “The Da Vinci Deception” have been published. Preachers are giving sermons in response to church members who ask why they were never told there was a Mrs. Jesus. Web sites and discussion groups are humming over the book's “heresies.”

A collective Christian outcry is rising, with some of the country's most influential clerics joining in.

When “The Da Vinci Code” was released in March 2003, church leaders paid little attention. Brown was an obscure author; this wasn't the first time a novel had taken shots at Christianity. And it was, after all, fiction.

But as the book became a publishing phenomenon, religious leaders noticed that readers, even in their own congregations, were taking the novel's historical claims as fact. “Jesus, Mary and Da Vinci,” an ABC special last November that seriously explored Brown's themes, made clear that this was a cultural force to be reckoned with.

Yet where some Christian leaders perceive a threat, others see an opportunity.

The book has sparked interest in early Christian history, with the public suddenly fascinated with topics like the Council of Nicea in 325.

“It's only a threat if people read this fictional book naively, don't think critically about it and don't pursue truth,” said Mark Roberts, pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church in Irvine, Calif. “Now that we have people thinking and talking, we can look at the real evidence of Jesus.”

But on the book's first page, Brown makes an assertion that galls his critics: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

The plot centers on the search for the Holy Grail by a brilliant Harvard symbologist and a beautiful French cryptologist, who follow clues in the work of Leonardo Da Vinci.

The greatest protest has been over the book's negative portrayal of central Christian beliefs, including:

Jesus' divinity. Brown writes that Constantine collated the Bible, omitting some 80 gospels emphasizing Jesus' human traits in favor of four that made him God. This was supposedly done at the Council of Nicea, “in a relatively close vote.”

But the actual vote was 300-2, said Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, and it did not determine Jesus' divinity. That was attested to much earlier “by many New Testament passages, as well as by the earliest Christians and all the church fathers, even if there was some disagreement as to the precise nature of that deity,” Maier said.

The Council of Nicea “did not debate over whether Jesus was only mortal or divine, but whether he was created or eternal.”

The Bible's inerrancy. Peter Jones, co-author of “Cracking the Da Vinci Code,” says that in trying to establish that the Bible was cooked by Constantine and his cronies, Brown overlooks the fact that four-fifths of what is now called The New Testament was deemed divinely inspired in the first century–two centuries before Constantine and the Council of Nicea.

Jesus' celibacy. Even feminist scholars, such as Karen King, a Harvard professor who may be the world's leading authority on early non-biblical texts about Mary Magdalene, have said there is no evidence that Jesus was married to her or to anyone else.

Cardinal Francis George and other traditionalists treat the claim as absurd. “All I have to say is, nobody ever told me to keep secret the fact that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene,” he told The Chicago Sun-Times.

“All those martyrs the first 300 years, they were covering up the fact that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene? Why in heaven's name would someone go to their death to protect that secret? It's absurd.”