6 Easter 06 B

The film version of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, looks to be a thrilling blockbuster since its debut May 19. My intention in this sermon is not to tell you to avoid the movie or the bestselling novel of the same title. At the same time, I realize that there are many gullible people not only in the world, but also in the church who will believe this novel is true history. I believe this book and movie give Christians a great opportunity to engage our culture in discussions about a subject that they rarely want to talk about, Jesus. Dan Brown has also caused many Christians to dig deeper into their own understanding of the Christian faith, and to examine the evidence for themselves. I have read the book so what I have to share with you comes from a first hand encounter with the work of Dan Brown. I believe one of the main reasons this book is so popular is because of what Brown writes in Chapter 40. One of the main characters proclaims, “Everyone loves a conspiracy.”

The story is part action, part mystery. Robert Langdon, a professor who is in Paris for a conference, becomes swept up in a murder, religious intrigue, and a hunt for clues revolving around paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci. As he and Sophie Neveu run from the police and follow clues, they meet Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) who tells them they're on the trail of one of the most ancient cover-ups ever perpetrated by the Church: the true nature of Jesus and the Holy Grail.

According to Teabing, the Grail secret is that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and still has royal descendants today. And, Teabing says, the Church has been wrong all along about who Jesus really was. According to the earliest, Gnostic Gospel writings, Jesus was a wise man who lived in Palestine, but he never claimed to be God. No one believed Jesus was divine, Teabing says, until another faction of Christians believed in his divinity and rose to leadership in the Catholic Church. The Roman emperor Constantine, in order to bring peace to the Empire, called the council of Nicea in A.D. 325, where members of the council voted to make Jesus the divine Son of God. Teabing then says that at the same time, the Church declared that Gnostics were heretics, and refused to allow the other, earlier gnostic Gospels, (numbering around 80) to be included in the New Testament. As the action progresses, Robert, Sophie and Sir Teabing find out just how far the Church will go to hide its secrets.

The question with which we are confronted is: Has the Church covered up the truth about Jesus? Dan Brown claims that it has. In an interview on NBC's Today show in 2003, Brown claimed, "Obviously, Robert Langdon is fictional, but all of the art, architecture, secret rituals, and secret societies-all of those are historical fact." The secret societies, of course hid the truth about Jesus and his bloodline. But is this what really happened? Did Jesus really marry Mary Magdalene and have children? Was he a mere human being, or was he the divine Son of God? The answers to these questions are about more than mere intellectual curiosity. How we answer the question about who Jesus was can have a tremendous impact on us and change our lives forever. It can also determine whether we are worshipping the true God or simply a god of fiction.

Just as was the case with the movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” The Da Vinci Code coverage has a template. It's called "Christians React" for short. The established storyline so far is Christians are "offended" and have busied themselves "reacting" and "defending."

Note the difference. That storyline was absent from The Passion coverage, which actively sought to be engaged in the question itself: “What do the Gospels say about Jesus' death?”

The Da Vinci Code coverage hasn't asked a similar question. It hasn't asked, "Is what The Da Vinci Code says about Jesus accurate?" Instead, it presents the picture we're used to: The defensive Christians taking stuff way too seriously. Questions being raised about the accuracy of the story aren't being directly addressed, unlike the way the secular media outlets expressed great concern that the story of Jesus be accurately and fairly portrayed on film in The Passion of the Christ.

Sure, there's a slight difference in genre, but the fact is, The Da Vinci Code presents its theories authoritatively, and a startling number of readers embrace them as such. Many people are studying copies of Leonardo's Last Supper talking to each other about the figure to Jesus' right and how, "Everyone knows that's Mary Magdalene now."

Does this not bother anyone who cares about an intelligent approach to art and history? It's not history and it is a misrepresentation of art.

The issue isn't about personal faith in Jesus. But The Da Vinci Code says wild things about the past that even secular historians scoff at and are bothered to hear readers take so seriously. No, Constantine did not transform Christianity from a feminine-centered wisdom movement to a Jesus-worshipping mega-movement. It just didn't happen.

I sometimes think that many members of the secular media are afraid to take this nonsense on and, frankly, mock it for the silliness it is because the news media might then be perceived as giving support to narrow-minded conservative Christians. I don’t normally applaud 60 Minutes because of all of the attacks that they have made in the past on Christianity, but their recent story debunking much of the so-called historical facts of The Da Vinci Code, like the Priory of Sion was admirable.

Every few years a popular conspiracy theory about the origins of Christianity reemerges once everyone has forgotten how it was refuted the last time it appeared. The premise that underlies the story in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code last appeared in a book titled Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Delacorte Press, 1982).1 At that time, one theory purported that the “Holy Grail” was not the cup used by Jesus Christ at the last supper; instead, it “was a royal bloodline fostered by Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene.” Religious scholars completely ignored or dismissed this theory because they had little patience for the claims of documents and societies that supposedly possessed “secret” knowledge that the academic world had missed for centuries.

Nothing in scholarship or evidence to date has changed to supplant this dismissive evaluation. Theories like this, moreover, are promulgated not in peer-reviewed scholarly journals but in popular presses in which the exercise of critical faculties is optional. The Da Vinci Code is merely resurrecting in vain a thesis that serious scholars have condemned and buried decades ago.

A central theme of Brown’s work is that Leonardo Da Vinci, as a former head of the Priory of Sion, left encoded messages in his art in order to direct seekers to the truth about Christian origins. Brown makes several highly questionable assertions about Leonardo Da Vinci’s work through the book’s characters.

Langdon, for example, suggests that Leonardo Da Vinci’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was meant to carry a “subtle message of androgyny” and may have been intended to portray Leonardo Da Vinci as the woman; hence the Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile, which signifies “Da Vinci’s little secret.” This idea is further supported with the claim that the name “Mona Lisa” is an anagram for “Amon L’isa,” combining the names of the male Egyptian deity Amon and an alternate pictographic name for the female Egyptian deity Isis.

The claim that “L’isa” is an allusion to Isis is seriously questionable. There is no documentation from academic sources on Egyptology that “Isa” is an acceptable variant spelling of “Isis” and thus no support for the idea that “Isa,” combined with the Italian prefix “L” (meaning “the”), refers to “the Isis.”

Several more tangible difficulties attend Brown’s thesis. First, the closest historical testimony, by Giorgio Vasari, indicates that the Mona Lisa is a genuine portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy merchant. Second, the painting is not known as the “Mona Lisa” in either its country of origin, Italy (where it is called La Gioconda), or its current place of residence, France (where it is called La Joconde). Third, it is a matter of record that the Mona Lisa’s smile was not considered mysterious until the 19th century. Finally, “Mona” is short for Mia donna, Italian for “my lady,” but the English spelling “Mona” is erroneous; it should be spelled Monna. Brown’s anagram fails to account for that extra n!

Even more questionable are the claims Brown puts into his historian’s mouth about customs and documents of the New Testament era, supposedly pointing to Mary’s marriage to Jesus. Brown correctly notes that the common identification of Mary as a prostitute is false; the New Testament actually depicts her as a wealthy supporter of Jesus’ ministry. Brown, however, uncritically following the theories found in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, claims that Jesus must have been married because in the Jewish world, “social decorum…virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried.” Not only is this an argument from silence, it is patently false. The Jewish atmosphere of Jesus’ day clearly had a tradition of celibacy for those who devoted their lives to God, as exemplified by the unmarried prophets Jeremiah and Elijah and as expressed by New Testament-era groups such as the Essenes and figures such as John the Baptist and Banus the prophet (Josephus, Life 2.11). Celibacy and singleness were indeed exceptional, but contrary to Brown, they were not forbidden by any “social decorum.”

I was talking to someone the other day who was an Episcopalian. She said that it wouldn’t make a bit of difference to her if Jesus was married. If Jesus had married Mary Magdalene, it would not have been wrong, but there is no evidence whatever that Jesus ever married. It is highly unlikely that Jesus, who was holy, sinless and pure, would have had physical relations with someone who was not holy, sinless and pure.

There is no evidence in the earliest writings of Christianity (including the Gnostic Gospels) that Jesus was ever married or had a child.

Conversely, there is powerful evidence that He did not. In fact, Paul defended his own right to have a wife (a prerogative that he never exercised) when he wrote, “Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas [Peter]?” (1 Cor. 9:5 niv). If Jesus Himself had ever married, Paul would surely have cited His marriage as the greatest precedent of all, after which it would have been unnecessary even to mention figures subordinate to Him. To claim that the church covered up the “fact” of Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene because this would have humanized Him out of any divinity, so to speak, is outrageous, but this is exactly what The Da Vinci Code maintains as its central thesis.

Brown places much emphasis on what he calls the Gnostic gospels which, he says, the church tried to discredit. He says that these so-called gospels paint a more feminine side to Jesus’ message, and are a further indication of Jesus’ relationship with Mary Magdalene. Another Gnostic gospel, however, the Gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying something quite startling. In an account involving the apostles, Simon Peter said to Jesus,

“Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.” Jesus said, “Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the domain of heaven” (Thomas 114:1-3).

So as you can see if you want to place much credibility in the Gnostic gospels that were never accepted by the vast majority of Christians or the Church, then you have a lot of problems with their accounts of Jesus.

In The Da Vinci Code, the character Teabing claims that the pagan deity Mithras was “called the Son of God and the Light of the World — was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days.” Not one of these descriptions of Mithra is accurate: Mithraic scholarship knows of no such titles for Mithra, nor any birthdate, and as one Mithraic scholar rather bluntly puts it, “there is no death of Mithras” — and so, neither can there be a burial or a resurrection.”

The great historical villain, for Brown, is the emperor Constantine the Great (d. AD 337). Teabing claims that Constantine “collated” the various documents that comprise the Bible “as we know it today,” causing dozens of other gospels to be discarded and destroyed in favor of the current collection of four in the New Testament. He also claims that Christians originally honored the Jewish Sabbath but that Constantine “shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.”

Finally, Brown’s historian maintains that Constantine assembled the Council of Nicaea, at which the church voted on several subjects, among them “the divinity of Jesus.” “Until that moment in history,” Teabing states, “Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless.” Constantine, Teabing asserts, stood behind this effort to turn Jesus into the “Son of God,” as he and the Roman Catholic Church set about “hijacking [Jesus’] human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power.” The Council of Nicaea, therefore, decided on Jesus’ divinity by a “relatively close vote,” which forever destroyed the original Christian message.

It would be a profound embarrassment to any serious historian were he or she to make the errors that permeate these statements. Contrary to Teabing, Constantine did not establish the New Testament canon. Instead, over a period of time the Christian community identified which books were divinely inspired while coming to grips with its own identity and mission.

Robert Grant, a scholar specializing in the composition of the canon of Scripture, writes that the New Testament canon was “not the product of official assemblies or even of the studies of a few theologians,” but rather it “reflects and expresses the ideal self-understanding of a whole religious movement which, in spite of temporal, geographical, and even ideological differences, could finally be united in accepting these diverse documents as expressing the meaning of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and to his church.” No single person decided the canon, and the canonical process was functioning well before the time of Constantine.

In terms of the Sabbath day, this, too, was a decision made long before Constantine. Paul had explained to Gentile believers that observation of a Sabbath or a special day was a matter of one’s own conviction (Rom.

14:5–6) and that the schedule of Jewish holidays was a system that was no longer in effect for Christians (Col. 2:14–17). Testimonies from early church figures that significantly predate Constantine, such as Justin

Martyr (AD 150) and Ignatius of Antioch (AD 110), show that Sunday was already the standard day for Christian assembly. The Council of Nicaea itself said and did nothing about the Lord’s Day or the Sabbath other than declaring that certain prayers on Sunday ought to be made while standing (Nicene Creed, canon 20).

Finally, Teabing grossly misrepresents both the nature and the outcome of the Council of Nicaea. The issue before the council was not “Jesus: Divine or Mortal?”— Both sides agreed that Jesus was divine and not merely mortal. The issue was put on the table, however, because a particular heretic named Arius had declared, against the belief already held by the church at large (and affirmed by the New Testament itself), that rather than being eternal, Jesus was caused to exist by God at a particular point in time.

Arius did not regard Jesus as a “mere mortal” but as a godlike being who had been called into existence by the Father. The vote, despite Teabing’s claim, was not even close: the final tally of approximately 300 bishops left only two who sided with Arius. It seems that the only matter Brown correctly reports about the Council of Nicaea is its location!

I have just begun to scratch the surface of the problems contained in The Da Vinci Code. I have a handout containing much more than I described for you today. If you are interested in obtaining a copy, fill out a blue card asking for one.

It is indeed unfortunate that many who have seen the movie and read the book have been mesmerized by Brown’s storyline and have become convinced that The Da Vinci Code presents, or may present, a true, academic account of history.

On the contrary, art scholars do not support Brown’s claims about Renaissance art and biblical and patristic scholars do not confirm his assertions regarding Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the Church, and Constantine. In the final analysis, Brown’s claims turn out to be just as fictional as the rest of The Da Vinci Code.