Thursday Thirteen about the Da Vinci Code

Don't let Dan Brown or Ron Howard ensnare you in their web. The book and movie are fiction, but even the background that Brown calls "fact" is false. If I wrote a novel and screenplay about 9/11 and placed the WTC in Columbus, OH, and made the terrorists Dutch nationals you'd probably think it a bit screwed up even if Tom Hanks played the lead.

The New Testament was pretty much completed before the end of the first century after Christ, so Brown's just a victim of his own imagination on that one. The Priory of Sion has been proven to be a hoax, not from the 11th century, but from the 1950s created by Pierre Plantard. Brown's whole novel depends on this hoax, which he claims to be fact.

1) The Council of Nicaea didn't decide the divinity of Jesus. There have been Dan Browns around for 2,000 years and a few in 325 for the Council.

2) Long before the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), Jesus declares himself God to his followers and they believed him. Brown ignored not only the testimony of Jesus, all his disciples, the writers of the Gospels but also these men (called church fathers), all of whom wrote for believers before the Council took place:

3) Ignatius and Clement, 1st century

4) Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian, 2nd century

5) Origen, Novatian, Cyprian and Methodius, 3rd century

6) Lactatius and Arnobius, 4th century

7) Mary Magdalene was the first witness to the resurrection and wasn't a prostitute.

8) There is no Biblical evidence that Jesus was married, and no reason to keep it a secret if he was. His first miracle was at a wedding; he held a much higher view of marriage than the current Christian church.

9) Da Vinci says the figure in the painting is John. He's the artist, so he should know.

10) There's a lot of evidence that Dan Brown plagarized huge sections of another book and there's huge evidence that by the end of the first century A.D. Christians accepted the current books of the Bible. So who you gonna believe? A guy who makes his living writing fiction and laughs all the way to the bank, or the guys who died for their beliefs?

11) Constantine had converted to Christianity, so he wasn't a pagan, and he had nothing to do with deciding books for inclusion.

12) The Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish and pre-date Jesus.

13) Gnostic gospels were written much later than the books of the New Testament and are basically Greek, not lst century Jewish. They also did not value women, as Jesus clearly did.

"Discussing the Da Vinci Code" by Lee Strobel and Garry Poole, Zondervan, 2006.

Banner photo by Donald Kinney, Pestbouncer.com
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Da Vinci Code