In an era infatuated with fantasy and human imagination, it is getting increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. Today, a fantasy novel can have a huge impact on how millions of people think about reality. Exhibit ‘A‘ is the current best-selling novel,
The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. It’s flying off bookstore shelves.
The Da Vinci Code is a gripping, well-written page-turner. Bizarre theories about art, religion, church history and biblical source criticism are woven into a fictional murder mystery that keeps you on edge to the end. Perhaps it goes to show that what bores people is not so much art, religion, church history or biblical criticism, but reality. When responsible scholarship in search of real truth is applied to such topics as art, religion, church history or biblical criticism, our eyes glaze over. We prefer the bizarre and The Da Vinci Code meets that bar.
Readers are eating
The Da Vinci Code up and ending up with fiction masquerading as fact and fact disparaged as fiction. Let's put our
fuddy-duddy hats on and straighten out some curves thrown by this novel.
No, that’s not Jesus’ pregnant wife Mary Magdalene sitting next to him in da Vinci’s Last Supper painting. It’s a youthful John, one of the 12
disciples. John was the last of the apostles to die and he is always depicted as very youthful in Christian art. There is not an ounce of evidence from anything the real Leonardo DaVinci said or did to suggest otherwise.
There’s no blood line traceable back to Jesus. Paul warned against concern over
“myths and endless genealogies” (1 Timothy 1:4).
Jesus was not married. He affirmed marriage as God’s sacred ordinance and gift (see Matthew 19:4-6), but his own mission involved a lifestyle that offered
“no place to lay his head” (Luke 9:58) and called for him to die young to redeem sinners. A wife and family did not fit well into this calling. Like Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha, Daniel (perhaps), John the Baptist and Paul, Jesus was single. This did not diminish God’s ability to use these men in their times and cultures.
Christianity did not crush some sweet pagan feminist era of harmony among the genders. Actually, ancient pagans were famous for devaluing
real
women while worshipping mythical goddesses. They were not so enamored with reality either.
No, they did not suddenly vote Jesus’ divinity into church doctrine in the 4th century. Jesus’ divinity is clearly claimed in the
first century gospel documents. A divine Christ was by no means a new notion in the fourth century. If anything, they needed more reminders of his human side.
The Dead Sea Scrolls do not speak of Christ’s ministry in more human terms. They do not speak of Jesus’ ministry at all.
The mysterious
Gnostic Gospels have nothing to do with the historical Jesus. They have everything to do with human imagination nearly four
centuries later in Egypt.
Were the Crusades about finding or destroying ancient evidence and information about Jesus? The idea that the church went to war to rewrite
history is, well, re-writing history.
Is the Hebrew name for God (Yahweh) derived from “Jehovah”-- the androgynous physical union between the masculine 'Jah' with the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, 'Havah?' This is preposterous. Brown made this up wholesale to blow fancy feminist smoke. ‘Jehovah’ is simply an anglicized transliteration of ‘Yahweh.’
Did the Catholic church develop reservations about sex out of fear that people might be able to commune with God through sex and thus not need the Church? Nice try.
The Da Vinci Code is not just a murder mystery. It’s about disorienting readers with wild enticing claims about Jesus, the Bible, history, art, the
church and religion that have little basis in fact. That many find Brown’s fictional theories to be believable is alarming evidence that Americans are
dangerously uninformed historically. Jesus is a hot topic today, but few are willing to base their understanding of him on the primary sources: the four gospels. They prefer to reinvent Jesus to suit their fancies.
Many people are suckers for whatever tears down the Bible while glorifying personal spirituality. We fall for anything that allows us to trust in our own imaginations more than in historical texts. What could be more reliable than our own imaginations? A character in the novel is told; “Every faith in the world is based on fabrications. That is the definition of faith; acceptance of that which we imagine to be true...” In other words, we worship our imaginations and call it religion.
Yet, this novel is extremely religious. Wicca rituals are positively portrayed. Satanic themes and symbols are sprinkled throughout the story. To
glorify the father of lies, one must do a lot of smooth fabricating, and Brown does just that. The book ends with the hero (stop reading here if you don’t want to know) paying idolatrous tribute on his knees to the bones of Mary Magdalene in a weird symbolic context in the Louvre. He holds an implied hope of carrying on the bloodline of Jesus himself with a woman he has known only 24 hours.
How spiritual.
Recommendation: Read the Bible first. Know what it says for itself before others tell you what they want you to think it says or means. The Bible is still the
BEST best-seller. Not everyone is bored by
reality and
truth.
POSTSCRIPT:
While
The Da Vinci Code is a fiction, the book has a note at the beginning that makes a claim that turns out to be irresponsible. Before beginning the story, Brown claimed that all "descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." This is a serious misrepresentation with regard to the outrageous claims he ends up making about ancient languages, the Dead Sea documents, the Council of Nicea and the fabricated 'documents' allegedly uncovered during the Crusades. His treatment of art work is also "off the wall" (to apply a fitting pun). I support his freedom to write fiction, but his claim to factual accuracy for the related material in his plot should never have been included. It's ALL fiction.
Joel Mark Solliday, M.Div., is the minister of the Brooklyn Center Church of Christ in Minnesota. A
Pepperdine graduate (Art and Religion), he later worked in their Campus Life Office and then at ACU as a Missionary in Residence. He is the current editor of Campus CrossWalk.
