Author: Julia Duin
Publication: The Washington Times
Date: February 16, 2004
URL: http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040216-121916-6332r.htm
"The Da Vinci Code," the best-selling
novel that asserts as fact that Jesus Christ had a daughter as well as
a wife, has provoked fierce opposition from Protestants and Catholics alike.
From Dallas Theological Seminary,
whose faculty and students have staged seminars debunking the novel, to
"Christian History" magazine in Carol Stream, Ill., which established a
Da Vinci section on its Web site (www.christianitytoday.com/history), Christians
have denounced the fabrications.
"What caused the stir, at least
in part, was the author's claim that the backdrop to his fictitious story
is based on the truth," says professor Darrell Bock of the Dallas seminary,
who calls the book's claims "ludicrous."
"Dan Brown's book isn't an innocent
book," he said. "There is something else going on here. At its very core
is an attempt to reshape our culture and Christian beliefs."
Mr. Bock's counterpunch book, "Breaking
the Da Vinci Code," is due out in April.
A thriller purporting to combine
art, cryptology and religion, "The Da Vinci Code" has sold 6.1 million
copies to date and has topped the New York Times best-seller list for 45
weeks. A movie by Columbia Pictures is in the works.
America's religious elite ignored
the book for months after it was released in March. Then it became clear
that many Americans, particularly the unchurched, have taken the book as
gospel according to Dan Brown.
He writes that the Emperor Constantine
originated the New Testament during the fourth-century Council of Nicea,
a large gathering of Christian leaders that rewrote Jesus into a divine
figure, writing that the early church had venerated him merely as a mortal
prophet.
Other "facts" recited by Mr. Brown
include assertions that pre-Babylonian Judaism included temple prostitutes,
that sex is a prime way to God that has been squelched mainly by the Roman
Catholic Church for 2,000 years, that Gothic cathedrals are modeled after
the female body, and that Noah was an albino.
Not everyone is alarmed. David Klinghoffer,
writing Dec. 8 for the National Review, said the fact that Christians regard
the novel as a threat to their faith indicates that readers are taking
the book far too seriously.
"This also suggests that the problems
in Catholic religious education are every bit as severe as Catholic conservatives
have been alleging for some time now," he wrote. "If the professional educators
were doing their job, any believing Catholic past elementary-school age
would know that Brown's book is a total falsehood."
Leonardo Da Vinci is cited as the
author of the "codes" because he purportedly placed such clues in his paintings.
One of them, according to the novel, is that the person on Jesus' right
in Da Vinci's painting of "The Last Supper" is not the Apostle John but
Mary Magdalene. The Catholic Church, he writes, hid the "fact" that Jesus
and Mary were husband and wife and that she fled to France after the Crucifixion,
bearing him a daughter whose descendants are alive today.
Christian clerics were alarmed when
a New York Daily News book reviewer called the book's scholarship "impeccable"
and the book rocketed to the top of the best-seller charts.
"[The author] wins your trust with
fascinating facts that are true, then misleads you with insights that are
not," says the Rev. Tim Floyd, pastor of Providence Baptist Church in McLean
whose Wednesday night lecture series on the book typically draws 75 to
80 persons.
"The book easily deceives readers
by cleverly mixing truths, half- truths and complete falsehoods. Oliver
Stone did the same thing with the Kennedy assassination in his notorious
[1991] movie 'JFK,' which most people accepted as totally factual."
What spurred Mr. Floyd - and many
other Christians - to action was a Nov. 3 ABC special on whether Jesus
had a wife. "I knew [such a claim] was spurious, but people were talking
about it, and I realized I had to do something."
When the Rev. George Evans, pastor
of Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in McLean, scheduled a Da Vinci lecture
for Jan. 14, "I thought we'd get six to 10 people," he said. "We got 113
people, and that was on a bad night, with rainy, freezing weather."
Mr. Evans was asked by a parishioner
whether the word "companion" in the gnostic Gospel of Philip meant "wife"
in the Syriac language in which the second-century manuscript was written.
"It could be used to mean 'companion,'
'friend' or maybe 'wife,' but that stands against a flood of testimony
of it being a different relationship," he said. "The Gospels have her calling
him 'rabbi,' 'lord' and 'teacher,' words you would not be saying to your
husband and lover."
Crisis magazine, a Catholic publication,
took a swing at Mr. Brown's book in its September issue.
Such debunkings might seem "like
a pile driver applied to a gnat," author Sandra Miesel says, but "the blows
are necessary to demonstrate the utter falseness of Brown's material. His
willful distortions of documented history are more than matched by his
outlandish claims about controversial subjects. But to a postmodernist,
one construct of reality is as good as any other."
For the author, she says, "to state
that the [Catholic] Church burned five million women as witches shows a
willful - and malicious - ignorance of the historical record. The latest
figures for deaths during the European witch craze are between 30,000 to
50,000 victims."
