Difficult
Questions?
Question:
Has Dan Brown undermined Christianity?
Has Dan Brown's popular book,
The Da Vinci Code undermined Christianity?
Answer:
Dan
Brown's book, although a good read, is very deceptive. On its opening
page it speaks as if it is declaring facts. It is not. It is declaring
speculation. We'll leave the Catholic Church to denounce the speculation
about Opus Dei and they have done that well – you can find information
on the Internet.
There
are two attacks that come through the book that are worth commenting
upon before we make general comments :
•
The supposition that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus
•
That the deity of Jesus was something made up centuries later.
1.
The Question of Mary Magdalene
Let's
answer this by some basic statements of truth:
- There
is no hint whatsoever in the Gospels that there was any relationship
between Jesus and Mary.
- if
there had been any indication of such a relationship between Jesus
and Mary, the disciples would have known about it – and would
not have been able to keep quiet about it!
- There
is no hint whatsoever in the New Testament epistles that there
was such a relationship.
- Dan
Brown relies upon a hidden relationship but the reality
was that Jesus' followers were utterly clear in their minds about
Jesus and the idea that such a relationship could have existed without
their knowledge, or with them being able to keep it quiet, is so
beyond the bounds of credulity as to be laughable to anyone who
knows anything about how the Gospels came into being.
- There
is no hint whatsoever in the early church of such a relationship.
2.
The Deity of Jesus & the Canon of Scripture was decided by Constantine
.
Dan
Brown makes out that Constantine formulated the canon of Scripture at
the Council of Nicaea. Reliance is made upon gnostic writings such as
the 'Gospel of Mary'.
- The
truth is that already the Church Fathers had done a good job of sorting
out the wheat from the chaff when it came to spurious writings.
- The
writings from Irenaeus (bishop of Lyons AD177) make this clear. Irenaeus
was first bishop to identify the books of the New Testament. He was
a disciple of Polycarp, who in turn was a disciple of Ignatius, disciple
of the Apostle John. Irenaeus narrowed the canon not according to
his own whims or interpretations, but through the "rule of faith"
handed down by the apostolic church.
- Writings
such as the so-called Gospel of Mary were written much later than
the Gospels and receive no credibility from scholars. If you compare
the remains of the Gospel of Mary with the contents of the four Gospels
you will see that the former writing lacks authority and even flatly
contradicts the teaching found in the Gospels. There is a mystical
flavour in it, of the Gnostic writers, that is not in the authoritative
canon of Scripture.
- Anyone
who does even the most simple research as to how the canon of Scripture
came into being can see how the ‘other writings', not accepted by
the church as canonical, simply do not come up to the exhaustive tests
through which the New Testament documents passed.
- The
purpose of the Council of Nicea (AD325) was to combat the heretical
teachings of a presbyter, Arius, (from whom came Arianism) who maintained
that Christ could not be fully God. What made this so notable was
teh fact that he was flying in the face of the teaching of the New
Testament, and the teaching of the Church Fathers, the senior authoritative
figures of the early church centuries.
General
Comments:
Areas
of study you might like to make are:
- how
the New Testament came to be written
- how
the ‘canon' of the New Testament came to be agreed
- heresies
that grew up and the spurious writings that came about in the early
centuries of church history and how they differ so radically for the
authoritative documents of our New Testament.
There
are two further comments that need to conclude this answer:
- The
fact is that there have always been those who, for their own purposes,
have stood against the scholarship of the New Testament and come up
with distortions of the truths of the Bible. The Da Vinci Code and
other books like it in the twentieth century are simply modern versions
of the Arian heresy, and in that respect, there is nothing original
in them
- What
is sad about the modern debate is that it shows that gullible people
are only too willing to accept myths because their writers sound plausible,
so that we are simply going over the same ground that was covered
in the third and fourth centuries. If, instead of reading the spurious
writings of heretics, people would study simple books of theology
or church history, they would be better equipped to laugh at such
writings.
The
Da Vinci Code? A good read until you get near the end where it seems
Dan Brown became fed up with the story and seems to have rushed it,
but don't take the theology as truth; it isn't. Take this as an opportunity
to learn the real truth about how our Bible came to be, who Jesus really
was, and the wonder of God's love we can know today. THOSE are things
worth pursuing!
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