If you want to genuinely understand the widespread public appeal of both the book and the movie, then you have to understand a truth about the viewing public in our post modern world. There exists a significant body of seemingly normal people who genuinely believe that "The X-Files" was really a cleverly disguised documentary. These same people believe two more things: 1) that aliens crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico but it was covered up by the Air Force until finally revealed by that bastion of investigative journalism, The National Inquirer (no, I’m not kidding), and 2) that Dan Brown is a serious historian who is presenting documented facts & evidence (Hmmm. I’ll skip over the whole Roswell thing, lest I get nasty letters from the local Chamber of Commerce for attacking their golden-egg-laying goose and go straight for Dan Brown’s jugular). To go to Dan Brown for an authoritative lesson in Church history is like going to Homer Simpson for authoritative advice on marriage and family. Apart from the momentary comedic relief enjoyed in the exercise, it would otherwise be unproductive. There’s a reason why The Da Vinci Code is sold in the "Fiction" section of the book store, and why my copy (a FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS TRADE PAPERBACK EDITION, MARCH 2006) carries the following disclaimer: "This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental." DUH! Shame Ron Howard didn’t include a similar disclaimer in the movie. But then the X-Files crowd would probably have dismissed the disclaimer anyway - all part of the cover-up you know.

O.K., before I go any further I should summarize the basic plot of The Da Vinci Code, which unless you’ve been living on Mars the past few months you probably already know. Here goes. Brown’s premise is that history is written by the victors, in this case the Roman Emperor Constantine and the male-dominated 4^th Century Church. Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t really God, just a good moral teacher who married one of his disciples, Mary Magdalene. Together they had a daughter. Jesus didn’t die on the cross or rise from the dead. The whole "resurrection/divine Jesus" message was made up by the 4^th Century Church leaders in cahoots with the Roman Emperor Constantine. The early church worshiped Mary Magdalene as "the divine feminine," not Jesus. After Jesus’ death, Mary Magdalene took her daughter and moved to France where her descendants became the ancestors of the French line of royal blood. Originally, "true Christianity" was the worship of the "divine feminine" represented by Mary Magdalene. But the evil female suppressing Church conspired with the Roman Emperor Constantine to suppress this "true knowledge" and replaced it with a patriarchal version centered around the man Jesus. How did they accomplish this? By suppressing over 80 other gospels and certain unspecified "secret documents" which contained the truth about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Instead of these "true" documents, Constantine and the Church included in the New Testament only those four gospels which contained the approved "patriarchal" view of the Church. But these "secret documents" fell into the hands of "unstable people" who threatened to reveal them, expose the fraud and destroy the Church. These keepers of the secret eventually organized themselves into "The Priory Of Sion," a "secret society" which kept the secret alive and passed along the knowledge of Mary Magdalene (and her living descendants) and the location of the "secret documents." The evil Church, through its own "secret society" known as Opus Dei, persecuted the Priory and that’s where the book picks up the story.

There you have the basic "plot" of The Da Vinci Code (hereafter TDVC because I’m tired of writing it out!), a plot which smacks more of a Chris Carter script than something approaching serious history (O.K., he created and wrote The X-Files). The problem for TDVC is that it has a kind of "reverse X-Files" thing going on. Only this time, when we say "The Truth Is Out There," the "truth" isn’t favorable to either aliens in Roswell (there weren’t any, in case you’re still wondering), or to secret documents, secret societies or the basic plot elements of TDVC.

I don’t have the time or space in a 5-page newsletter (take courage, I used to write 9 page newsletters!) to touch on every fallacious point in TDVC. Refuting TDVC is now a cottage industry in the church and there are numerous good books (and many more sloppy ones) by accomplished apologists that you can read if you need to bolster your arsenal of facts and arguments (but you should read the post modern sections below before you do that). If you want some good reviews with worthwhile insights I would encourage you to visit http://www.breakpoint.org/generic.asp?ID=2284  which is Chuck Colson’s ministry website. I find the material & links posted here to be thoughtful and informative. What I want to do is to touch on what I see as some important "Da Vinci Truths". Afterwards I want to reflect on the relationship of TDVC to Post Modernism and finally to discuss the real message behind TDVC - "A Post Modern Immorality Tale."

Da Vinci Truth # 1 - Was Jesus Married?. Nope. There is no authoritative (i.e., New Testament) evidence that Jesus ever married, much less that he married Mary Magdalene. Mary was apparently an affluent woman who was healed when Jesus cast seven demons out of her (Luke 8:2, Mark 16:9). She appears some dozen times in the gospels, making her one of the most prominent women among Jesus followers. There is no evidence whatever of an immoral past (such as being a prostitute), or of a special (i.e., romantic) relation with Jesus. The alleged evidence cited by Dan Brown comes from a gnostic "gospel" containing a corrupted and incomplete passage which Brown conveniently "completes" in such a manner as to imply a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. On the subject of marriage, the New Testament is silent. To our knowledge Jesus never married. If He had married Mary Magdalene, following the custom of the first century, she would no longer have been called "Mary Magdalene" (literally, Mary from Magdala - a town on the west bank of the Sea of Galilee), but "Mary the Wife of Jesus." The dozen occurrences of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament never reflect such a marital change. So, out of curiosity, why didn’t Jesus ever marry and raise a family? I would suggest two reasons: First, marriage and family were not part of His divine calling and mission to redeem mankind through His death and resurrection. Second, because He knew that the result would be even more idiotic stories like TDVC! ‘Nuff said?!

Da Vinci Truth # 2 - The New Testament Canon. As a young and precocious undergrad at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (where we worshiped Dean Smith basketball) I majored in Classical Greek (yep, I’ve actually translated Homer’s Iliad from the original), took graduate courses in Greek paleography (the study of unreadable manuscripts) and wrote a senior thesis on "New Testament Textual Criticism and the Codex Sinaiticus". My point here is that I have had an interest in the New Testament canon for over 30 years and it is a subject with which I am somewhat familiar. The operating "thesis" of TDVC is that the 80-or-so "true" gospels which included information about Mary Magdalene were expunged and suppressed by the Roman Emperor Constantine (circa A.D. 325) and the 4^th Century Church leadership and were replaced with our current four (Matthew, Mark Luke & John). The problem here is . . . well . . . history. Take for example the writings of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons in southern Gaul (think France) from roughly A.D. 177-200. F.F. Bruce says of Irenaeus, "The importance of evidence lies in his link with the apostolic age and in his ecumenical associations. Brought up in Asia Minor at the feet of Polycarp, the disciple of John, he became Bishop of Lyons in Gaul, A.D. 180. His writings attest the canonical recognition of the fourfold Gospel and Acts, of Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philemon, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus, of 1 Peter and 1 John and of the Revelation. In his treatise, Against Heresies, III, ii, 8, it is evident that by A.D. 180 the idea of the fourfold Gospel had become so axiomatic throughout Christendom that it could be referred to as an established fact as obvious and inevitable and natural as the four cardinal points of the compass(as we call them) or the four winds." (FF Bruce, "The Books and the Parchments"). In case you missed the point, allow me to re-iterate. The four gospels of our New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke & John) were already widely acknowledged as authoritative Scripture within the Church by A.D. 180, nearly 100 years before the future Emperor Constantine was even born (A.D. 274)! The other writings, including such things as letters to churches and supposed "gospels," were well known among the churches of the first two centuries, but were quickly recognized as not being either accurate or authoritative. They weren’t suppressed by anyone. They were simply rejected as inferior writings. By the time Constantine became sole Emperor in A.D. 323 the New Testament canon was fairly well established. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria in 367 published a "festal letter" to his churches listing the 27 books of our New Testament, including the same four gospels which Irenaeus had listed 187 years earlier. How’s that for a "cover up." Sorry, Dan, this is just New Testament Intro 101 stuff.

Da Vinci Truth # 3 - The Priory of Sion. O.K. This is going to be more fun than a Christian should be allowed to have in public! On a page just before the Prologue, Dan Brown lists the following "Fact": "The Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Issac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci." (Insert sound of game show buzzer here). Sorry, Dan, wrong answer! The correct response is: "The Priory of Sion is a hoax dating from 1956 and established by a convicted fraud and public nuisance by the name of Pierre Plantard who created fake secret documents on parchments (making them appear old) and planted them in the Bibliotheque Nationale in the 1960s. How do we know they are fake? Well, because one of the parchments quotes a version of the Latin Vulgate Bible which wasn’t published until 1889! And because Plantard’s co-conspirator in the hoax, a fellow by the name of Philippe de Cherisey, signed a hand-written document prior to his death describing how he created the parchments to produce what he called ‘a good hoax.’" This hoax was first uncovered by the BBC in a 1996 documentary (Timewatch: The History of a Mystery, BBC 2 (InVision Productions), 17 September 1996, Written and Directed by William Cran). There have been numerous books & articles since then, which Dan Brown apparently didn’t bother to read . . . or did he?! Even the CBS News program 60 Minutes did an exposee on the Priory (April 30, 2006), which is amazing given their penchant for overlooking forged documents! When 60 Minutes can spot your fraud you know you’re in trouble! (If you’re looking for more documentaries on this subject try this link: http://priory_of_sion.com/dvc/documentaries.html) O.K., did you get the point? If not, let me clarify: "I have sweaters older than the Priory of Sion, and I can forge better documents!"

Da Vinci Truth #4 - The Death & Resurrection of Jesus. In almost every historic argument over facts and their interpretation there is usually a "linchpin" which, if "pulled," causes everything else to fall apart. The argument over TDVC and whether or not it is true or false is no exception. What is the "linchpin" in this argument? It is the heart of the Christian faith. It is the dominant topic of the proclamation of the early church. It is the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Prove the death and resurrection of Jesus, and you de facto disprove all of Dan Brown’s pseudo-history. The death and resurrection of Jesus is the "linchpin" of the Christian faith. Refute it and our faith is in vain. Prove it and Dan Brown’s nonsense is . . . well . . . proven to be nonsense! It really is that simple . . . and that profound.

I was a young Christian undergraduate in the lion’s den of a secular state university when I attended a Campus Crusade conference at Virginia Polytech in Blacksburg, VA (where I had spent my first summer as a new Christian, attending a National Science Foundation summer school in physics & chemistry). It was at this conference that a Campus Crusade staff guy named Josh McDowell handed out the first printed copies of his new book, "Evidence That Demands A Verdict" (the cover was black letters on a red background, and the glue binding crumbled within weeks!). Christians who have grown up since then cannot understand the impact that book had on campus Christians of the 1970s. It revolutionized Christian apologetics on campus by arming already radical believers (hey, these were the days of the Jesus Movement!) with solid historical facts and arguments for such things as the historical reliability of the New Testament and the resurrection of Jesus. If the New Testament documents were historically reliable (listen up, Dan Brown), and if those historical documents recorded the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, then we could confidently offer an evangelistic gospel which called for a decision on the part of every person. And we did!

The thesis of TDVC is that Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t God, didn’t die on the cross for the sins of the world, and didn’t rise from the dead. How do we refute this today? In reality, the arguments are the same today as they were 30 years ago when Josh McDowell was presenting his historical arguments for the resurrection. Jesus didn’t swoon (faint) on the cross (mimicking death), he didn’t revive in the tomb, roll away a 2-ton stone, beat up a 16-man Roman guard and run away to marry Mary Magdalene. Nor did 11 frightened disciples break a Roman seal on pain of death, overpower that same Roman guard, carry away the body of Jesus and go on to live and die as martyrs for something they knew to be a lie.

Over the past 30 years Josh McDowell’s books have been frequently reprinted, and new books on the evidence for the resurrection have been written, but the basic argument remains the same. The death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the linchpin of Christian faith. Refute the resurrection and Dan Brown might have a story to tell. Prove the resurrection, as Josh McDowell and others have done for the past 30 years, and TDVC is just another religious yarn spun from second-rate thread by a guy who should have done better homework.

" . . . ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is, in the sweep of Christian history, a historical marker - encapsulating in one muddled movie an era in which many Christian believers have assimilated a whole lot of new and unorthodox ideas, as well as half-truths and conspiracy thinking, into their faith, while still seeing it as Christianity. Call it Da Vinci Christianity." (Laurie Goodstein, "It’s Not Just a Movie, It’s a Revelation (About the Audience)," The New York Times, May 21, 2006)

Personally, I think Laurie Goodstein has pretty well "nailed it." TDVC isn’t so much about church history as it is about the hodge-podge belief system of so many people today in our Post Modern culture, and, yes, that includes a substantial number of "professing Christians." Much of the Church today is responding to TDVC as if it were a dispute over the facts of Church history. BUT IT ISN’T! No, not really. You see, if it were simply a dispute over the facts of church history it could be easily refuted with a quick crash course in Christian apologetics and church history. For example, the "clue" that the figure seated next to Jesus in Da Vinci’s "Last Supper" is really Mary Magdalene would be quickly refuted by the fact that an authenticated Da Vinci notebook was discovered in the 1800s in which Da Vinci himself explained that the person seated next to Jesus was a very young and boyish looking John the Apostle (the "beloved" disciple).

So, this raises an interesting point. Either Dan Brown is a very sloppy and careless "historian" who didn’t bother doing his homework, or there is something else at work here. As Chuck Colson argued, "Why else would Brown fudge so many of his supposedly ‘accurate’ facts - facts that can be easily checked?" And whatever this "something else" is, it resonates with our Post Modern culture. So, what is Brown’s agenda in TDVC? What’s he really up to?

In his new book "The Gospel According To the Da Vinci Code" author Ken Boa argues that Brown’s agenda is nothing less than "the deconstruction of Christianity." The "deconstructionism" Boa refers to is a hallmark of Post Modernism, the dominant philosophy of our age. I have treated Post Modernism extensively in our House Church equipping workbook, "A Kingdom, A People & A River" (see Module 3: Post Modernism And "A Pain In The Mind"). I only have time and space here to "skim the surface" of Post Modernism in order to make a point about TDVC. In my treatment of Post Modernism I highlight nine characteristics - which I obviously don’t have time or space to repeat here (sorry, buy the workbook!). But I need to touch on three which are relevant to TDVC. First, Post Modernism is characterized by a rejection of "absolute" or "universal" truth. Truth is no longer objective and universal, but has become subjective and personal - the whole "It’s true for me" phenomenon today. Second, Post Modernism is distrustful of institutions, which they feel have perpetuated the "status quo" and often used their position of power to abuse and subjugate people. Third, Post Modernism is suspicious of "meta-narratives." One of the significant philosophers of secular Post Modernism was Jean-Francois Lyotard. In his book La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge), published in 1979, he argued that our Post Modern age was marked by what he termed an 'incredulity towards meta-narratives'. A meta-narrative, or 'grand narrative,' is any grand, large scale theory, philosophy or story (yep, including such stories as Christianity) which attempts to encompass "universal" or "absolute" truth that is binding upon all men everywhere. Lyotard argued that we have ceased to believe that these kinds of "stories" are adequate to represent and contain us all, and for that reason Post Modernism is now characterised by an abundance of micro-narratives ("personal stories" in which people find "personal truths"). In Post Modern thought, the role of philosophy is to "deconstruct" such meta-narratives by demonstrating their flaws, inconsistencies or errors, thereby liberating people to create and pursue their own personal "micro-narratives" based upon a subjective view of truth. We all create "personal micro-narratives" which are "true for us." Regis Nicoll points this out in an excellent article entitled "Code Movie Cracks Under Truth" (http://www.breakpoint.org/listingarticle.asp?ID=2308), "After all the clues have been solved and the identity of Christ’s last living descendent unveiled, Sophie asks Langdon whether he believes it is all true. After brief reflection, Langdon demurs, ‘What matters is what you believe.’" Nicoll sums up the situation well when he says, "In a culture conditioned by two generations of postmodern relativism, subjective truth seems alive and well." Once the pseudo-historical "facts" have been used to deconstruct the "meta-narrative" of Christianity, all that is left to Sophie Neveu (whose name means "new wisdom," hmmmmmm) is her own "micro-narrative," her own "personal truth" and belief. Forget the "facts" (and TDVC has precious few of them). What do you "believe"?

In TDVC Brown has created the "perfect Post Modern storm" by bringing all of the doubt, skepticism, relativism and subjectivism (and a bunch more "isms" I don’t have time to unpack here) to bear on Christianity and the institutional church, and he has done it in a way that has captured the imagination of the book reading & movie going public.  But there is more.

You see, at the end of the long dark night of the Post Modern soul, people can’t live without "meta-narratives." People want over-arching stories that "tie it all together." People want things to believe in. If you are going to "deconstruct" one meta-narrative, then you had better be prepared to offer something else for people to believe in. A revolutionary once observed that the only way to defeat and overturn an existing story is to tell a better one. And so, between the lines of TDVC Dan Brown has spun one whopper of another story, in the hope that you will "believe." In this "substitute narrative" the early church didn’t worship Jesus at all. Nope. They actually worshiped Mary Magdalene, who represented "the sacred feminine." It was this goddess worship that the evil 4^th Century Church suppressed and which the "secret documents" would reveal. Think I’m kidding? Two examples should suffice. In the only gratuitous sex scene of the book Sophie recounts witnessing an orgiastic sex ritual involving her grandfather and several strangely dressed people. We later learn that this was The Priory of Sion (you know, the keepers of the "truth" about Christianity) conducting an act of "holy marriage," a sacrament of sacred feminine worship - you know . . . "true Christianity" (SIC). In the second example, the hero Robert Langdon finally finds the Holy Grail. Describing this scene Brown writes, "The quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Madgalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one. With a sudden upwelling of reverence, Robert Langdon fell to his knees. For a moment, he thought he heard a woman’s voice . . . the wisdom of the ages . . . whispering up from the chasms of the earth."

O.K.. Sick yet? According to Dan Brown’s "alternative narrative," about which I have heard very little discussion among reviewers, "true Christianity" as practiced by the early church was really a fertility cult centered around ritualistic sex and the worship of Mary Magdalene as the embodiment of "the sacred feminine." Not to put too fine a "point" on this, what Dan Brown has done (in addition to the "deconstruction" of the Christian narrative) is to aim a dagger directly at the heart of biblical faith and practice. Biblical Christianity (as represented by both the Old & New Testaments) has fought a 4,000-year-long running battle against sexual impurity. From the incident with Balaam who counseled Balak, King of Moab, to destroy Israel by causing them to "play the harlot" (read Numbers 22-25), to the ritual temple prostitutes of Corinth and Ephesus which plagued the New Testament believers, to battles against sexual sin today, sexual purity has always been a hallmark characteristic of genuine biblical faith and practice. For a Post Modern culture already obsessed with sex (or have you not watched any prime-time sticoms lately?!), Dan Brown has provided an alternative "culturally appealing" version of Christianity, one which declares that ol’ fashioned sexual impurity is really genuine historic Christian faith (now that we’ve deconstructed and exposed that ol’ evil woman-and-sex-hating, oppressive religious establishment!). And you wonder why TDVC is outselling every other book on the bookstore shelf? DUH! Welcome to "The Da Vinci Code: A Post Modern Immorality Tale." I’m sure that Balaam, Balak, the Moabites and all the Canaanites of ancient Palestine (whom Israel destroyed) are feeling very vindicated now to discover that they were right all along, and the Children of Israel and their intolerant God were wrong. Hmmm. Maybe Fox Mulder was right. Maybe "The Truth Is Out There." Yea, right. I don't think so.

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