As I write this, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has spent over eight months on the New York Times best-seller List, much of that time at No. 1. The book is a fast-paced piece of fiction, and it's fun to read. It says some startling things about Christianity, and that often sells.

The novel describes the murder of Jaques Saunière, curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris. His nude body is found at midnight in the Louvre's Grand Salon. He's positioned his body to resemble Leonardo Da Vinci's sketch, The Vitruvian Man. In his lifeless hand he holds a black light pen, and written on the floor beside his body is a message that is obviously in code.

Harvard's Professor of Religious Symbology, Robert Langdon, is called, primarily because the message mentions his name. Even though he's the immediate suspect, he's Brown's hero, described as "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed" (Brown, 9). The next character to appear is Sophie Neveu, a lovely young cryptologist with the DCPJ, France's answer to the FBI. Since she's Saunière's granddaughter, the message is aimed at her.

The reader is told who the murderer is. He is Silas, an albino hit man who works for Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic group. He's been hard at work, murdering the four men who know the location of the Holy Grail. Saunière is the fourth and last, and his encoded message is meant to lead his granddaughter and Robert Langdon to the Grail. The rest of the book is spent with Robert Langdon and Sophie running around France and England, with Silas and the French police hot on their trail.

Why would such a book elicit so much interest in the Christian community? Subtly packaged in the plot is a completely renovated history of Christianity. For example, several of the characters assert that Christianity, as we know it, is a complete fraud. Jesus was not divine and never claimed to be. His elevation to godhood was the result of political maneuvering in the fourth century. Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and the two had a daughter, Sarah. The apostles rewrote history to preserve their own power, repackaging Mary as a harlot. The descendants of Jesus and Mary are still alive, and the Holy Grail is currently under their protection. And last but not least, Mary Magdalene is the Holy Grail.

Admittedly, that's a lot of baggage for a work of fiction. His shallow argumentation is irritating, and by the end of the book the studied intellectualism gets laborious. But it's not a bad read, and it has a lot of people talking about Jesus. They're working with a great deal of misinformation, but they're talking about Jesus, and that's a plus.

What follows is a brief description of the arguments against Christianity, as offered by Brown's characters. What are they actually saying, what evidence is cited, and does it hold water? If you're a Christian, you may have friends who have read the book or heard about it, and they're interested in this. If someone wants to talk about Jesus, I want to be able to interact with him in an intelligent way. And that's the thinking behind what follows.

What does The Da Vinci Code say about Jesus?

The contention of Brown's heroes is basically that "...almost everything our fathers taught us about Christianity is false" (Brown, 235). For instance:

1. Jesus was not divine, and His deity was the result of 4th-century political maneuvering.

"At this gathering [the Council of Nicea, 325 AD]," Teabing said, "many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon—the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus."

"I don't follow. His divinity?"

"My dear," Teabing declared, "until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet...a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal."

"Not the Son of God?"

"Right," Teabing said. "Jesus' establishment as ‘the Son of God' was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea."

"Hold on. You're saying Jesus' divinity was the result of a vote?"

"A relatively close vote at that," Teabing added" (Brown, 233).

2. Jesus was married – to Mary Magdalene. And not only was He married, but they had a child.

"Behold...the greatest cover-up in human history. Not only was Jesus Christ married, but He was a father" (Brown, 235).

"‘...the early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus' life had to be omitted from the Bible. Unfortunately for the early editors, one particularly troubling earthly theme kept recurring in the gospels, Mary Magdalene.' He paused. ‘More specifically, her marriage to Jesus Christ" (Brown, 244).

"The marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record" (Brown, 245).

3. Jesus' commission to lead the Church after His death was given to Mary Magdalene, not Peter and the disciples.

"At this point in the gospels, Jesus suspects He will soon be captured and crucified. So He gives Mary Magdalene instructions on how to carry on His church after He is gone...According to these unaltered gospels, it was not Peter to whom Christ gave directions with which to establish the Christian Church. It was Mary Magdalene" (Brown, 247-248).

4. The Holy Grail is not the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper, as everyone has believed, from ancient history to Monty Python to Indiana Jones. The Holy Grail is actually Mary Magdalene and four chests of documents that disprove Christianity.

"When Grail legend speaks of ‘the chalice that held the blood of Christ'...it speaks, in fact, of Mary Magdalene – the female womb that carried Jesus' royal bloodline" (Brown, 249).

The Holy Grail is "A tomb containing the body of Mary Magdalene and the documents that tell the true story of her life. At its heart, the quest for the Holy Grail has always been a quest for the Magdalene, the wronged Queen, entombed with proof of her family's rightful claim to power" (Brown, 257).

"The [Sangreal] Holy Grail documents simply tell the other side of the Christ story" (Brown, 256).

"The last Grail ‘sighting' had been in 1447 when numerous eyewitnesses described a fire that had broken out and almost engulfed the documents before they were carried to safety in four huge chests that each required six men to carry. After that, nobody claimed to see the Grail ever again" (Brown, 169).

There's more, but this is plenty to start with. Remember, this is a fictional book, but the claims above are made by characters within the book as if they're true. What makes it more persuasive is the amazing amount of arcane knowledge that Brown includes in the book. Interesting – and little known – details about the art world and the city of Paris are designed to convince the reader that Dan Brown knows a great many things that we don't know. When his characters start to impart information about the history of Christianity, we're already used to accepting unknown, but convincing, information on other subjects. This tendency can prompt the reader to think, "Maybe what he says about Christianity is true, too."

Those are the basic claims made by Brown's characters. Is there any evidence behind what they are saying?

1. Was Jesus' divinity a 4th century political decision?

The Council of Nicea was called in 325 by the Roman Emperor Constantine. He was a new Christian who had legalized Christianity in the empire, and he was troubled by disagreement in the Church. Arius, a preacher from Alexandria, was teaching that Jesus was in some senses less than God the Father.¹ The Council was called largely to deal with the discord over the claims of Arius.

Doctrinal formulation has almost always been defensive in nature. The Church has basically believed what they read in Scripture in its most evident sense. But through the years, different parties have questioned many of the main themes of the Bible – the nature of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, etc. When someone has come with an interpretation that seems to go against what the Bible says, there's been discussion, disagreement, conflict, and finally a decision and eventual acceptance of a new doctrinal formulation. The final formulation usually ends up being what the Church believed already, but described in more technical language, in order to refute what was identified as heresy.

That's exactly what happened with Arius. The Nicene Creed, accepted by the Council, affirmed that Jesus was "...begotten, not made...of one essence with the Father,"² and rejected Arius' ideas. There was conflict after the Council, but ultimately Arianism died out and the Church went on believing in Jesus as the divine Son of God.

Brown's claim that the deity of Christ was a new idea in 325 is a complete distortion of history. Of the eleven disciples alive after Jesus' resurrection and Judas' suicide, ten of them died as martyrs. They did not die because they believed in a human Jesus who was a good teacher. They died for their widely proclaimed belief in the divinity and resurrection of Jesus. The Council of Nicea merely defended that belief and stated it more precisely. In no sense did the Council establish a belief in Jesus that wasn't there already.³

There's one other issue that's too easily forgotten here. Why did the disciples and the church believe in the divinity of Christ to begin with? Unlike every other founder of a major religion, Jesus left behind no body to revere. Today you can visit several locations in Jerusalem that claim to be the tomb of Christ, but they're all empty. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the event that He offered to prove His deity.⁴ The evidence behind that claim – and its realization – is solid.⁵ The very foundation of the early Church was the belief in a divine Christ, with His divinity established by the resurrection. Nicea merely reaffirmed what the Church had long believed.

2. Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene, and did they have a child?

Let me quote from Was Jesus Married?⁶ by Darrell L. Bock, Research Professor and Professor of Spiritual Development and Culture at Dallas Theological Seminary. For more discussion, I refer the reader to his article on the web. But Bock's basic conclusion is that "It has long been believed that Jesus was single. Every detail of Scripture indicates this...Attempts to suggest that any of the many women associated with his ministry were, in fact, his wife are empty speculation...So if we ask what the hard evidence is that Jesus was married, there really is a very short answer. There is none."

What is Brown's evidence to the contrary?

A. The evidence from Da Vinci's The Last Supper

First, there's Leonardo Da Vinci's The
Last Supper. The person to Jesus' right is not the apostle John, but really Mary Magdalene. If you look closely, you can see "...flowing red hair, delicate folded hands, and the hint of a bosom.

"It was, without a doubt...female" (Brown, 243). The reason we haven't seen it before is that the painting was dirty, and it was only cleaned up in 1954 (Brown, 243).

Even more conclusive (from the point of view of Brown's characters), Jesus and "Mary" are leaning away from each other, and the space between them forms a "V". If you "view Jesus and Magdalene as compositional elements rather than as people, you will see...the unquestionable outline of an enormous, flawlessly formed letter M" (Brown, 244-245). And the "M" stands for "Matrimonio or Mary Magdalene" (Brown, 245). This is part of Da Vinci's "code," communicating the "real truth" about Jesus and Mary.

B. The argument from silence

"Jesus was a Jew...and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried...If Jesus were not married, at least one of the Bible's gospels would have mentioned it and offered some explanation for His unnatural state of bachelorhood" (Brown, 245).

An argument from silence is...silence. The New Testament's clear claims that Jesus was divine make it very easy to understand why there was no Mrs. Jesus. Evidently the gospel writers felt that no further comment was necessary.

C. The argument from first century religious comic books

Brown's characters make a big fuss about The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (Brown, 245-248). These are two documents that are part of the Apocryphal New Testament, writings from the early Christian community.

In the establishment of the Old and New Testament canons, there are three different groups of literature that were considered and discarded⁷:

a. Pseudepigrapha. Literally, "false writings." These were "writings attributed to fictitious authors,"⁸ written between 200 BC and 200 AD, and were rejected for the Old Testament canon.

b. Apocrypha. Literally, "hidden things." Fifteen books fitting between the Old and New Testaments that were seen as having some historical and religious merit, but they were rejected for the canon.⁹ During the Reformation, the Protestant reformers clearly rejected them.¹⁰ Soon thereafter, the Catholic Church accepted most of the apocryphal books as "deuterocanonical,"or "later added to the canon."¹¹

c. Apocryphal New Testament.¹² Writings circulating in the first few centuries of the church that were so obviously false that they were never seriously considered for the canon.¹³ The Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene were part of this. These were on the order of religious comic books, and you see such stories as Jesus turning birds to stone because they were making too much noise.

Eusebius, one of the early Church fathers, called these documents "totally absurd".¹⁴ Many of the Apocryphal New Testament documents were efforts to gain a counterfeit "apostolic sponsorship" for a splinter group or idea, such as the Gnostics, Docetists or ascetic groups. "By means of pseudonymous literature the producers hoped to gain acceptance of their ideas."¹⁵ Other documents tried to fill in the gaps of Jesus' life, usually concerning His childhood or the appearances after His resurrection. Still others provided stories of the early Church leaders.¹⁶

Two points must be addressed here. First, even the documents that Brown's characters cite don't prove their case! These apocryphal "gospels" have Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene on the mouth (Brown, 246) and loving her more than He did the disciples (Brown, 247). But there's no hint of a marriage.

Second, we have to look at a character's statement that "the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record" (Brown, 245). Jesus being married to Mary is "part of the historical record" in exactly the same sense that President George Bush is an alien if a supermarket tabloid says so. If The National Enquirer runs a story declaring that Bush is an alien, then that becomes part of the historical record simply because it's in print. But that doesn't make the statement true.

3. Was Jesus' commission given to Mary Magdalene, not the disciples?

According to Brown's characters, this idea comes from The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. They quote from that document, and we're then told, "At this point in the gospels, Jesus suspects that He will soon be captured and crucified. So He gives Mary Magdalene instructions on how to carry on His Church after He is gone...According to these unaltered gospels,¹⁷ it was not Peter to whom Christ gave directions with which to establish the Christian Church. It was Mary Magdalene" (Brown, 247-248).

But if you look at The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, this is the closing passage, (9:9,10)¹⁸ and there are no such "instructions on how to carry on His Church after He is gone." There are earlier verses that describe Mary as having information from Jesus that the twelve disciples had not heard (5:1-11).¹⁹ But there is no clear announcement anywhere in Mary's "gospel" that would turn over authority for the Church to Mary Magdalene.

Again, the sources cited to prove the argument don't prove it. Besides which, all the arguments cited in the section above concerning the unreliability of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the other apocryphal New Testament documents apply here. As fond as Brown and his characters are of these writings, they never measured up – either historically or spiritually – to even be considered for the canon of the New Testament. Subsequent scholarship has shown that to be a good decision.

4. Is the Holy Grail really Mary Magdalene and boxes of notes that would destroy Christianity?

At this point, it's a good idea to take a deep breath and remember that the book is supposed to be fiction. But Brown's book, along with a few others (see below), are indicative of a whole school of thought that is promoting this very idea. If the proofs submitted by the characters in The Da Vinci Code are any indication, this is no threat to Christianity.

Does anybody else believe this?

At one point in the book, Brown's hero, Robert Langdon, has a conversation with his editor. Langdon has just told his editor that he's written a book – about exactly what we've discussed above.

"With a quiet smile Langdon pulled a piece of paper from the pocket of his tweed coat and handed it to Faukman. The page listed a bibliography of over fifty titles—books by well-known historians, some contemporary, some centuries old—many of them academic bestsellers. All the book titles suggested the same premise Langdon had just proposed. As Faukman read down the list, he looked like a man who had just discovered the earth was actually flat. ‘I know some of these authors. They're...real historians!'" (Brown, 163).

We're not told who these "real historians" are, but evidently we're supposed to be impressed. On page 253, Brown does cite four actual books. The one he's most proud of is Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book that presents the same ideas as The Da Vinci Code, but in nonfiction form. I assume that Brown's characters are presenting the best arguments that these four authors have to offer. If that's the case, another four hundred authors wouldn't help. As Socrates observed almost 2500 years ago, it's your arguments, not your credentials or authorities that should be convincing.

But Brown wants us to be convinced. As one of his characters says, "Sophie, the historical evidence supporting this is substantial" (Brown, 254). We're told that Mary Magdalene fled to France after Jesus' crucifixion and gave birth to His daughter, Sarah. "Countless scholars of that era chronicled Mary Magdalene's days in France, including the birth of Sarah and the subsequent family tree" (Brown, 255). None of these "countless scholars" is mentioned by name.

Does Dan Brown really believe all this stuff?

Anti-Christian ideas will usually receive more attention in the secular media. I don't think we'll ever hear Brown totally disavow his ideas in The Da Vinci Code because raising these questions is making him tens of millions of dollars. But he presents these ideas and a type of "feminist paganism" in his book with such enthusiasm that this may be what he actually believes. Added to that, we see some of the same ideas in his previous book, Angels and Demons. So his characters may be faithfully representing the author's position.

Whether he believes it or not, it's profitable. Movie rights to The Da Vinci Code have been bought by Columbia Pictures. The team that created A Beautiful Mind – producer Brian Grazer, director Ron Howard, and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman – are set to go to work on the movie as soon as they finish their current projects.

This book has put Brown on the map. He's working on a sequel, this time with Robert Langdon in Washington, D.C. If Dan Brown can't find a good conspiracy theory in Washington, then he's not paying attention.

What should a Christian do?

The No. 1 book on the best-seller lists talks about Jesus. If you're a Christian, there's a good chance you have unbelieving friends who would like to know what you think about it. This opportunity is too good to miss. I'd encourage you to read the book and be ready to interact with them.

Don't get preachy and don't go further than they want to go. But let them know that Christianity has answers to these questions – and any others they may have. Then, be willing to do your homework or ask another believer for help.

In 1973, Hugh J. Schonfield wrote The Passover Plot. It was trumpeted as the book that would shake Christianity. The Passover Plot was soon out of print, and Christianity is doing just fine, thank you. The Da Vinci Code is fiction, so it will probably have a longer shelf life. But there is nothing here that any believer needs to worry about.

Endnotes - http://mckinneychurch.com/davinciNotes.html - opens in new window.

© Benjie Spears 2003

Benjie Spears is the Minister of Singles & Missions at McKinney Memorial Bible Church in Fort Worth, Texas.