The DaVinci Decoder Ring

There’s no way Jesus could have been married! He takes off one day with 12 other friggin' guys and she doesn't see Him again for 3 days??? Yeah. Come on! No "wife" is going to buy "The Resurrection" story! - Sam Kinison

Adventure Christian Church took on "The Da Vinci Code" two weekends ago. Never got around to posting on it until now. I haven't read the book, nor do I intend to. I've heard the basic synopsis on it:

Jesus wasn't God in human form, didn't die on the cross for my sins, married
Mary Magdalene, had a kid, moved to France and started the Mervonigian (sp?)
dynasty.

Whhhhaaaaaat? So Jesus and Mary Magdalene turned into Beldar and Remulak Conehead ("We're from France")?!?!?! And Leonardo Davinci knew all about this because he was a member of some secret sect that was protecting this secret all these years, but left clues to it in the Mona Lisa and/or The Last Supper?

Whhhaaaaaat? Okay, this is starting to sound like something you'd find on the back of a Kraptain, errr, Captain Crunch box of cereal. Great Saturday morning reading if yer 10!! Ohhhh, wait, it gets better!!! The Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great, basically conspired with the Christian Church as we know it by collating the books of the New Testament and suppressing others that didn't give the Church dominion over culture. Also he further conspired to deify Christ in his collation of the NT to consolidate that power into the church's teaching. So the New Testament is just a power play by the early church to dominate society.

Whhhhaaaaaat? Now I know this book has probably become the "bible" of some leftist kooks out there that would love nothing more than to see John Lennon's imaginings come true - as in: and no religion, too. You know its fun to believe in all sorts of kooky conspiracy theories. I was a die-hard X-Files fan for years. Used to have the Smoking Man's mug on my desktop with a ballooned quote: "Every problem has a solution." (You X-philes out there; tell me who and what ole Smokey was referring to from that quote.) BUT, after the show was over every Friday and then Sunday night, I turned off the TV and rejoined reality. The reality is no conspiracy can survive this long without exposure. Humans aren't that smart to perpetuate a fraud for centuries on end. The answer to that might be; "Well, this book DOES expose it!" Guess that explains why it's on the fiction shelf in bookstores and libraries, was never peer-reviewed by historians, and now Opie and Tom Hanks are making a probably equally pathetic movie based on it. Perhaps it will double bill with Disney's Atlantis.

There have been many attempts to relegate the Redemption of Christ to the dustbin of history. The most fanatically faithful in science tried to declare God as either dead or no longer needed. I used to be quite a Carl Sagan fan many years ago. Sagan absolutely had no use for an active Creator in the universe. His primary conclusion was if God had always been here, then the universe had always been here, so there was no need for a singular Creation event. From that dismissive albeit weak line of reasoning, he then ran down a Hindu rabbit trail of multiple births and deaths for a closed universe to explain away the Singular Big Bang (sounds too much like a "Creation") as rather "Multiple Big Bangs." Carl getting in touch with his feminine side I suppose.

Whhhaaaatttt? As a young man, I gobbled up that kind of farcical crap like a kid at the theatre slamming down greasy popcorn washed down with Coke and all its sugary goodness. “Dragon’s of Eden:” Now there’s intellectual nutrition for you! Now I wonder what Carl was smoking - or how much - right before that particular episode of Cosmos. Our cosmological knowledge today would no doubt trouble Sagan today had he lived. He knows the Truth now. It points to an incredibly precise mechanism to support our lives. Just the slightest upset in the design and life on Earth would have never happened. Fascinating stuff, but extremely problematic to modern day dinosaurs still pursuing the Answer to Life through Darwinian theory.

Anyway, Tim Dally with ACC dissected The Davinci Code with a surgeon's skill. He didn't have a set outline to it, but here are the basic discussion points:

1. The Bible is Truth

2. Jesus’ Divinity

3. The Davinci Code as a historical document

Point 1 The DaVinci Code (herein “DVC”) declares the Bible to be a creation of men and not God. According to the DVC:

The Bible is a product of man, not of God. History has never had a definitive version of the Book. The Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in 325 AD

First of all, Constantine was not a “pagan” emperor. Constantine converted to Christianity in the year 312 AD after a dream in which he “was commanded to place the sign of Christ on the shields of his soldiers” before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in which he won sole power of the western empire, and that “he attributed his victory to the power of "the God of the Christians" and committed himself to the Christian faith from that day on, although his understanding of the Christian faith at this time was quite superficial.” (link). Constantine did make church clergy functionaries in his imperial government and created legislation supportive of the church. He eliminated many old Roman “pagan” traditions in the New Rome – Constantinople, and commissioned several churches such as the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem as examples. But Constantine was an imperfect man and engaged in several imperial intrigues, including the murder of his own family members. Ahh, the plot thickens. Before Constantine showed “favor” on the church, it was persecuted by Rome. Apostles such as Paul were executed by Roman Emperors. From this postmodernesque view of a suppressed church gaining power over suppression through the inter-government role of Christian clergy in Constantine’s government, probably stems the DVC fantasy of Constantine and the Church creating the hugest fraud on humanity our own CIA would hold up as deity itself.

To give the DVC a little credit, let’s suppose its claim is correct for a moment over this Constantinian conspiracy. If Constantine began collating the New Testament at the “First Ecumenical Council of the church” in May 325, why did he put some books in and leave others out? First of all, let’s explore the origins of the four known and accepted, or "canonical" Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Judea in the time of Christ was an oral history culture. Only a small percentage of the population was even literate (the so-called “scribes”). Oral history of a village was passed about its inhabitants and through the generations with fierce devotion to the original. In the example Dally presented, we parents know this fierce defense of oral tradition is often demonstrated by our kids. Dally’s kids used to hear Sukie, the Saggy, Baggy Elephant before bed. Like mine, if I skipped a paragraph or a page in his favorite stories, Bat Jr. (not his real name) KNEW IT!!! Daaaadd! You missed a WHOLE part! Even if I left his favorite parts intact, he still knew I missed a page or paragraph of those books. And that’s how it was in oral cultures. Whole sections of the village able to counter false teachings or foggy memories with “No, that’s not right.” The Gospels were written to defend those oral histories of Jerusalem beyond Jerusalem. The Gospels were written within decades of Jesus’ ministry and the Resurrection by the eye witnesses themselves and so had not yet become foggy in antiquity. This all happened centuries before Constantine converted let alone held the first major council on what the church truly believed. The canon of Christ’ life and death had been “collated” long before. So what was the First Ecumenical Council about? Heresy, basically:

Arius, a priest in Alexandria, taught that there was a time when Christ did not exist, i.e. that he was not co-eternal with the Father, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were three separate and distinct hypostaseis, and that the Son was subordinate to the Father, was in fact a "creature."

Ah-HAH! The DVC’s point exactly! Jesus was just a guy like you and me. Nothing special about Him. But the Bible vehemently disagrees! The First Ecumenical Council sought to declare what the church believed and had believed all along and also what it didn't believe to discredit heresies like Arius'. The canon of the New Testament was developed through three tests: Apostolic teaching, consistency with Jesus’ teaching, and recognition by the Church. The four Gospels, while not all inclusive on some specific facts or starting in different periods of Jesus’ life, are wholly consistent with each other. The smell of conspiracy would spring forth from Gospels that were basically carbon copies of each other. They were written by the Apostles themselves or associates (Mark and Luke) of the Apostles, thus Apostolic. They had to be consistent with what Jesus said. What say you if you found the following in the Bible?

(114) Simon Peter said to him, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven."

Whhhaaaaattt? Wherdaheckisdatweirdness in the BIBLE?!?!?! It ain’t. That be a quote from the “Book” of Thomas in Codex II of the so-called Gnostic Gospels. The Gnostic Gospels can be described as “unauthorized biographies” of Jesus. Something like Kitty Kelly on Jesus Christ. The Gnostic Gospels were found in upper Egypt in 1945. They preached that men could have knowledge of deity on their own and that was the supreme purpose of human beings. Teachings on Gnostic themes began around 140 AD by one Valentinus, its first and greatest teacher. Just 40 short years or so later, Gnosticism was being purged from the church as heresy, nearly 145 years before Constantine held the First Ecumenical “Conspiracy” to eradicate such “historical” documents. The DVC starts breaking down right there. The Gnostic Gospels fail both the second canonical test and as well as the third even if they pose as passing the first with titles such as the “Gospel of Thomas,” so the DVC sympathy with their plight is misplaced at best, historically illiterate at worst.

Point 2 Jesus as God in human form. The DVC denies His deity in suggesting Christ scampered off to France (Gaul) with Mary Magdalene and baby in tow. There’s no need for a personal Savior then and the church loses a huge grip on humanity. The Gospels of the New Testament give no evidence at all that Jesus was ever married, but very forcefully declare that He was “the Christ” (Matt 16:16) or that he was God among us from John’s testimony (John 1:1-3), or as Paul said to the Colossians; “in Christ, all the fullness of God lives in bodily form” (Col 2:9). The first century believers in this faith of God among us, most were killed defending this “conspiracy” the DVC would have us believe. Steven, then, was stoned to death for a lie. Conspirators may be many things, but stupid they are not. Being stoned to death does nothing towards consolidating one’s own personal power and prestige, which is the usual goal of a conspiracy.

Point 3 The DVC as a historical book. It ain’t to put it simply. Historical books are peer reviewed, they are ripped asunder before ever seeing the light of day by fellow historians much in the ancient tradition of oral history – “No, that’s not right,” or “Yes, that’s correct according to the Dead Sea Scrolls.” Historical books don’t appear on the fiction shelf. Historical books don’t claim the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the Judean Desert in the 1950’s when they were found by the Dead Sea in 1947 as pointed out by Tim Dally.

The DVC is hugely flawed as history making the claims it does. As a piece of great American literature, I doubt anybody will remember much about it 10 years or so from now.