By Neil Earle
Originally given in Memphis, May 27, 2006.
You'd have to be living on the dark side of the moon to miss all the fuss about the movie The Da Vinci Code starring Tom Hanks.
It grossed $77 million its first week out and matched the buzz of the 6 million copy sale of Dan Brown's book in 2003. Driving around Memphis it's hard to miss the signs of the Mona Lisa in church front yards. Overall, the Christian world has done a pretty good job responding to some of the problems in the Da Vinci Code, book and film. I want to pick up on just three of those issues today.
First – why all the fuss? What's the connection with Leonardo Da Vinci?
It begins at the Louvre in Paris where Tom Hanks, playing a Harvard symbologist (there's no such critter) named Robert Langdon, is called to the crime scene of Jacques Sauniere. Sauniere has been shot but has twisted his body in the shape of a Da Vinci drawing. Before he dies, he left clues that direct Langdon and Sauniere's daughter, Sophie, to various works of art connected with Leonardo.
The trigger is that Sauniere was no mere curator but the head of a secret society that has been sitting on the secret that the author claims would overthrow Christianity – that evidence exists for the fact that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that she was the real leader of the twelve apostles. This fact is indicated (says the Da Vinci Code) by her appearance at Jesus' right hand in Leonardo's famous Last Supper. Ahh, Leonardo was in on the secret.
O.K. Only a few new twists here so far on what you might recall from Jesus Christ Superstar (He's Just a Man) and The Last Temptation of Christ which made a similar flap in 1988.
The three issues that make Dan Brown's novel important for Christians revolve around claims made by the fictitious scholar Teabling whom Langdon consults for help given that the Paris police suspect him of the murder. Teabling (alias Ian McKellan alias Gandalf in Lord of the Rings) revises Christian history to assert that:
The Bible contains missing books – the Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Thomas, etc. – that attest to Mary Magdalene's prominence. "History is written by the winners."
Jesus was only human, his divinity only confirmed by a "close vote" at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD convened by Constantine who wanted a religion to unite his crumbling Empire.
Mary Magdalene has been slandered by the organized church to cover up the scandal of her and Jesus – the biggest cover-up in history.
You can see where some orthodox Christians might be concerned. So what's the answer.
First, the Da Vinci Code at least raises one important point – how did we get the New Testament? Teabling is right – it did not arrive by fax from heaven. A text widely used at Ambassador College in the 1980s, David Ewart's From Ancient Tablets to Modern Translations states insightfully: "The Bible did not fall from heaven as a leather-bound version."
Good point. The story of the transmission and textual preservation of the NT is one of the greatest stories never told. Christians wince nervously when they first hear that the 27 books we have today in the NT were not announced as one coherent canon until 367 in an Easter Letter by Saint Athanasius. That seems like a long time but when we consider that the church was under heavy persecution from the 100s through the 200s, it should not surprise us. Indeed, Luke 1:1-4 says that many writers had collected the Gospel accounts and woven them into a narrative but that his report was orderly and substantiated by eye-witnesses.
Scholars concur with F.F. Bruce's splendid little volume The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? Bruce states that no man or bishop could confer authority on documents unless they were already recognized as such. The test of authenticity was twofold: Was this book or letter written by an apostle or the associate of an apostle? Where does it stand on Christ's divinity? It is interesting that the final argument to accept Revelation into the canon was the fact of Jesus being worshipped by the angels in Revelation 5.
This bleeds into Teabling's second point and it is here that he makes a chief error. The Council of Nicea was called to settle a controversy over Jesus Christ's divinity but even more so on how he was divine and how he could be related to the Father in a way to preserve the Oneness of God. As Luke Timothy Johnson says, the men of Nicea were correcting a distortion not inventing a new doctrine. But – most important of all for the credibility of The Da Vinci Code as a work of history (which it surely is not) the statement of Nicea was not accepted by a "close vote" but by 300 bishops to 2. This is one of Dan Brown's major faux pas.
By 325 AD, Jesus relationship to the Father needed clarification. A deacon had got a following by claiming that there was a time when the Word was not. This was a dagger aimed at the essential atonement – if Jesus were less than God than his sacrifice for our sins was futile. In the end Nicea's answer was simple, elegant, and accurate. It described Jesus as God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God, of one substance (ousia) with the Father. There is one God substance of which the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit all partake. The bishops at Nicea did a nice job but they had to use philosophical terminology because the challenge was philosophical.
But what of the Gospel of Philip, which even Newsweek magazine can see is a weak straw to base so much upon?
These "other gospels" are part of the Nag Hammadi Collection found in Egypt in 1945. They are writings claimed to be from leading apostles but are actually self-incriminated as Gnostic writings. The Gnostics were super-spiritual philosophers who mortified the flesh and were convinced the world and the flesh were so evil that it was blasphemous to say God could have become a mere man. Therefore they invented stories to "explain away" Christ as both human and divine. When he walked, they claimed, he left no footprints; when he died on the cross only his body died, his spirit escaped. This is bogus stuff!
John's Gospel relentlessly shoots down some of these early Gnostic claims. John's signature theme is: the Word became FLESH and dwelt among us. John records that at His crucifixion there poured out blood and water and John is emphatic about that – real man, real blood, real atonement (John 19:34-35). 1 John 4:1-6 takes issue with any heresy that denies Jesus his full humanity. The problem with skeptics today is the other side of the coin – accepting his full divinity. Both extreme negations are wrong.
What of Teabling (and Brown's claim) that Mary was horribly persecuted by the church? Okay, there are reasons some feminists have a hard time with the Bible which we can get into at another time, but consider the other side. First, the veneration accorded Holy Mary Mother of God. Consider that the Magdalene (a town in Galilee) had her own feast day through most of Christian history – July 22. Consider Magdalene College in Oxford. Consider that we only hear about her before 1945 from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John who show her first at the tomb (Matthew 28:1).
The Da Vinci Code raises some issues that Christians perhaps should know a lot more about. It does not overthrow the faith and was not intended to do so. But if it makes us rethink the "how" of the Gospels and forces us to take another look at the old, old story, then it is worth one sermon.
Jesus as God? Check John 5:21, 8:58, 10:33, 14:8-9, 20:28 and 1 John 5:20 for starters.
Further reading? F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents; David Ewart, From Ancient Tablets to Modern Translations; Amy Welborn, De-Coding Da Vinci.