Decoding DaVinci pt.1

Sunday Morning Bible Study

May 14, 2006

Introduction (highlight is slide change)

(Picture of USC cheerleader cheering for Texas touchdown)

Cheerleading, tumbling lessons and camps since age 3: $30,000

Annual cost of attending USC: $ 50,000

Annual cost for staying just the right shade of blonde: $10,000

Cheering when the other team scores: Priceless 

Sometimes the “goof” isn’t so obvious. Looking at the picture you don’t notice it right away.  But it’s there.

We’re going to talk about some pretty serious “goofs” today.  They are actually quite bad, and in fact they’re the kind of thing that can throw some folks for a tailspin. But some people might not notice them.  We’re going to talk some of the problems with the book “The DaVinci Code”.

The Da Vinci Code was written by Dan Brown, and was released in March of 2003.

It sold 7 million copies it’s first year, and was on top the New York Times bestseller list for 47 weeks.

That broke the record for the most sales in a single year.

Today, it’s sold something over 40 million copies has become one of the most widely read books of all time.

To date, the book has been translated into 44 different languages!

Next week, Columbia Pictures will be releasing the big screen version of the book, the movie is directed by Ron Howard and stars Tom Hanks.  What nicer two guys could you think of in the movie industry?  Opie and Forrest Gump!  Sounds pretty innocent to me.

Dan Brown, has also indicated that a follow-up novel will come out within the next year, picking up right where The Da Vinci Code left off.

Here’s what the book’s all about:

The book is a modern day, murder mystery.  It’s a page burner, you can’t put it down.  I read it in a couple of days.

The book begins with the mysterious murder of the museum curator at the Louvre in Paris, the famous museum that houses the Mona Lisa painting and other paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci.

But along with the body of the dead curator, the police find some strange, mysterious clues.

While working to solve the cryptic message, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), a Harvard professor of symbology, and Sophie, a code specialist, discover a trail of clues hidden in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Solving the riddle leads these two individuals, Robert and Sophie on a pursuit all over France and England in search of the Holy Grail, (that mythological cup that some believe caught Jesus’ blood during his crucifixion).

Their search for the Holy Grail ends with the discovery that the Holy Grail is not a cup but rather a person, Mary Magdalene, whom the book says was the wife of Jesus, the mother of their child Sarah, and the person whom Jesus chose to lead the church after His death.

According to The Da Vinci Code, these and many other truths about Christianity have been suppressed by the Catholic Church for the past two thousand years but secretly handed down through the centuries by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion.

Why make a big deal over a fiction book and an upcoming movie?  Isn’t it all just fiction?

Last week we studied:

(Eph 4:14-15 NKJV)  that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, {15} but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head; Christ;
There will be “winds” of teaching that will toss immature believers around.  But the key to growing up is learning the truth in love.

Mr. Brown might very easily laugh at what I’m talking about today.  He could easily say, “You’re taking this way too seriously, I only wrote a fictional novel”.

And if the world would simply take it as a completely fictional piece of writing, I wouldn’t have any problems at all.

It may indeed be fiction, and in fact there is more fiction that people realize, but the problem is that Dan Brown writes his story against a supposed backdrop of facts.  Here’s the opening page of the book (page 1)

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 Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.

“ …All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”

Except that much of it simply isn’t fact.

The secret society called “The Priory of Sion” plays a huge part in the book, most of the plot hangs on the secrets of this group.  There really is a group called this, but it wasn’t founded in 1099, it was founded on May 7, 1956.  Apparently it was started by a fellow named Pierre Plantard and was originally started to deal with tenant’s rights in a small town in France located on a hill named “Sion”.  Later, this same fellow took this club and began to make up a supposed history of this secret society of which he was the “Grand Master”.  He forged documents that linked him to French kings, he even got himself into a bit of trouble by linking himself to someone close to French President Mitterrand.  It was these documents that Brown calls the “secret documents” found at the National Library of France.  Then in the 1980’s a group of three British writers took some of Plantard’s ideas and transformed the “Priory of Sion” into a secret society that actually controlled the finances of Europe and who claimed to be descendants of a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.  Their book was called ‘The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail’.  Plantard died in 2000, and Brown never mentions him in his book.

Google for yourself “Priory of Sion” to check these things out…

It really sounds as if it’s one of those “urban legends” gone wild… like that idea of “Big Foot”, apparently started as a prank, but got carried away to the point where people today still claim they saw “Big Foot”.  The fellow that started the hoax died a few years back…

None of this is really worth preaching a sermon or two about, except for the fact that it leaves the reader with some suspicions as to the accuracy of the Bible and the person of Jesus Christ.

That’s what I want to deal with.

I’m not concerned about you falling away because of the book or movie, you all are pretty grounded.  I want to give you some information that will help you be able to talk to your friends who are asking questions.

The Reliability of the Bible

Is our Bible reliable?  Is it what was originally written?

(Much of the notes that follow come from Charlie Campbell’s presentation “The DaVinci Code Examined”, www.AlwaysBeReady.com)

Brown asserts in his book...

“…The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.” (p. 231)

Obviously we would agree with the first part of this statement.

“…The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds.”

The Bible itself tells us in...

(2 Pet 1:21 NKJV)  …. holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

God superintended the writings of more than 40 different authors whom He inspired to make sure that what He wanted written was actually written.

We also know that the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic manuscripts of the Bible have been translated into numerous translations.

The Wycliffe Bible Translation members and their coworkers alone have translated the New Testament into 578 languages thus far.

But for Dan Brown to continue the popular myth that the Bible we have today is unreliable because it has “evolved” through numerous “additions, and revisions” betrays the fact that Brown is ignorant of the facts surrounding the transmission of the Biblical text or has purposefully thrown the facts aside to advance his own agenda.

There are two pools of evidence that prove conclusively that the text of the Bible has not undergone corruption or change down through the centuries.

The Manuscript Evidence

Manuscript? What is a manuscript?

A manuscript is a hand-written copy of an ancient document that predates the invention of the printing press in 1455.

Today there survive 24,633, partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament alone, not to mention the tens of thousands of Old Testament manuscripts that survive today dating back to as early as the third century B.C.

These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the New Testament that we have in our possession today is the same New Testament that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago. 

There also exists today tens of thousands of manuscript copies of the Old Testament proving that the Old Testament was transmitted accurately down through the centuries.

There was an amazing discovery in 1947.

In Israel a shepherd boy tending his father’s sheep in Qumran, north and to the west of the Dead Sea in Israel, made an amazing discovery while looking for a lost sheep.

There in Qumran, in a hillside cave that had laid untouched for nearly two thousand years, he discovered an ancient collection of hand written copies of the Old Testament.

These scrolls had been hidden in caves by the Essenes, a Jewish sect living in Qumran, 2,000 years ago.

These scrolls and writings, now known as “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” represented every book of the Old Testament except the Book of Esther.

They are considered one of the greatest discoveries in modern times.

These Old Testament manuscripts predate the time of Christ’s birth all the way back to the third century B.C.

It’s manuscript copies of the Old Testament like this that have allowed Biblical scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the Old Testament that we have today is the same Old Testament that the Jewish community had before Christ was even born.

The skeptic asks, “How do they know that the Dead Sea Scrolls date back to before Christ?”

Scholars determined the age of the scrolls by examining…

1. The pottery that housed the manuscripts      

2. The weave and pattern of the manuscript cloths                                                                

3. The form of the characters      

4. The spelling of the words                         

5. The coins found alongside the manuscripts

6. Carbon-14 dating methods were also applied by the University of Chicago     

You can view some of these manuscripts yourself in places like the British Museum, the Cambridge University Library, the Smithsonian Institute, Oxford University, the National Library at Paris, and the Israel Museum.

Now, even if we did not have any manuscript copies of the Bible, there is another way of verifying that the Bible has not undergone corruption, and that is by examining…

The Writings of the Church Fathers.

By church fathers we are referring to those leaders in the Church, of the first three centuries A.D. that followed the original disciples.

Men like Polycarp. Justin Martyr. Tertullian. Eusebius.

These men in their writings and correspondence with other believers and other churches quote NT Scripture over and over again.

If you add up these quotes (and the others like them), the church fathers quoted the gospels an amazing 19,368 times! [Norman Geisler, Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 529-530]

In fact, the early church fathers refer to the NT Scriptures over 86,000 times.

There are enough quotations from the early church fathers that even if we did not have a single manuscript copy of the Bible, scholars could still reconstruct 99.86% of the New Testament that we have today. There were only 11 verses in the New Testament that were never quoted by the Church Fathers.

These quotes have served as a secondary but valuable witness to the manuscript evidence and trustworthiness of the Bible!!!

Isaiah 40:8 “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever.”   

For Brown to assert that the Bible “has evolved through countless…additions, and revisions” again demonstrates either his ignorance of the facts, or his willingness to go against the facts.

The Establishment of the Canon of Scripture

How did we get our Bible?

The word canon is a term that means “standard.”

When we speak of the canon of Scripture we are referring to the standard collection of 66 books that God determined should make up the Bible.

By the second century, the complete canon of Scripture exactly as we have it today was popularly recognized.

The ancient church used three tests to discover the authority of these books: apostolicity, orthodoxy and catholicity.

Was a book written by an apostle or an associate of an apostle (apostolicity)?

Did it conform to the teachings of other books known to be written by apostles (orthodoxy)?

Did a majority of churches accept it (catholicity)?

Only if a book met these criteria was it worthy of being considered part of the canon.

When it comes to the establishment of the canon of Scripture, again Dan Brown makes many inaccurate statements in the book.

The Da Vinci Code says...

Leigh Teabing: “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them.”

Sophie: “Who chose which gospels to include?”

Teabing: “Aha! The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” (p. 231)

This is absolutely false.

First off, nobody knows where in the world Dan Brown got his figure about the existence of “eighty gospels.”

There is no historical evidence for such a statement.

Even counting all the heretical, apocryphal writings about Jesus there were less than 20 documents in the first four centuries that could even be called gospels or accounts of Jesus’ life.

Secondly,

Constantine had nothing to do with the collation (or canonization) of the Bible.

The Old Testament had been compiled by the Jews long before Jesus was even born.
As for the New Testament, its formation began by the end of the first century, nearly two hundred years before Constantine was even born.
(Again, Constantine was born about 274-280 A.D.)

Most of the canon of the New Testament was well known long before Constantine.

In fact, by the time of Constantine, the early church had already dismissed the many fraudulent apocryphal gospels that had arisen later in the second century.

Regarding the canon of Scripture Dan Brown also says this:

“Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that make Him godlike.” (p. 234)

Again, Brown is mistaken.

There is absolutely zero historical evidence that…

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John …were “embellished” in the fourth century.

Neither is there is any record that these texts were ever recalled, in order to be embellished! Recalling thousands of hand written copies of Gospels would have been impossible.

And, if an event like that happened, there surely would have been some sort of mention of it by Christians in their writings, or histories of the church.

And there is none.

Brown also states that…

“The earlier gospels [i.e. the ones Dan Brown says told the real truth about Jesus and that He was just a man] were outlawed, gathered up, and burned...” (p. 234)

There was an order to burn the works of the heretic Arius who did not write any gospels, but there were no orders to destroy the Gnostic gospels, or any pagan works for that matter.

And what “earlier gospels” is Dan Brown talking about?

If he is talking about the so called gospels, written by Gnostics,…

--the Gospel of Thomas, Philip, and Mary …
...he is wrong for saying that these fraudulent writings were “earlier.”

Most scholars, Christian and non-Christian date the Gnostic gospels to about A.D. 250 to 350. (for example those found in the Nag Hammadi collection in northern Egypt), long after Matthew, Mark, Luke’s, and John’s Gospels were written.

There is very good evidence that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were all written before the close of the first century.

Brown goes on to say, QUOTE:

“Fortunately for historians some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Seas Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert.” (p. 234)

To say that the Dead Sea Scrolls contained “gospels,” of any kind (let alone ones that tell the true story about Jesus) again demonstrates that Brown is an unreliable source of information.

Except for a small manuscript that some scholars believe comes from Mark’s Gospel, the Dead Sea Scrolls contained nothing that could even be called a gospel.

Rather, the Dead Sea Scrolls included portions of...

--every Old Testament book (except Esther)

--commentaries on the Old Testament

--extrabiblical works

--secular documents

--and business records.

The Qumran community, which wrote or preserved these documents, had nothing to do with Jesus or Christianity.

Most of their documents were written centuries before Christ.

In fact, the Qumran manuscripts can be dated no later than A.D. 68.

Dan Brown suggests next…

“The scrolls [The dead Sea Scrolls] highlight...that the modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda—to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.” (p. 234)

Again, Dan Brown demonstrates that he has a complete disregard for the facts.

There have been many books, journals, and articles written on the Dead Scrolls (even at a lay level). And one after another, they have documented and clearly stated that the Dead Sea Scrolls did not contain anything mentioning Jesus.

The claim that…

--the Dead Sea Scrolls tell us about the real Jesus

The claim that…

--Constantine was behind the formation of the canon

--or was responsible for destroying Gospels he did not approve of …

…is pure fiction.

Why?

Why have I spent so much time this morning talking about the reliability of the Bible?

Because it’s the truth.

Even though books like the DaVinci Code might not shake some of you, you may know some folks who don’t know what to do with something that makes it sound as if Christianity is bogus.
And if they don’t know the truth, how can they ever grow up?

Our passage in Ephesians 4 talked about being

(Eph 4:14 NKJV)  …tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting,
And whether it’s some bad doctrine or one of the storms of life, we need something to hold on to in order to survive.

Jesus said,

(Mat 7:24-25 NKJV)  "Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: {25} "and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.
The Bible is what God wants you to build your life on.
It’s solid.  It’s dependable.

Next week we’ll talk about the Gnostics, the “Divine Feminine”, and the Deity of Christ.