Questions about the Bible: 9. Hasn’t Dan Brown proved the Bible to just be a legend?

Hasn’t Dan Brown proved the Bible to just be a legend?

It is not easy to write an international number one best seller. Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ has all the right ingredients. It’s a blockbuster fiction book, and film, a gripping thriller, with sexual intrigue and some interesting characters. It also rewrites the Christian message, and that in itself appeals to many people.

Before the story begins, there is a page marked ‘Fact’, which tells the reader that ‘All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.’ But, that sentence is itself fiction. Eight times in the book, the author writes that ‘art historians’, ‘religious historians’ or ‘all academics’ believe something or other. Each time they appear to be fact, but Dan Brown is writing fiction.

Who are these historians? What qualifications and positions do they hold? What proportion of historians actually agree with what Brown writes? Brown is simply writing his fictional novel, so doesn’t tell us names.

David Shugarts in his book ‘Secrets of The Code’ says that he has listed from Brown’s book 69 factual errors, eight of which are trivial, but 61 are significant errors of fact or history. That is one error every seven and a half pages. It means that two out of three of Dan Brown’s interesting ‘facts’ are actually untrue! If I was Dan Brown I would be seriously embarrassed about this! These errors would hardly matter, except they are on issues concerning God, Jesus, and the Bible. Nobody can afford to be gullible or fooled about such matters, for how a person responds to Jesus Christ matters for eternity.

Dan Brown says, for example, that the Bible has ‘evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions’. We have about 5,700 early Greek New Testament manuscripts, which is far more than of any other ancient book. It means that we can be sure that we have the original texts. Translations are all about trying to provide, from the original languages, an up-to-date translation of those documents. That there are many translations in print today is evidence of the integrity of the translators who revise their work to try to guarantee accuracy.

God is a person, but whether God is male or female was not an issue for Bible writers, as it is for Dan Brown. We read in the Bible of God’s ‘Shekinah’ glory: but that is not a female-equal to God, but rather God’s glory seen in the Temple. These things are very clear in the Bible, and one wonders why Dan Brown thinks his readers are so gullible.

The Da Vinci Code says there were originally over 80 Gospels (biographies of Jesus). But again, this is not true. In the first 300 years after Jesus, there were about 15 biographies, four of which are in the New Testament part of the Bible. There were six other fragments and a few legendary stories of Jesus’ childhood. However, the point about Matthew and John is that they were eye witnesses, and Mark and Luke based their writing on eye-witness testimony. Later legends are only what they claim to be – legends.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first found in 1947, with various scrolls discovered up until 1956. Dan Brown says they were discovered in 1950 and that the Roman Catholic Church suppressed them because they contained potentially damaging information about Jesus and Christianity. However, most were written before the time of Jesus, and only some in the first century AD. They were delayed in publication because it is difficult to piece together tiny fragments, but they are available to be read today, and do not mention Christianity. As for Constantine commissioning a new Bible, the New Testament was established 100 years before Constantine! And he didn’t change the Christian Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Actually, we read in the Bible that Jesus’ earliest followers began worshipping on Sunday to commemorate Jesus, who had died for their sin on the cross and then risen again on the first day of the week, Sunday.

In the New Testament alone there are about 500 verses where it is taken for granted that Jesus is Himself God. God took on Himself human flesh, so that Jesus is both fully God and fully human. It was not decided at the Council of Nicea that Jesus was God, but rather when people then, like Brown today, questioned it, Christian leaders gathered to address the wrong teaching. The vote was 316 (over 99%) to 2 (less than 1%) but Brown calls that a relatively close vote!

The Da Vinci Code says that Jesus and Mary Magdalene (who is only mentioned 3 or 4 times in the Bible) were married, and had a child. Clearly Dan Brown is writing fantasy. No ancient document ever says that Jesus was married. The idea of Jesus having a child was first written 800 years after Jesus. “Would you trust the inhabitants of Planet Earth 2800AD to ‘discover’ new information about you?” Neither was Mary Magdalene from the tribe of Benjamin, and that wasn’t the royal tribe anyway! Brown refers to The Knights Templar finding secret documents under the Temple in Jerusalem which contain forbidden information about Jesus. However, nobody else knows of these documents, and Brown hasn’t been able to produce them!

Dan Brown loves secret societies. The Priory of Sion is supposed to guard the secrets of the Knights Templar and has been headed up by people like Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci. However, the man who wrote about this first, Pierre Plantard, testified under oath in 1993 that he had made up the whole thing.

Why, when so many writers have shown Brown to be deeply and repeatedly flawed, does he stand by what he said? Like many earlier books, he gives his readers excuses for not treating Jesus Christ seriously. It is all too easy to invent conspiracy theories. The Bible warns us not to follow cunningly devised myths, but as Napoleon is supposed to have said, ‘It is amazing what people will believe as long as it is not in the Bible!’ There is within all human beings an antagonism to God, because we are born with a sinful nature.

Though the Church has sometimes been guilty of authoritarianism, Bible Christianity has no place for such misuse of power. Christianity is not anti-women; rather Jesus by His deeds and words, liberated women. Repeatedly, the Bible proclaims Jesus to be divine.

The death and resurrection of Jesus never feature in The Da Vinci Code, but they are central to the Christian message. Christianity is not good advice, but good news. Our wrongdoing is deadly serious because it cuts us off from God and brings condemnation on us. Jesus came to deal with our sin. When Jesus hung on the cross, He was paying the penalty for our sin. God’s just anger against our rebellion was laid on Jesus, who died as the substitute for us. Having carried our sin, Jesus rose from the dead, and is Lord of all.

What a difference there is between the real Jesus we read about in the Bible and the smoke and mirrors of Dan Brown’s story. Brown wrongly says, ‘Most people keep a chronicle of ministry’. Eyewitnesses, however, did record that Jesus was born, lived, taught, ministered and ‘that Jesus died for our sins … that He was buried …that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures’. (1 Corinthians 15 v. 3-4)

You and I would never undergo something as serious as medical treatment, or invest our life’s savings, without having compete trust in the doctors or financial advisors. Therefore, read Matthew, Mark, Luke or John for yourself. Be introduced to the real Jesus. Ask Him to become your Lord, Saviour and Friend forever. It is wrong to try to rewrite history, to devise a Jesus who makes no claims on our lives and has no challenge, even if it leads to a book becoming a money-spinning best seller. Most important is to know that you are in a right relationship with God, through Jesus who loves us and came into the world for us. There is nothing secret about that.

Go to: Where did Cain get his wife?