I. Overall Accuracy
A. First of all, there are all kinds of historical and other little blunders throughout the book. Let me just mention a few of them. And by the way, you don't have to take my word for it, you can easily check these out for yourself.
1. The “Fact” page begins by saying: “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.”
a. Well, these documents really do exist, but the evidence shows that they were planted there by a man named Pierre Plantard (1920-2000) in this last century.
b. Wikipedia says the Priory of Sion “ultimately, has been shown to be a hoax created in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, a pretender to the French throne. The evidence presented in support of its historical existence has not been considered authentic or persuasive by established historians, academics, and universities, and the evidence was later discovered to have been forged and then planted in various locations around France by Plantard and his associates.”
c. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Pierre Plantard created a series of documents “proving” the existence of a bloodline descending from Mary Magdalene, through the Merovingian kings of France, down to the present day to include Pierre Plantard of course. This was promoted by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
d. From what I understand, one of his friends latter admitted to participating in this hoax, and in 1993 Plantard himself admitted under oath that he made the whole thing up. This hoax was exposed in a series of French books and a BBC documentary in 1996. Some scholars think Dan Brown just didn’t know this.
2. What else? In chapter 3, it says that it would take a visitor an estimated five weeks to properly appreciate the 65,300 pieces of art in the Louvre. But, the Louvre museum official website says that there are only 35,000 works of art on display.
3. The Da Vinci Code says in chapter 4 that there are “exactly 666 panes of glass” in the Louvre pyramid. This is an urban legend that originated in the 1980s; there are actually 673 (603 diamonds and 70 triangles).
4. We also read in the book that during three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake five million women (chapter 28). But Josh McDowell says, “Between the years of 1400-1800 which is four hundred years, there were less than 100,000 maximum people killed. And at least 20% of these were men.”
5. Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks is said to be a “five-foot-tall canvas” in chapter 30. It’s actually six and a half feet tall.
6. There are two quotes from Leonardo da Vinci in chapter 55: “Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude.” And, “Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!” After reading this it says: “Sophie felt a little chill. ‘Da Vinci is talking about the Bible?’ Teabing nodded.” Well, these are quite easy to look up and as Richard Abanes said, "His first comment, in context, is about alchemists who claimed that they could change lead into gold. His second comment, in context, refers to the foolishness of what he called men's 'own opinions', 'lascivious joys', and 'vain splendour'. Brown completely misrepresented Leonardo's writings to make it seem as if the great artist detested the Bible."
7. We are told in chapter 55 that the word "heretic" was used for the first time when Constantine created a divine Christ and a new Bible and called everyone who didn't accept this a heretic, and then the Latin form of the word is mentioned. Well, the word ultimately comes from the ancient Greek (hairesis) which actually dates back several centuries before Constantine, and was even used before the time of Christ.
8. Also in chapter 55, The Da Vinci Code says the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s and contained other gospels about Jesus. Well, they were actually found in 1947 and contained Jewish writings from a Jewish religious sect, not Christian writings. They are mostly copies of Old Testament books, and internal documents for the Qumran community. In fact, Jesus of Nazareth is never even mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Now, there is debate as to whether fragments of the Gospel of Mark were discovered, which if true, would just be more evidence against Dan Brown.
9. The book says that the Merovingian Kings founded Paris in chapter 60, but historians tell us that Paris was founded by the Gauls centuries before the Merovingians.
10. We are told in chapter 74 that the "Jewish tetragrammaton YHWH—the sacred name of God—in fact derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah." Actually, it's the other way around—Jehovah derives from YHWH. The ancient written Hebrew didn't have any vowels. "Jehovah" came from inserting the vowels from Adonai (my Lord) and then it becoming Latonized (the Y to J and the W to V). Neither have anything to do with Eve.
11. In chapter 104, the Knights Templar are said to have build Rosslyn Chapel, designed it as an exact architectural blueprint of Solomon’s Temple, and worn into the floor is a large star of David. It was actually founded by Sir William St. Clair so that Mass could be said for the souls of his family, it was built upon a blueprint of St. Giles Cathedral, and there is no star of David worn into the floor (I watched a show where they lifted up the red carpet to prove it).
12. And you can go on and on and on detailing all the errors, misinterpretations, deceptions, and distortions. At first I thought it was just Christians attacking it, but there have been plenty of secular articles and documentaries as well. It is attacked by experts in history, art, ancient documents, and many others.
B. Dr Paul Maier (professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University) said, “If a student of mine had written something like this, I would flunk him.”
II. Claims of The Da Vinci Code
A. The material that we need to discuss doesn’t emerge until chapter 55, about halfway through the book. The statements we are going to look at are almost all put in the mouth of a historian and Grail expert named Teabing, as he answers some of the questions of the two lead characters (the symbologist Langdon, and the cryptologist Sophie) about the nature and background of their quest. So, let’s just work our way thought some of the things that are said.
B. On page 231, Teabing says, “The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven . . . The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. 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.”
1. First of all, if you are going to criticize someone’s beliefs, you need to first get those beliefs right. The implied view that “the Bible arrived by fax from heaven” or “dropped out of the clouds” is a straw man. We don’t believe that and the Bible doesn’t say it. Yes, the Bible was composed by men, but men who were chosen instruments of God. 2 Tim. 3:16 tells us that the Scriptures are inspired by God, that they are “God breathed.” God made sure that what they wrote was accurate.
2. Now, “countless translations, additions, and revisions” is excessive hyperbole and you will notice that there is no specific charge here of what was translated, added, or revised. The truth is, there is a wealth of evidence for the integrity of the New Testament documents. How do we know that the NT is reliable, that it hasn’t been changed? Well, one thing we can do is compare its manuscript value to the manuscript value of classical histories which are generally received as authentic.
a. First, how many manuscripts do we have; how many have been found?
(1) You see, they didn’t have the printing press, so ancient documents had to be copied by hand. And so we don’t have the originals of any ancient literature, just copies.
(2) So, why do we care about how many we have? Well, the more ancient manuscripts you find, the more capable you are of being able to come up with the more exact text of the original, since little copying errors and additions can sneak in.
(3) Now, we have 10 manuscript copies of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Of other ancient writings, some are more and some are less, but very few ever get over a hundred. You may want to hold on to your seat; the truth is, we have over, 24,600 ancient manuscripts of the NT that have been found, and over 5,600 of those are in the original Greek language. The next closest of any ancient literature is Homer’s Iliad at 643 manuscripts and that is considered to be unusual. The New Testament is by far the best of all known ancient literature in manuscript copies; the others are not even in the same league.
b. Second, how early are the manuscripts; how close to the author can we find copies?
(1) Why do we care? Well, the further you get removed from the original, the more you can expect intrusion of legends and errors to creep into the text.
(2) Julius Caesar wrote around 50 BC and the closest manuscript we can find is over 900 years later. That’s plenty of time for changes to creep into the text. Of the 142 books of Livy’s History of Rome (59 BC–AD 17), only 35 of them have survived in 20 manuscripts and only one of them (that just contains fragments) is as old as the fourth century (400 years later). Many have much larger gaps than these and are never found in the generation of those who witnessed the events. Why are we not questioning those works?
(3) With the New Testament though, we have manuscripts from the second and third century and even have fragments that have been dated by some to be as early as the first century, the eyewitness generation. We have fragments of the New Testament with only a 50-year gap from the originals, whole books with only a 100-year gap, and the whole New Testament with only a 225 year gap.
(4) Dr. John Montgomery said, “...to be skeptical of the resultant text of the New Testament books is to allow all of classical antiquity to slip into obscurity, for no documents of the ancient period are as well attested bibliographically as the New Testament.”
(5) You see, the truth is, the NT has more integrity in this area than any other ancient writing.
c. Now, as far as “History has never had a definitive version of the book,” we will talk about that in a bit.
C. Later on page 231, Teabing says, “Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen . . . Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land . . . 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 . . . The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
1. One problem is that Jesus became a figure of “staggering influence” only after the day of Pentecost when the church began to grow.
a. You see, Jesus was not a member of any known political party; He never addressed the Roman Senate; He never traveled outside of the regions of Palestine; His closest friends were fishermen; He associated with the despised and rejected; etc. There were thousands of people who heard Him speak from time to time, but in the beginning of Acts, He only had about 120 disciples, which means He could not have had “thousands of followers across the land” to write authoritative biographies.
b. And there is also the problem that many scholars say about 90% of the people back then were illiterate, which means they would be unable to write such works to begin with.
2. What about the assertion that there were “more than eighty gospels” around to choose from?
a. Dr. Craig Bloomberg says if we look in the first four centuries for every gospel found and even those that are simply referenced in other writings, the most you can come up with is 24.
b. Later on, Teabing will make reference to the Nag Hammadi Library of gnostic writings discovered in Egypt (he calls them scrolls, but they were actually in book form). They consist of forty-five separate titles and only five were gospels: The gospel of Truth, Thomas, Philip, Egyptians, and Mary. From what I understand, the most generous count of this type of extrabiblical documents stands at about 60, but very few of those could be considered “gospels.”
c. We will talk more about these other gospels later.
3. He then says the Bible was collated by Constantine.
a. There is no doubt that Constantine was an important figure in Christian history. He granted freedom of worship in 313 AD and held the council of Nicaea in 325. The church went from being persecuted by the empire to being endorsed by the emperor.
b. But one thing he did not do is collate the New Testament. We still have the proceedings of the council of Nicea and scholars are agreed that there is not one line in there that refers to what books should be in the Bible.
c. The gathering of the New Testament documents began within the first century. Paul referred to Luke’s Gospel as “scripture” in 1 Tim. 5:18. Peter referred to Paul’s writings as “scripture” in 2 Pet. 3:15-17. The canon was decided by God and merely recognized by man (“canon” is a term that means “standard” or “rule” and refers to the books received as Scripture by the church).
d. In speaking about this, Dr. Phil Sanders said, "Nor should we think that Athanasius in 367 AD, the council of Hippo in 393, or the Synod of Carthage in 397 determined the canon of the New Testament. The church did not determine what had been believed for centuries, but merely recognized the canon."
e. The early Christian writers (known as the church fathers) constantly quoted from the writings we have in our New Testaments.
(1) Polycarp (69-156 AD) quotes or refers to 18 New Testament letters including all four Gospels. Ignatius (35-107 AD) quotes or refers to 24 New Testament letters including all four Gospels. Clement (first century) quotes or refers to the existence of 11 New Testament letters including Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Just from those three writers, we see that at least 25 of the 27 books we have in the New Testament were accepted and circulating by the beginning of the second century.
(2) Geisler and Nix in their General Introduction To The Bible said of their investigation, “A brief inventory at this point will reveal that there were some thirty-two thousand citations of the New Testament prior to the time of the Council of Nicea (325) . . . Hence, prior to the period of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, there is overwhelming evidence in the manifold witness of the outstanding church Fathers to the text of the New Testament.”
(3) J. Harold Greenlee wrote about the early church fathers and said, “These quotations are so extensive that the New Testament could virtually be reconstructed from them without the use of New Testament Manuscripts.” Sir David Dalrymple was asked about this one time and later reported: “That question roused my curiosity, and as I possessed all the existing works of the Fathers of the second and third centuries, I commenced to search, and up to this time I have found the entire New Testament, except eleven verses.” That’s amazing! If there are other gospels that should be considered authoritative, why didn't the early church writers quote from them in the same way?
f. One more piece of evidence: In 303 AD, the Roman Emperor Diocletian gave an edict that called for the destruction of the Christian Scriptures, which makes no sense if there was no definitive version of the Bible until the time of Constantine, twenty-two years later. Obviously there must have been a set of books so well defined and universally accepted, that even outsiders knew which books the Christians considered as Scripture.
D. Next, on page 232, Teabing says, “Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian God Mithras—called the Son of God and the Light of the World—was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. By the way, December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans . . . Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.”
1. So, what about Mithraism and these other pagan religions?
a. In the book The Da Vinci Hoax by Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel, it says, “Unfortunately for Brown and the authors of ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail,’ there is little or no evidence that most pagan mystery religions, such as the Egyptian cult of Isis and Osiris or the cult of Mithras, existed in the forms described in their books prior to the mid-first century. This is a significant point, for much of the existing evidence indicates that the third and fourth-century beliefs and practices of certain pagan mystery religions are read back into the first-century beliefs of Christians without support for such a presumptive act.”
b. J. P. Holding on his website (www.tektonics.org/copycat/copycathub.html) talks a lot about these pagan mystery religions and said this about The Da Vinci Code statement: “Not surprisingly, scholars of Mithraism know nothing of any of this . . . I have previously surveyed Mithraic studies literature and neither of these titles is noted by Mithraic scholars . . . He died, and was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. This is simply false. The Mithraic scholar Richard Gordon says plainly that there is ‘no death of Mithras’ – which means, there can be no burial of Mithras, and no resurrection of Mithras, either. Some amateur writers cite the church writer of the fourth century, Firmicus, who says that the Mithraists mourn the image of a dead Mithras; but this is far too late to have influenced Christianity (if anything, the influence was the other way around).”
c. Josh McDowell (the noted apologist) said, “Indeed, it is a question of who influenced who. With Christianity exploding onto the scene of the Roman Empire, it is evident that other religions adopted certain teachings or practices from Christianity in order to stem the tide of departing adherents and/or to attract Christians to their side.”
d. You see, Dan Brown has it the wrong way around. There seems to be more evidence to the effect that pagan mystery religions more often borrowed from Christian themes. Now, it is true that Christians later stole the date of December 25, but as you know, the Bible never associates December 25th with the birth of Christ. It’s what the Bible says that we are concerned with.
2. What about worshiping on Sunday?
a. It is pretty clear from the New Testament that the early Christians worshiped on the “first day of the week.”
(1) Acts 20:7, “And on the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread...” The context indicates that this is the Lord’s Supper.
(2) 1 Cor. 16:2, “On the first day of every week let each one of you put aside and save, as he may prosper...” Why do it on the first day of the week? Because that is the day they were meeting.
b. The early church fathers also make it clear that Sunday was being observed well before Constantine.
(1) Ignatius (in about 35-107 AD) wrote: “If, then, those who walk in the ancient practices attain to newness of hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but fashioning their lives after the Lord's Day on which our life also arose through Him, that we may be found disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher.” And Ignatius and others specify the “Lord’s Day” as the day on which Jesus was resurrected, which was a Sunday.
(2) Justin Martyr (100-165) wrote, “And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read . . . Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly...”
c. Constantine had nothing to do with saints assembling on the first day of the week. Christians have been worshiping God on Sunday ever since the establishment of the church in the first century.
E. Then, on page 233, Teabing says, “Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea . . . many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon—the date of Easter, the role of bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course the divinity of Jesus . . . 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!” Sophie responds, “Hold on. You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?” “A relatively close vote at that,” Teabing added.
1. It is actually as Dr. Darrell Bock has said, “The vote at Nicaea, rather than establishing the church’s beliefs, affirmed and officially recognized what was already the church’s dominant view.”
2.
