Opening Day

With permission granted to me, I will submit a short document by Dr. Paul Maier and his concerns with this film. Dr. Paul Maier is a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University. He graduated from Harvard and Concordia Seminary before receiving his PhD "summa cum laude" at the University of Basel - the first American ever to do so. He is also a best-selling author of both fiction and non-fiction, including "A Skeleton in God's Closet." You can also find more interviews with other professionals at our links column to the right. Here is Dr. Maier.

THE DA VINCI DISTORTION

An Outline by Paul L. Maier

Society has a deplorable double standard: “It’s not politically correct to criticize anyone else’s religion – unless it’s Christianity!” The media are playing “The Jesus Game” as a result, offering us caricatures instead of Christ, and none are worse than Dan Brown’s in The Da Vinci Code.

A. A Literary Critique: The novel is engaging, a page-turner with rapid-fire action, but it’s hardly “pure genius,” as claimed on the book flap: the characters are thin, too many plot puzzles finally get tedious, errors stud its pages, and the ending is a huge let-down. Why, then, did it explode in sales? Controversy!

B. Attacks on Christ and Christianity: Halfway through the novel, its pages are littered with distortions, errors, exaggerations, misinformation, and outright falsehoods. Brown’s method is to offer an attractive pill coated with 20% truth to suggest credibility, but disguising the 80% of falsehood inside.. A few examples:

The Priory of Sion, the main premise of the novel, is a total hoax.

“Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.”

“The New Testament is fake testimony.”

Constantine, the first Christian emperor, was really a lifelong pagan..

Early Christians thought Jesus was merely a man, but the Council of Nicaea turned him into a God, though “only by a close vote.” (314 to 2!!)

Out of 80 gospels, the fourth-century church selected four, and not necessarily the best. (In fact, only about 20 false “gospels” existed.)

The Gnostic gospels were more favorable to women than the canonicals.

The Gnostic gospels preserve a truer version of who Jesus was.

Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and they had a daughter named Sarah.

Jesus appointed Mary Magdalene to lead the church.

Mary Magdalene was the Holy Grail.Leonardo painted Mary Magdalene, not John, to Jesus’ right in "TheLast Supper." (So where, then, is the missing John?)

False Freudian explanations for Medieval cathedrals.

God had a divine consort named Shekinah, and ritual sex took place in the Jerusalem temple!

YHWH, the ineffable name for God, derived from Jehovah (!!)

The Bible evolved through various recopyings. (Just the opposite, in fact.)

The Vatican tried to suppress the Gnostic gospels and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And many more! Each of the above falsehoods is so easily refuted – the Gnostic gospels in particular, which are late, derivative, and packed with absurdities.

C. “Chill out: it’s FICTION, isn’t it?” This common objection breaks down, for two reasons:

1) Brown claims that his material 'is basically factual,' as witness the first page of his novel, as well as his repeated claims in media appearances: “Were I to rewrite the novel as history, I wouldn’t change a word.”

2) All novels have two action dimensions: the 'foreground,' in which fictional players act out their roles, and a 'background' or setting, which, for credibility, is always non-fiction. Obviously, novelists can do whatever they wish with the foreground, but they offer an authentic background. Brown has fictionalized the foreground – nothing amiss there – 'but he has also falsified the background,' and many readers don’t know this. (“Hitler wins,” if Brown wrote a WW. II novel.)

D. The Negative Results: When fiction becomes “fact,” truth suffers. Readers get a totally false view of the historical past, disinformation. “If it’s in print, it must be true,” people wrongly assume: 1/3 of Canadian readersassumed that "The Da Vinci Code" was totally factual! Seekers, who might have accepted Christianity, are now dismissing it. Even some Christians, who ought to know better, are not well enough grounded intheir faith (or even in history), and therefore that faith is shaken. After reading the book, some have totally lost their faith, and some have even died in despair as a result.

E. Who is Responsible? Not merely Dan Brown and radical sensationalist authors like him who distort the truth (James Frey, "A Million Little Pieces"), but the publishing industry itself, which seems to have sold its soul to the corporate bottom line and no longer seems to care about the truth.

F. The Positive Results: Paradoxically, the Da Vinci phenomenon can be a good opportunity for Christian witness, since people are now talking again about Jesus, the Bible, and the church as never before.

For further information, please see Hank Hanegraaff and Paul L. Maier’s book,"The Da Vinci Code – Fact or Fiction?" (Tyndale House, 2004), or amazon.com