The DaVinci Code

Holy Grail? The Last Supper? The DaVinci Code? Gospel of Judas? Canonicity of Scripture? Gnosticism? Mary Magdalen? Dan Brown?

What is this stuff and why should I care?

On May 19th, Sony Pictures is going to release the long awaited movie The DaVinci Code. It is based on the best selling book of the same name by Dan Brown. This Ron Howard film will be staring Tom Hanks and you bet that this film will be a block buster.

Here is a summary of Brown’s novel;

“The central event of the novel is the murder of a Louvre curator, found in the pose of Leonardo’s celebrated “Vitruvian man”—a figure inscribed in both a circle and a square—which sets in motion an ingenious plot involving numerological symbolism, verbal puzzles and an alternative version of Christianity, wrapped around the legend of the Holy Grail. Brown posits that Leonardo is at the center of a secret society that has maintained a secret from biblical times, namely that Mary Magdalene, far from being a prostitute, was the rightful wife of Jesus; Mary and Jesus had a child and heirs; and finally, the heirs, whose existence threatened church dogma, were protected by a clandestine priory that counted Leonardo among its members. The novel also contends that the Holy Grail, contrary to most ideas that it was the chalice Jesus used as He introduced the ordinance of communion, was actually the pregnant Mary Magdalene, the lost vessel of Jesus’ blood. Thus, the figure sitting on Jesus’ right in Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” generally taken to be the effeminate apostle John, was actually Mary Magdalene. Since there is no object on the table that could be a grail or chalice, Brown contends that Mary symbolizes the actual grail, which is a metaphor for the sacred feminine and a form of goddess worship suppressed by Christianity.”

Too preposterous to even warrant a response, right? Wrong! People have been talking about this book, and with the movie coming out it is going to be a topic of conversations everywhere.

If our attitude towards this book is that it is ‘to preposterous to even warrant a response’ then we are going to become what the usual dogmatic, narrow-minded Christian stereotype portrays. So what do we do? Buy and read the book? Go see the movie? Wouldn’t that be supporting the whole thing?

Let me say this: I have seen 2 people in my office (of only 60 employees) with this book already. People are going to be talking and if I can not talk intelligently about this book, or if I refuse to participate in the conversations about this book, then I will be missing opportunities to show the obvious lies and inaccuracies of the book and the coming movie. I will miss opportunities to share the truth and reliability of the Bible, about Jesus, and salvation.

We need to look at this as a great opportunity to share Jesus in a nation where that freedom is slowly being taken away. For more detailed responses to questions raised in the book I suggest this book: The DaVinci Deception by Edwin Lutzer.