Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code

-Bible did not arrive from heaven: or not divinely inspired, God-breathed; product of man
-Man created it as a historical record and has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definite version of the book
-Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence
-Over 80 gospels were considered for NT, but Constantine the Great chose the 4 of Matt, Mark, Luke, John
-Was Constantine a Christian? Hardly – He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest
-In Constantine’s day, Rome’s official religion was sun worship – the cult of Sol Invictus, or Invincible Sun – and Constantine was its head priest
-After crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Christ’s followers had multiplied exponentially and Constantine changed religion to Christianity because he was a good businessman, because he could see that Christianity was on the rise and he simply backed the winning one
-Historians still marvel at the brilliance with which Constantine converted the sun-worshipping pagans to Christianity
-Fused pagan symbols, dates, and rituals into growing Christian tradition, he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties
-transmogrification the vestiges of pagan religion into Christian symbology are undeniable
-Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints; Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus; and virtual all the elements of the Catholic ritual, the miter, the alter, the doxology and communion, the act of “God-eating” – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions
-Nothing in Christianity is original; the Pre-Christian God Mithras – called the Son of God and the Light of the World – was born on Dec 25th, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days; by the way Dec 25th is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus; the newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh
-Christians holy day was stolen from the pagans; Originally Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun. When churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning they have no idea that they are actually there on account of the pagan sun god’s weekly tribute – Sun-day.
-During fusion of religions Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous gathering known as the Council of Nicaea, birthplace of the Nicene Creed
-At this gathering many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration sacraments, and the divinity of Jesus.
-Jesus establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea

Breaking

Code 7
Foundational Claims of the Da Vinci Code Found Lacking
-Mary Magdalene was not married to Jesus; Jesus was not married to anyone else; He had no children; Jesus was single in a manner that Jews of His time could appreciate; Jesus, as a religious Jew, could be single
-The secret gospels do not tell us very much new about the centuries just after Christ, other than to make clear that they contain a distinct theology from the biblical books, to show that the church fathers who describes their views did so accurately, and to let us hear them present their view in their own words.
-The secret gospels noted in the novel were part of a contentious dispute among various Christian factions about who spoke best for Jesus and Christianity. These gospels, written after the four Gospels of the NT, claimed access to revelation from God independent of the writings that many in the church regarded as authoritative and as a reflection of the church’s most historic tradition. The presence of such views fueled the formal recognition of the canon, a process completed in the fourth century.
-The deity of Christ was NOT a creation of a fourth-century vote or council but is based on the teaching of the four Gospels and other NT books. These four canonical Gospels are rooted in apostolic tradition, and they were firmly established as the defining texts of the Christian church by the end of the second century, if not earlier
-Mary Magdalene was affirmed in her role as a witness to the Resurrection, a role that made her among the first to announce the Resurrection, a role that made her among the first to announce the Resurrection to the eleven remaining apostles; in that sense, she was an “apostle to the apostles.”

Code 5
How were the NT Gospels Assembled?
-Most problematic of the claims is the Gnostic gospels, and then the treatment of Constantine and Nicea
-Claims that Constantine “commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted the gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned”
-This 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”
-Teabing claims that “almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false”
-Constantine and the Council of Nicea are held culpable for collating the Bible and voting for Jesus’ divinity when, “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet”
-Again Teabing says, “Christ as Messiah was critical to the functioning of Church and state. Many scholar claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power”
-“it was by a relatively close vote at the council that Jesus was made Son of God”
-“because Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status four centuries after Jesus’ death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling His life as a mortal man.”
- In other words, Constantine and the council ignored a while swath of documents in giving Jesus a greater status than He previously had possessed.
- the claim is that Christianity as we now know it is really a creation of the fourth century not the first
-Teabing makes an appeal to scholars who argue that Jesus’ human message was hijacked and turned into something that made Jesus into a God by the later church; here is where the novel and scholarship converge
-in these claims, two ideas are brought together, both of which need examination, they are the manner in which the NT Gospels emerged at central to Christian belief and the issue of Jesus’ divinity
-we tackle the topics in the reverse order: 1) what Christians believed and when they began believing it and 2) what took place before Nicea was held; in other words before Nicea, what did Christians believe, and where can we find evidence of what they believed?
-three points in THE DA VINCI CODE have some validity: 1) there is no doubt that Constantine was a key figure and that his rule was a turning point in Christian history; in the centuries leading up to Constantine’s power, Christians had suffered persecution and martyrdom all of that changed when the emperor gave his support to Christianity and 2) the Nicene Creed was an important affirmation in the history of the faith and was, in part, an effort to control what was to be believed. The creed was an attempt to affirm the core of what Christians regarded as essential for all Christians to believe, a significant exercise for a movement experiencing the diversity that Christianity faced 3) the collection of texts into an official list that became the canon of Scripture gained momentum in this period; a result of that process was that documents on the other side of this dispute were destroyed, and their influence waned
-this council and creed represented what a sizable number of Christian communities had believed for more than two hundred years; that was a major reason this view found support at this council; the four Gospels highlighted at this council had been solidly established and recognized in these communities for more than a century before Nicea; the vote at Nicea, rather than establishing the church’s beliefs, affirmed and officially recognized what was already the church’s dominant view; the canon and how we got it is a story that starts with beliefs about Jesus Christ

The Divinity of Jesus: By Vote or by Conviction
-I. The First-Century Evidence from Paul and Early Traditional Materials
-The writings from Paul date between 50 and 68 A.D., almost three hundred years before Nicea.
-Paul used traditional materials showing that others shared and confessed his core theological beliefs; no one knew who Constantine was when Paul wrote.
-The title “Lord” often referred to God. In the Greek Bible of the Jews, a work know as the Septuagint, the title “Lord” often substituted for “God.” To call Jesus Christ Lord was to refer to His Deity; according to Paul, Jesus was involved in the Creation as Creator, for a person of Jewish background, that would be the declaration of an activity of God the creator; Centuries before Nicea, a major Christian leader was affirming the divinity of Jesus not by the mere use of a title, but by a description of activity.

-II. The First-Century Evidence from the Rest of the NT
-John made it clear in this opening gospel that the Word became flesh is Jesus, and actual and full incarnation of deity; again Creation pointed to deity, just like Paul argued
-The Jews believed that Jesus blasphemed, which meant He insulted the unique dignity of God by His claims
-In light of Jesus’ subsequent resurrection, Jesus is a divine figure worthy to sit in God’s presence because He is capable of sharing God’s unique glory
-the Gospels and Paul’s writings, first century documents, portrayed Jesus as a fully human figure and as One who uniquely bears the full marks and honor of deity; these beliefs were widespread in Christianity almost three full centuries before Nicea

What about the Canon and the Making of the NT?
-Athanasius was the first to list the twenty-seven books of the NT, also the first to use the term canon for this collection; the list actually comes after Nicea, although the history of this collection process shows that by the end of the second century, the four Gospels had, because of their roots, content, and usage, surfaced as the primary sources of Jesus’ life and ministry
-Four forces drove the effort to define which gospel documents bore unique authority for Christians: 1) apostolic roots as a ground for truth 2) widespread use 3) the rise of competing views of faith 4) persecution

-I. The Fourfold Gospel: Apostolic Roots As a Ground for Truth, Widespread Use, and the Threat of False Teaching
- the recognition that the existence of competing views of the faith made their relevance even more important

-II. Persecution
-the sacred books of the Christians were ordered to be burned or destroyed; came from Emperor Diocletian; those who would defy such orders, needed to know which books were worth dying for

What Can We Say About the Four Gospels As a Part of the Canon?
-the recognition of the four Gospels as important sources for Christians significantly predates Constantine and the Council of Nicea
-either the Gnostic texts reflect what Jesus was and is, or the four Gospels are the best witnesses to the movement that Jesus generated; Code 5 is broken
- Attributing the selection of the Gospels to Constantine and the Council of Nicea ignores more than a century of widespread use and recognition of these four Gospels.
-the four Gospels were well established long before Constantine was born