Constantine the Great made up the deity of Christ at the Council of Nicea. At Nicea it was decided which books should be included in the New Testament. Jesus married Mary Magdalene and they had a daughter. A secret organization was in charge of keeping the “secret of the real Jesus.” Keep calm, keep calm! Before you think I am upholding heresies, let me explain that those absurdities are the background of a detective novel which has reached hundreds of thousands of readers worldwide. And it is not everyday that a book reaches the amount of 15 million copies sold. I am talking about the book The Da Vinci Code by the American author Dan Brown.The plot, that will soon come to theaters in a movie based on Dan’s book is the following: Everything starts with the mysterious death of the Curator of Louvre Museum. Robert Langdon, a Harvard Professor and Specialist in esoteric symbols, is in Paris on business. The police asks him to decipher a code left near a dead body. That task guides all the plot and makes Langdom and the cryptologist Sophie Neveu go after the Holy Grail. The characters go into a secret word of mystery and conspiration, aiming to reveal the truth behind the mask of “ centuries of mistakes”. For that purpose they use secret codes and manuscripts church has putatively tried to hide, but that the historian Leigh Teabing wants to divulge at any cost. (It is important to remember that the central topic in the plot of Dan’s book has already existed for centuries.It can be found in esoteric and New Age Literature, such as in the The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, which also was used as reference to his novel.)
It would be only another ordinary fiction book, as many others, if there was not the allegation that it is based on real facts. Brown, with base in gnostic apocryphal books, advocates that after Christ crucifixion, Mary and their daughter, Sarah, left Gaul, in France, where they hypothetically built the lineage of the Merovingians kings. The author also declares that dynasty lasts until today through the misterious organization known as the Prior of Zion, a secret entity which had the Knights Templar as army force. They even fancy that Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo may have been members of that organization.
According to Erwin Lutzer, author of the book The Da Vinci Deception, “The da Vinci Code is a direct attack on Jesus Christ, religion and those of us who follow Him and call Him Savior and Lord. According to the novel by Dan Brown, christianism was invented to subdue women and to keep people away from the ‘feminine holy’”. Brown even declares that in the Old Testament the jews worshiped the masculine God, Jehovah, through His “feminine equivalent” Shekinah. Centuries later, says the author, church, which “hates sex and women”, would have rebuked such worship to a goddess.
Carlos Alberto di Franco reminded in the Brazilian newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, from July 2004, some criticisms found in respectable foreign newspapers about Brown’s book: El Mundo names it an opportunist and puerile book”; The New York Times says it is an insult to intelligence”; To the Weekly Standard it is a mix up of the non-imaginable”; The New York Daily News declares the book contains “ crass mistakes which do not shock only the experienced reader”. The problems is that there are many of them . Million of such readers.
The Jornal do Brasil from December 16, 2004 published an article by Ives Gandra Martins. In a extract it is written: “How to admit one can reveal a secret which could not be revealed for two thousand years about a possible daughter of Christ in a world of proved information and of access to varied sources? Or that in the so highly explored lives of Boticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Boyle, Newton, Victor Hugo, Debussy and Cocteau their researchers could not discover they were masters in a fantastic secret society intitled the Prior of Zion, whose mission was to keep the secret about Jesus’ daughter? All historians of the world were not capable to find out a secret that the oportunist Dan Brown supposedly did through investigations whose sources he cannot even mention. History is despised by a person without scruple who barefaced lies about everything.”
** GNOSTIC GOSPELS
One of the most polemical extract from The Da Vinci Code is the following: “And Jesus’ wife is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all his disciples and He frequently used to kiss her mouth.” That allegation probably had its origin in the Gospel by Philipe, one of the gnostic apocryphal books found in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, and hid there in the IV Century, by an anonimous Egyptian. According to Darrell L. Bock, author of the book Breaking The Da Vinci Code: Answers to the Questions Everyone’s Asking, the original has blanks and brings only the initial ( in the copta alphabet) of the word “ mouth”. “The text is fragmented and says: ‘And the companion of (...) Mary Magdalene, (...) her more than (...) the disciples and (...) kiss her (...) in the m (...).’” Actually, Brown does a great imagination exercise.
Although Brown mantains that it would be weird and even dishonorable to a jew in Jesus time to be single, Amy Welborn, Master in History of Church by Vanderbilt University and author of De-coding Da Vinci affirms that in the first century many men who were devoted to God were single. The examples: from Prophet Jeremias to Paul the apostle. In one of his letters to the Corinthians, Paul refers to other apostles’ wives but not to Jesus’.
All the problem comes from the called gnostic “gospels”. They portray Jesus as a superior Spirit, but say He was a man like any other. And being like any man, what would be the problem if he had married and had children?
A quickly comparison between the four gospels from the Holy Bible and the gnostic apocryphals – results for instance that “that who did not know himself did not know anything, but that who knew himself came to know simultaneously the depth of all things.” It is also assured that salvation comes through self-knowing, or through wisdom, not by faith. Confounding the importance of self-knowing – in a freudian context – with salvation, more and more people have adopted such non-canonical books as their Bible. But the true knowledge which can be found in the real Word of God consists in knowing the only true God, and Jesus Christ, His Son. (John 17:3)
There is another aspect in the gnostic apocryphal books which is clearly perceived by those who know the Holy Bible and its message. The “gospels” by Thomas, Philip and Mary Magdalene do not contain any sentence about the meaning of the judgement and death of Jesus in the cross. That means the central event related to the Redemption History is totally lacking in those books which require a position as gospels. They present only charades which invite their readers to spiritual reflexions, but not to repentance – even though sin does not exist in them.
To intend that apocryphal “gospels” have the same weigh and credibility of the canonical gospels is not to know the Bible History. Besides the gnostic apocryphal “gospels” have been written after the four evangelhos, Mathews, Mark, Luke and John are the only accounts written by eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life, or corroborated by them. Luke did not live with Jesus but did his account under Paul’s supervision and had Peter’s approval. “The Holy Spirit first led Mathews, then Paul and his partner Luke, after that Peter and his partner Mark and lastly John, the apostle, to write the gospel which was given by Jesus to church during his life,”, wrote David Alan Black, in the instructive Why Four Gospels: The Historical Origins of the Gospels?
Moreover, “the most accepted sources about Jesus journey – the synoptic gospels, by Mathews, Luke* and Mark – are consistent with what is known about the Palestine from the first century, so that the chance that they are fruit of imagination of their readers is despicable” wrote Isabela Boscov, in the Brazilian magazine Veja from December 15, 2004. It is good to keep clear that primitive church had already recognized the divine inspiration of the four gospels long before the time Constantine convoked the Council of Nicea. Thanks to the historian Eusebius, it is known that twenty creeds were promulgated in Nicéia. None of them are related to the canon.
The apocryphal gospels, as well as the canonicals, were written by excited people, in a difficult and tumultuous time, in which old answers could not soothe the spirits anymore” declares Érica Montenegro, in the article “Another Jesus”, published in the Brazilian magazine Superinteressante from December 2004. “It is obvious that time today is very different. But once more a great part of humanity is unquiet and discontent with the existent answers. There are many people searching something which can make our existence more transcedent and worther. And those texts written by other men, in a similar search, can give us a clue of where to start to look for the answers.
Without knowing, Érica came close to the description the apostle Paul does of our days: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” 2 Timothy 4: 3-4 (NIV)
(*) Sir Willian Ramsey, celebrated historian and archeologist from the 19th century made an effort to demonstrate that the account of Luke was full of mistakes. However, after a whole life of work and studies he wrote: “The history of Luke is unbeatable in its credibility.” (The Bearing of Recent Discoveries on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament [Grand Rapids: Baker], page 81)
By Michelson Borges, journalist and author of the book Nos Bastidores da Mídia (www.cpb.com.br
Translated by Maria Cristina Reis (reiscrism@hotmail.com)
