Hollywood Is in 'Da Vinci' Mode

by Alex McFarland

On May 19, Sony Pictures will release a movie based on Dan Brown's bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. Brown is not a meticulous historian: His book is rife with errors. Having said that, I believe the film's release presents an excellent opportunity for us to share the solid, compelling, truthful grounds on which Christianity rests.

The Da Vinci Code begins with a murder, followed by a frantic search for the Holy Grail. Informed by a literary twist, we come to learn that the Grail was not the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper, but the very womb of Mary, which carried the descendants of the royal bloodline.

However intriguing this theory might have been to the millions who bought Brown's book, there's no historical evidence to even suggest such a thing. The author also proposes that Mary's tomb contains documents capable of destroying Christianity. It's all presented as part of a virtuous quest to return to a more holistic spirituality constructed around a divine goddess. Although the dubious documents from Mary's tomb are never revealed, the story still takes a dim view of Christianity and distorts doctrine.

The Da Vinci Code is acknowledged as fiction. Still, Brown begins the book by asserting that his characters and historical claims are factual. He sows seeds of doubt about the Christian faith and challenges important core truths:

  • The identity of Jesus: Christians know Jesus to be God's Son and the promised Messiah based on the testimony of Scripture, the claims of Christ and empirical historical data. Brown depicts Jesus as a mere man.

  • The deeds of Jesus: Although Jesus was the sinless Savior, Brown portrays Him throughout the novel as the mystical husband of Mary Magdalene.

  • The mission and purpose Jesus: Brown misrepresents the Lord's mission by claiming that procreation, not eternal salvation, was Jesus' primary purpose.

  • The origin and content of the Bible: The Da Vinci Code presents outright falsehoods regarding the origin of Scripture and recklessly casts doubt on the trustworthiness of the Bible.

  • The origin of the church: To learn the true history of the beginnings of the church, read Matthew 16 and the book of Acts. Even secular historians have called Luke, the writer of Acts, "a historian of the first rank."

  • The message of the early church: The true message of the first-century church was salvation, authenticated by the physically resurrected Jesus — an event corroborated by early, eyewitness testimony.

  • The motives of early church leaders: Brown questions the intentions of trailblazing saints, ignoring why many of them gave their lives to spread and defend the truth of the gospel.

  • The relevance and trustworthiness of the church today: Given what he considers to be Christianity's devious motives and baseless origins, Brown feels the best hope for the modern world is the elimination of this corrupt, centuries-old institution.

With so much buzz surrounding The Da Vinci Code, Christians must be prepared to defend the truths we hold dear against Brown's half truths, faulty logic and revisionist history. I find it interesting that the author claims that Constantine was the first to conceptualize Jesus as deity. Anyone even remotely familiar with the Gospels knows that's a crock of poodle-poo: Jesus asserted His own divinity on many occasions (Matt. 6:64; Luke 24:25, etc.). Much like Anne Rice speculating about Jesus' boyhood years in her disappointing novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (written about and narrated by a 7-year-old Messiah), Brown, too, has been inspired by an unreliable muse.

My intent is not to condemn readers of the book or those who plan to see the movie. Rather, I hope that Christians who check out the movie will go armed with the knowledge that Brown is a fiction writer with an apparent agenda, and an unhealthy one at that.

Author and speaker Alex McFarland is Focus on the Family's director of teen apologetics. For an even more detailed treatise on this subject, Alex recommends the book The Da Vinci Deception by Erwin Lutzer, Ph.D.

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