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Da Vinci Doubts: Historians Crack the Code
By Paul StrandCWNewsFrom Sony Studios, Hollywood
CWNews.com -

With the release of the movie The Da Vinci Code, millions of people may suddenly be wondering if everything the church has told them is based on a lie, or not.
But some of Christianity's leading scholars are offering answers that confirm that the Christian faith is built on solid facts.
"Seek the Truth" is the movie's motto. The book starts out saying “FACT: all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”
Based on supposed ‘facts’ the story goes on to make the most outrageous claims about Christianity.
Lee Strobel co-authored the book Exploring ‘The Da Vinci Code’. Strobel said the book, "goes right to the core of Christianity: was Jesus Christ the Son of God or not?"
The clever presentation of twisted facts makes many people doubt the Christian faith. Strobel saw this up-close and quite painfully after he'd been wooing a famous Muslim American towards accepting Christ.
Strobel said the man read The Da Vinci Code and told him, “‘This has confirmed all my worst suspicions about Christianity.' And all of a sudden he wasn't interested anymore in investigating the claims of Christianity."
Dan Brown’s boldest charge is that for two millennia the church has conspired to hide that for the first three centuries of Christianity, Jesus's followers just considered him a mortal prophet. And, it wasn't [changed] until the emperor Constantine called together the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD with the express purpose of ‘suddenly declaring Jesus divine.’
But Gregory Koukl of the Christian intellectual organization 'Stand to Reason' says all the evidence shows Christians considered Jesus the divine Son of God right from the start.
Koukl told me, "The early Christians, from Ignatius at the beginning of the 2nd Century on, all defended the divinity of Christ. Now, if this idea was introduced at the Council of Nicea [in 325], how is it that early Christians in their extant writings that we possess now – you can Google them up and find them on the Internet – how is it that – to a person – they all defended the divinity of Christ.”
Author Dan Brown also claims Constantine hand-picked the books of the Bible, keeping only the Gospels that presented Jesus as divine and tossing out some 80 other ‘gospels’ about Jesus.
But that's far from the truth. William Edgar is a professor of Apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary.
Professor Edgar said, "The rival ‘gospels’ had long been dismissed as having no light to shine whatsoever on the New Testament events. They were ‘rival gospels’ because they had a very different theology, so the church never really recognized them."
The book and movie claim Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and their descendants formed one line of the kings of France.
New Testament Studies Professor Darrell Bock has written Breaking The Da Vinci Code. He says Brown depends on two murky passages from two rejected ‘gospels’ to come up with Jesus's marriage.
Professor Bock quoted one, "'Jesus loved Mary more than He loved the 12.’” Bock went on, “And out of that, the inference comes that He was married to Mary Magdalene. One of them has a reference to her being His ‘companion,’ but that term can mean everything from a spouse to a spiritual sister."
Josh McDowell is one of Christendom's leading apologists and author of The Da Vinci Code: A Quest for Answers. McDowell said, "There is not a wisp of evidence anywhere that Jesus Christ was married, but there's an abundance of evidence that He was not."
In Da Vinci Code, Brown states that Jesus intended to make Mary the leader of His new religion, but a ‘sexist church’ hid that truth and then slaughtered anyone who tried to uncover it.
Brown and the film claim a secret group, created in 1099 called the Priory of Sion, protected Jesus' descendants from a wrathful Catholic Church. And secret members of the Priory, like Leonardo da Vinci hid clues in their art to lead people to the supposed truth about Jesus, Mary and their descendants.
Lee Strobel went to France with a film crew to investigate Brown's claims -- including those about the Priory of Sion.
Strobel showed me some documents, saying, "I have in my hand the actual filing with the French government to create this organization, the Priory of Sion, and it is dated May the 7th, 1956 – not 1099. It's signed by a guy named Pierre Plantard as the secretary-general of this organization. But Pierre Plantard was a convicted con man, who did time for counterfeiting and fraud."
“So —“ I asked Strobel, “Jesus ‘wasn't divine,’ He was ‘married, He had children,’ and the church has been ‘lying and killing people to cover this up’ for the last two-thousand years? Well, what else did The da Vinci Code get wrong?"
Strobel added that one thing was "To call the book The Da Vinci Code. Nobody would call Leonardo 'da Vinci.' You don't call him 'da Vinci' – that means 'from the town of Vinci.' His name is Leonardo. Art historians always refer to him as 'Leonardo,' not 'da Vinci.'"
Brown says the Council of Nicaea vote ‘to make Christ divine’ was a ‘perilously close vote.’
But Koukl says the vote was not to ‘suddenly make Christ divine,’ but to affirm the belief in His divinity - which was already centuries old.
And the vote was not close at all. Koukl said, "The fact is, we know what the vote was. It was 316-2."
Brown claims Mary Magdalene's bones are buried beneath the Louvre pyramid.
Strobel said, "Brown adds this bit of conspiracy by saying: if you count up the number of panes of glass on this pyramid, there are 666. Like, 'Ooh, Satan's number, this is a big conspiracy.' Well, if you go over there and you investigate it, what you find out is there are 673 panes of glass."
But Brown and the movie sound so confident in their claims, it can deceive those who aren't educated in the facts.
Professor Edgar added, "We have a gullible culture and a gullible church. One of the reasons is: that we are simply biblically illiterate."
As for seeing the movie, Strobel said, "Why would you want to reward Hollywood for producing anti-Christian propaganda?" So, he thinks only a few believers should lay their money down to see The Da Vinci Code.
Strobel added, "I think, frankly, the only Christians who should go see this movie are Christians who have: number one, done their homework so they cannot be susceptible to the lies of the movie; and number two, their motivation is to reach out evangelistically to neighbors and family members who are going to go to the movie anyway."
Strobel and others say if you're armed with the truth—the real truth—then you should engage in the fight this film and book have begun.
More than a dozen major Christian authors have prepared books, study guides, videos and websites expressly to arm Christians against the claims of The Da Vinci Code.
Josh McDowell said, "We’d better be ready to give an answer to those who ask for the hope that you have in you. When they ask: 'Why do you believe the Bible is true? Why do you believe Christ was the Son of God? Why do you believe Christ wasn't married?' We’d better be ready."
Darrell Bock agreed and explained, "'Because it's going to be very easy to talk about Jesus, as a result of this book and this movie. It's good to be familiar with that which you're criticizing."
Strobel said, "We have history on our side. There's nothing for us to be afraid of with The Da Vinci Code. So let's seize this opportunity, take advantage of the people's spiritual curiosity, and help bring them the real Gospel about Jesus."
Some say that Sony Pictures The Da Vinci Code is Satan's answer to 'The Passion of the Christ.' But others see this as a divine opportunity to talk about Jesus and set the record straight.