HOW DARK THE CON OF MAN Continued
Here are some of the most important falsehoods in “The Da Vinci Code”, and alongside are the matching truths that, as Twain said, are now “putting their boots on.”
DVC: “ . . . almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false!”
TRUTH: Ditto for everything Dan Brown “teaches” about Christ! Brown contends that, until the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.), “Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. Not the Son of God.” According to Brown, the emperor Constantine made Jesus divine in the fourth century.
However, in St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (c. 55 A.D.) Jesus is portrayed as God’s Son and worshipped as Lord. In St. John’s Gospel, written almost two hundred years before Constantine was born, Thomas the Apostle sees the risen Jesus Christ and exclaims. “My Lord and my God!” Brown conveniently does not mention Docetism, a heresy circulating in the first century that claimed Jesus Christ was only God, and not human as well.
DVC: “Jesus as a married man makes infinitely more sense than our standard Biblical view of Jesus as a bachelor.” [Here’s why] “Because Jesus was a Jew, and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried.” “ . . . according to Jewish custom celibacy was condemned.” “If Jesus was not married at least one of the Bible’s gospels would have mentioned it and offered some explanation for his unnatural state of bachelorhood.”
TRUTH: Jesus was unmarried, as were the prophet Jeremiah, John the Baptist, the Apostle Paul, and members of the Essene community. The words of Jesus from the Cross, entrusting his mother to the care of John the Apostle, suggest the truth of this assertion.
Brown stresses the importance of the social decorum at that time. If “social decorum” had been a high priority for Jesus he wouldn’t have healed people on the Sabbath, talked to the Samaritan woman at the well, knocked over the moneychangers’ tables in the Temple, or socialized often with public sinners.
As for a gospel explanation for Jesus’s “unnatural state,” here is Jesus’s teaching on celibacy, from Matthew’s Gospel: “Some are incapable of marriage because they are born so; some, because they were made so by others; some because they have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Whoever can accept this ought to accept it.” (Mt. 19:12)
DVC: “The Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
TRUTH: By 150 A.D. (175 years before Constantine) Christian writers were listing the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and Paul’s letters as the most reliable sources of information about the life of Jesus and the faith of the apostles. Also, as Laura Miller observes in the New York Times, Brown tries to have it both ways in “The Da Vinci Code”: “Sources—such as the New Testament—are qualified as ‘questionable’ and derivative when they contradict the conspiracy theory, then microscopically scrutinized for inconsistencies that might support it.”
DVC: According to Brown “Peter’s party” among the early Christians slandered and demonized Mary Magdalen and, through her, all women.
TRUTH: From the beginning, the Church has honored Magdalen for her faithfulness at the foot of the Cross and at the tomb. Christian writers described her as “the apostle to the apostles” because she brought them the good news of Christ’s resurrection. The Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. Mary Magdalen on July 22nd each year, and many churches are dedicated to her as their patron. In the Diocese of Salt Lake City the Cathedral is named for St. Mary Magdalen, and she is the heavenly patron of the entire diocese. That’s a strange sort of demonizing.
DVC: “ . . . every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith—acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.”
TRUTH: That’s an unbeliever’s definition of faith. How does a believer define faith? Perhaps as “a human response to God,” or, “a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed.” A fair-minded person would let a socialist give his definition of capitalism, but he or she would let the capitalist give his definition as well. Believers and unbelievers should be treated the same way.
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