Is The Movie As Bad As The Book?
A “DaVinci Code” Checklist

1

“Until that moment in history [the Council of Nicaea, AD 325], Jesus was viewed by His (sic) followers as a mortal prophet ... a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A Mortal” (Sir Leigh Teabing).  (25 points)

This is the five-star mistake. The question before the bishops of Nicaea was NOT “Is Jesus divine?” but “Is Jesus equal to or subordinate to God the Father?” The bishops resoundingly affirmed (not “a relatively close vote” as the DVC claims), as the faith of the Church from the beginning, that that he is “true God from true God, one in being with Father.” Go to the back of the class, Sir Leigh.

2

“More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them” (Sir Leigh again). (25 points)

What’s this “among them”?  The last I looked there were only these four.  And they were received by the Church very early on as indisputably the inspired record of Christ’s saving words and deeds.  So there weren’t 70 or more disappointed evangelists who lost the chance to see their names up in parchment. The New Testament contains 27 books including the four gospels. There were quite a few Christian books written in the first couple of centuries of Christianity; but, besides these 27, only a handful of other books were ever seriously considered for inclusion but eventually rejected.

3

As for who chose the four among these supposed 80, “The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great. … He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized in his deathbed, too weak to protest” (Sir Leigh does it again). (20 points)

First of all “the Bible” also contains 45 books of inspired Jewish writings which Constantine clearly had nothing to do with.  Second, the list of books of the New Testament (the “canon”) was on the way to formation well before Constantine was a gleam in his father’s eye.  St. Athanasius was the first to give the list of books as they appear exactly in the New Testament today in a letter written in AD 367. However, the list had been pretty well firmed up by about AD 200. St. Iranaeus, writing around AD 180, quotes from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as THE four gospels. That’s 140 years before Constantine and Nicaea.  In some parts of the ancient Christian world, a few books that which were eventually included in the New Testament were not immediately accepted, and a few which were eventually not included were revered for a time.  The development of the canon was the work of the whole Church and not just one man.

As for Constantine, he was a politician who had the foresight to see that the future lay with Christianity, but he also had to rule an empire that was still largely pagan, especially the Senate in the ancient capital of Rome. Still, he clearly cast his lot with Christianity, raising his heirs as Christians and being baptized on his deathbed, when he faced no more awkward compromises.  

4

“Fortunately for historians, some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert.  And, of course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. … these documents speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms” (Sir Leigh has a million of them). (15 points)

I would be surprised if the reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls makes it into the film. It’s such a bad mistake that Sir Leigh should lose his knighthood. The Dead Sea Scrolls don’t contain gospels or any Christian writings. They antedate the time of Jesus and contain exclusively Jewish writings.  As for the Nag Hammadi texts, they follow the time of Jesus by a significantly greater distance in time than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There was never any question of their inclusion in the New Testament. And “human” seems to be in the eye of the beholder.  The Jesus of Nag Hammadi is the mouthpiece for a very obscure philosophy which rejects the material world and makes salvation available only  to a few who receive special knowledge (the Greek for “knowledge” is “gnosis,” so these groups are called “Gnostic.”).  These writings do not represent an earlier form of Christianity but a later development which uses Christian names and terminology for a philosophy/theology very different from that which Jesus and apostles preached. Sir Leigh cannot have read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, if he thinks that the Jesus portrayed in them is some inscrutable divinity. 

5

“Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His (sic) original followers, hijacking His human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power” (Sir Leigh – what he doesn’t know about Christianity could fill a book. … Sorry, it does). (15 points)

Sir Leigh seems to be entirely unaware that there was a powerful tendency in the first five centuries among some Christians to consider Jesus ONLY DIVINE.  These Christians thought it necessary to portray his humanity as a pretend kind of thing to protect his divinity.  The Church’s response to that was to affirm unequivocally both the humanity and divinity of Jesus. The Council of Chalcedon, in 451, proclaimed that “…our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, the same perfect in Godhead and the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man ….made known in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the difference of the natures being by no means removed because of the union…”

6

“…the early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible … More specifically, [Mary Magdalene’s] marriage to Jesus Christ” (Sir Leigh Teabing, very much enjoying Sophie’s shock).  (10 points)

The issue isn’t what one thinks of the idea of Jesus’ being married. The issue is the evidence. This is an utterly gratuitous assertion. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John clearly portray Mary Magdalene as an important disciple of Jesus.  They don’t conceal this fact, but they also never give the slightest indication that she or any woman was his spouse.  Jesus proclaims the nearness of God’s kingdom. He challenges some who would follow him to give up their possessions or to leave their families behind. He is hardly a prophet of cozy domesticity. Nor does he want his followers to make any mistake about the fact that his kingdom “is not of this world.” He’s not interested in establishing a “royal bloodline.”  Even the Gnostic writings that Sir Leigh calls to his aid, especially the “Gospel” of Philip, do not make any claims about a sexual relationship. The Gnostics were not enthusiastic abut the material world, but they were enthusiastic about secret spiritual knowledge. If this “gospel” has Jesus kissing Mary, that is meant to be a symbol of a spiritual communication not sexual.  The apostles’ reaction makes that clear. They are portrayed as being jealous of this alleged fondness for Mary.  If it were the affection of a husband for a wife, there is no reason for jealousy. But the fact is the Gospel of Philip is no more a reliable source for knowing about Jesus and his relationships than the script of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Both use the name of Jesus and his followers for reasons other than proclaiming the gospel as it came from Jesus himself.    

7

“… Jesus as a married man makes infinitely more sense than our standard biblical view of Jesus as a bachelor. … Because Jesus was a Jew and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried” (Sir Leigh, then Robert Langdon). (10 points)

Good thing they said “virtually.”  Remember the Dead Sea Scrolls? They belonged to a community called the Essenes among whom there were clearly celibate men. St. Paul, who lived at “that time,” writes to the Corinthians, “Now to the unmarried and to widows, I say: it is a good thing for them to remain as they are, as I do, but if they cannot exercise self-control they should marry, for it is better to marry than to be on fire” (1 Cor.7.8-9). There was a sense in those times that God was taking crucial action to bring about his kingdom, and that superseded even the most important human relationships, including marriage. “Bachelor” is a laughable word to describe this kind of commitment.

8

“Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian God Mithras … was born on December 25 … Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from pagans. … Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration of the day of the sun” (Sir Leigh and Robert Langdon). (10 points)

They’ve got it backwards. The Book of Exodus says that the Israelites, upon leaving their bondage in Egypt, “asked the Egyptians for articles of silver and gold and for clothing. The LORD indeed had made the Egyptians so well-disposed toward the people that they let them have whatever they asked for. Thus did they despoil the Egyptians” (12.35b-36).  The Christians despoiled the pagans in a different way.  They transformed pagan realities into Christian ones to make it clear that Christianity had surpassed paganism.  Constantine may very well have made Sunday a weekly day of rest because it was already the day of Christian worship, rather than making Christians worship on the “Sun”-day. As devout Jews, Jesus’ disciples continued their Jewish worship on Saturday, but gradually Sunday surpassed Saturday, because Sunday is the day of Christ’s Resurrection. Also, God began creating on the first day of the week, and in Christ there is a new creation. Christianity’s closest relationship was to the fiercely monotheistic Judaism. Pagans who became Christians chose the worship of one God, and many paid with their lives for refusing to worship false gods during eras of persecution.    

9

“Those deemed ‘witches’ by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers and any women ‘suspiciously attuned to the natural world.’ … During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women” (Robert Langdon, apparently). (10 points)    

No one is going to defend the prosecution of thousands of women and men (about 20 percent of the victims were men) which went on from the late Middle Ages, through the Renaissance and even into the first years of the Age of the Enlightenment. During centuries of widespread social upheaval, Catholics, Protestants, and the Puritans of New England turned with irrational suspicion against some of their neighbors and accused them of witchcraft.  However, scholars estimate the number of victims at about 50,000, at a time when capital punishment was imposed for many more crimes than it is today. It is an absolute libel to accuse the Church of what amounts to a campaign of genocide against women -- especially against the evidence of the lives of great women mystics who lived in those times and are revered by the Church to this day.

10  

“The Priory (of Sion) believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever” (Robert Langdon).  (10 points)

This is wrong on so many levels.  First of all, the Priory of Sion is a hoax of few modern Frenchmen. More important, one of the great achievements of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the realization that God is pure Spirit. He created the human race in his image, and he created the human race male and female.  But God is neither male nor female. There was no worship of goddesses in the religious tradition into which Jesus Christ was born.  And if one turns to the pagan world, where goddesses were part of the religious tradition, it is a mistake to assume that this Greek and Roman culture was not also patriarchal or that these goddesses were not in fact perceived as supporting the traditions this society.

Total Number of Points______________

150 = Definitely as bad as the novel

All lesser scores: Still as bad as the novel, if any of this misinformation appears in it.