If it weren't so serious and the claims made not so ardent, then it could have been laughed off. Yet, the book The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown can be called a historical novel of some sorts.
The Story
Most of the book is played out on the backdrop of modern Paris, France. It starts with a gruesome murder of the famous curator (Jacques Sauniere) of the Louvre Museum in Paris. This starts with the search of the murderer and the Holy Grail. The brains behind this search for the Holy Grail is Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University. With the help of Sauniere's daughter, Sophie Neveu, who happens to work for the French Judicial Police as a highly trained cryptographer, they set out to find the Holy Grail and to reveal the truth concerning the Holy Grail to an unsuspecting world. The problem with this whole scenario is that the police suspects Langdon as the killer, which as a necessity is causing great difficulties for Langdon and Neveu to both remain undetected by the police and to follow all the clues to the Holy Grail left by Sauniere at the murder site.
While on this search for the Holy Grail, Langdon starts explaining to Neveu all about the real nature of the Holy Grail. The Holy Grail is not the cup which contained some of the blood of Jesus from the cross. The Holy Grail is all about the blood of Jesus, but not in a cup. Rather, the Holy Grail is much about the descendants that resulted from the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In effect, they were searching for the resting place of Mary Magdalene. With finding the final resting place of Mary Magdalene comes the added bonus of finding various documents to prove that Jesus was married to her.
Langdon is still not finished with Neveu's education regarding the story of the Holy Grail. With it comes the "true" story of Christianity and how the Catholic Church as the cultural winners through Constantine's declaration of Christianity as the state church subsequently rewrote history to eliminate the true story of Christianity. The result of this rewriting of history by the church was a redefining of the Biblical documents. It was because of the church that we have the current gospels in the New Testament. By preferring these gospels to hide the truth of Christianity the church ordered the wholesale destruction of the true documents of Christianity. These documents, according to Langdon, are the many Gnostic gospels, not what we have in our New Testaments today.
The fact is, according to our esteemed symbology expert, that before this male dominated church started ruling with an iron fist, it was the sacred feminine that was the true religion through which connection could be made with the divine by having proper ritualistic sex with a woman, who by the way was so highly esteemed because of her ability to bring forth life from within her, that she was seen as sacred.
The Flow
I must say, even though the facts of this book are no facts at all, and even though this is such an obvious smear campaign against Christianity, I still enjoyed the book. I suppose it is the conspiritorial nature of the book. I have to admit, there are large sections in which things are being explained to Neveu by Langdon or by Leigh Teabing, another HolyGrail expert. So, it is not a very fast paced thriller. However, by the way Brown wove the explanations into the flow of the story, the unfolding of the so-called "true" history lends itself to an easy read. As a pure literary work, it is good. Not exceptional, but nevertheless worth the read.
History
It amazes me, that with so much of real history to be found, backed by real historians, that Brown would dig up such falsified claims as he does in his book. From the start of the alleged marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the sacred feminine to the so-called rewriting of the real history of the church by the Catholics, it is one falsification upon another. Because this book is written so convincingly, it has drawn many people into its snare of false claims and its own rewriting of history, not based on facts, but simply because it is willed to be so. What Brown accomplished in this novel is to simply smear the church with his own reliance upon other so-called factual books. His history in this book is based on so many false premises that it would need a whole book to answer all of the drivel that he has conjured up. Brown himself was caught by an age old attempt to discredit Christianity.
Even before the so-called victory of the church, the Romans tried to eradicate Christianity from the face of the earth, but simply could not. Why does Brown think that an obvious falsification of the truth would eradicate Christianity now? I suppose he hopes that everybody would be like him; not willing or able to differentiate between fact and fiction.
Conclusion
No matter what Dan Brown and those like him come up with, neither he, nor those of the Jesus Seminar, or modern Gnostics can alter history or the future. The very Christ he is trying to remove from real history is still the Sovereign Lord of the universe and nothing (Dan Brown included) can alter that fact.
Jesus Christ rules sovereignly and that cannot be changed, no matter what!
A book I can recommend is Cracking Da Vinci's Code: You've Read the Fiction, Now Read the Facts by James L. Garlow and Peter Jones. This book and also be found here.
To read more good articles about debunking The Da Vinci Code, simply go to Christianity Today and search for Da Vinci Code.
Just thinking...
No comments:
Post a Comment