Jesus and Da Vinci: Who was Jesus, Really?

The Da Vinci Code, directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, promises to be a thrilling blockbuster when it debuts May 19. Based on the bestselling novel of the same title by Dan Brown, the story is part action, part mystery. Robert Langdon (Hanks), a professor who is in Paris for a conference, becomes swept up in a murder, religious intrigue, and a hunt for clues revolving around paintings by Leonardo Da Vinci. As he and Sophie Neveu (Tautou) run from the police and follow clues, they meet Sir Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellen) who tells them they're on the trail of one of the most ancient coverups ever perpetrated by the Church: the true nature of Jesus and the Holy Grail.

According to Teabing, the Grail secret is that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and still has royal descendants today. And, Teabing says, the Church has been wrong all along about who Jesus really was. According to the earliest, gnostic Gospel writings, Jesus was a wise man who lived in Palestine, but he never claimed to be God. No one believed Jesus was divine, Teabing says, until another faction of Christians believed in his divinity and rose to leadership in the Catholic Church. The Roman emperor Constantine, in order to bring peace to the Empire, called the council of Nicea in A.D. 325, where members of the council voted to make Jesus the divine Son of God. Teabing then says that at the same time, the Church declared that Gnostics were heretics, and refused to allow the other, earlier gnostic Gospels, (numbering around 80) to be included in the New Testament. As the action progresses, Robert, Sophie and Sir Teabing find out just how far the Church will go to hide its secrets.

Has the Church covered up the truth about Jesus? Dan Brown claims that it has. In an interview on NBC's Today show in 2003, Brown claimed, "Obviously, Robert Langdon is fictional, but all of the art, architecture,secret rituals,secret societies-all of that is historical fact." The secret societies, of course hid the truth about Jesus and his bloodline. But is this what really happened? Did Jesus really marry Mary Magdalene and have children? Was he a mere human being, or was he the divine Son of God? The answers to these questions are about more than mere intellectual curiosity. How we answer the question about who Jesus was can have a tremendous impact on us and change our lives forever.

It turns out that very little of The Da Vinci Code is based on history. There is no evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, nor were there scores of Gospels that were excluded from the New Testament. The Council of Nicea did not vote on the divinity of Jesus, nor did Gnostic Gospels represent the earliest beliefs of the Church. And Christianity was not based on pagan myth, as Teabing claims. See the articles below for a more detailed discussion of these topics.

Instead, it turns out that the four Gospels in the New Testament are the most reliable history we have about Jesus, and they do say remarkable things about Jesus' words and deeds. Not only do they claim that Jesus was a wise teacher, and respected by many, they claim he did miracles and that he believed he was divine. They claim that he was crucified, but then rose from the dead. They go on to claim that he can give us new life. And you can have new life through Jesus today. Check out the articles below to explore these topics about who Jesus was, and how he can impact our lives now.

Featured Resources

Crash Goes The Da Vinci Code
Dr. Ron Rhodes
Master apologist and recognized author Dr. Ron Rhodes painstakingly deconstructs the major errors of The Da Vinci Code in a question and answer format. Includes direct quotations and page numbers from the novel. Very comprehensive.

Interview with Dr. Darrell Bock
Darrell L. Bock, author of Breaking the Da Vinci Code, answers questions about The Da Vinci Code, the Bible, and the historical Jesus.

Mary, Mary, Extraordinary
Ben Witherington III
The Da Vinci Code has resurrected an old debate about whether Mary Magdalene was an intimate disciple of Christ's, even his wife. Biblical scholar and seminary professor Witherington writes, "She was an important disciple and witness for Jesus, but there is no historical evidence for a more intimate relationship."

Was Jesus Married?
Dr. Darrell Bock
Seminary professor and writer Dr. Darrell Bock writes that "all the available evidence points to the answer 'no'."

Dismantling The Da Vinci Code
Sandra Miesel
Miesel delivers on her title, dismantling the supposed history of The Da Vinci Code. She delves into the sources Brown cited, scrutinizing his pick-and-choose methodology. She critiques his information about Jesus, built upon Gnostic texts and mistaken information about the Council of Nicea. She briefly dissects Brown's view of Mary Magdalene and his use of Gnostic extra-canonical gospels, as well as his understanding of The Knights Templar and Leonardo Da Vinci.

Deciphering the Da Vinci Code: A Symposium (audio, slide shows)
Dr. Darrell Bock, various others
Dr. Darrell Bock and a supporting cast of speakers from a three-night symposium on all aspects of The Da Vinci Code: Mary Magdalene's relationship to Jesus, the biblical canon, sex, goddess worship, The Jesus Seminar, oppression, "The Church, the Academy and the Culture," spiritual trends in America and more. A full array of lectures and Q&A sessions via streaming audio and PowerPoint slide shows (opens on a separate site).

Related Resources on How We Got Our Bible and Its Trustworthiness

Core to understanding and believing the Bible is assessing its reliability. But how does one know that it or any other work of antiquity is trustworthy? And how did we get our Bible? Why and how were certain texts chosen and others rejected for the Canon, the list of authoratative books included in the Bible?

The Christian Canon
Don Closson
This essay gives the reader an introduction to how the Bible came to include the books currently recognized as canonical.

The New Testament: Can I Trust It?
Rusty and Linda Wright
"How can any well-educated person believe the New Testament? It was written so long after the events it records that we can't possibly trust it as historically reliable." This is a common question and deserves an honest answer. The Wrights provide three tests: internal, external and bibliographic.

Are the Biblical Documents Reliable?
Jimmy Williams
We can trust that the Bible we hold in our hands today is the same as when the various documents were written. This essay provides evidence for the trustworthiness of the biblical documents. Includes a particularly helpful chart on extant New Testament manuscripts as compared with other works of antiquity.

Are The Gospels Mythical?
Rene Girard
Are the Gospels based on pagan mythology, or are they historical accounts? It is often said that the Gospels were based on Greek and pagan mythology, and The Da Vinci Code declares this as well, alleging that Jesus' story is based on dying and rising gods of pagan origin. This article from First Things compares the Gospel story to pagan myth to see if there is a connection.

Related Resources On The Jesus Seminar and Historical Christian Creeds

The Da Vinci Code popularizes several conclusions of radical scholars that are not agreed upon by the majority of today's New Testament professors. Radical scholarship of this kind includes "The Jesus Seminar," a group of scholars attempting to redefine the historical Jesus. The resources below can help sort through the claims of these scholars, including their conclusions on which Gospels should be included in the New Testament, and historically, when Jesus was considered divine.

Recommended Books (courtesy Apologia Report).

• Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way, by Philip Jenkins (Oxford Univ Press, 2001)
  
• Modern Apocrypha, by Edgar J. Goodspeed (Boston, Beacon Press, 1956)
  
• Strange New Gospels, by Edgar J. Goodspeed (Univ of Chicago Press, 1931—perhaps retitled Famous Biblical Hoaxes)
  

Chapter 6: Christ: The Man Who is God
Dr. Alan K. Scholes
From his book (online in its entirety here) What Christianity is All About. Scholes' clearly written chapter critiques the "historical Jesus" quest and the Jesus Seminar. This provides background for assessing the presumptions of The Da Vinci Code about the early Church's claim to Christ's divinity.

The Jesus Seminar
Jimmy Williams, Founder, Probe Ministries
An analysis of the Jesus Seminar findings in light of five critical areas: purpose of the Jesus Seminar fellows, philosophical presuppositions, Canonical Gospels, chronology and Christological differences.

Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar
Dr. William Lane Craig
In this first part of a two-part article, the presuppositions and pretensions of the Jesus Seminar are exposited and assessed. It is found that the principal presuppositions of (i) scientific naturalism, (ii) the primacy of the apocryphal gospels, and (iii) the necessity of a politically correct Jesus are unjustified and issue in a distorted portrait of the historical Jesus.

The Evidence For Jesus
Dr. William Lane Craig
Five reasons are presented for thinking that critics who accept the historical credibility of the gospel accounts of Jesus do not bear a special burden of proof relative to more skeptical critics. Then the historicity of a few specific aspects of Jesus' life are addressed, including his radical self-concept as the divine Son of God, his role as a miracle-worker, his trial and crucifixion, and his resurrection from the dead.

http://www.leaderu.com/theology/creeds.html
Actual texts of the Apostles' Creed (c. 700, earlier forms from c. 200 A.D.) and Nicene Creed (325, 381 A.D.)