Blinding Ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!" Leonardo Da Vinci, quoted in The Da Vinci Code, p. 231

In every age, there have been attacks on Jesus and the teaching of Scripture. Jesus has been an offense to the world from the very beginning. One recent attack is particularly beguiling because it is so entertaining. It's author, Dan Brown, brashly assures us his account is based on the actual historical facts. But The Da Vinci Code paints either an uninformed or intentionally false picture of the early church. In this issue, we want to show you why.

The Da Vinci Code is a suspense thriller and runaway bestseller in which the reader discovers that a modern-day murder is the result of an on-going, 2,000 year cover-up by the church in an attempt to hide the true origins of Christianity. The movie version of the book, starring Tom Hanks, is scheduled to be released sometime in 2006. The questions and doubts the novel has raised are an indication of how ahistorical our culture has become. It also indicates how uninformed many Christians are about early church history. Brown's character Teabing was right about one thing: "Blinding Ignorance does mislead us." As we will see below, it is The Da Vinci Code that turns out to be the distortion and re-writing of history.

The Claims
Chapter 55 of Brown's thriller opens with the fictional character Teabing asserting with scholarly confidence: "Nothing in Christianity is original. . .virtually all the elements. . .were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions. . .The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. . ..Who chose which gospels to include? . . . [T]he pagan Roman emperor Constantine. . . [U]ntil the [Council of Nicea in A.D. 325], Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet. . . [E]stablishing Christ's divinity was critical to [Constantine for] the further unification of the Roman empire and to the new Vatican power base. . .the earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned. . .the modern Church's desire to suppress these documents comes from a sincere belief in their established view of Christ."

Ironically, as we will see below, it is The Da Vinci Code that turns out to be the rewriting of history. Therefore, Christians should not feel threatened by its claims. Instead, we should grasp the wonderful opportunity we have been given to explore the historical roots of our beliefs and to share the gospel with those whose curiosity has been aroused by the book.

Here are three major claims made in The Da Vinci Code about church history: 1. Christians did not view Jesus as divine until after the Council of Nicea. 2. Constantine or the Vatican suppressed the earlier, truer gospels to consolidate power. 3. The church covered up the fact that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child together, because that would have proved that Jesus was only a "mortal prophet."

The novel then argues that the church continued to lie to protect these secrets right up to the present day. However, if these three arguments are proven false, then there is no secret that needs to be hidden and The Da Vinci Code's entire conspiracy charge crumbles. Because history cannot be repeated like a science experiment, figuring out what actually happened is more like a legal case--evidence must be weighed to determine the most reasonable explanation based on the known facts.