Today is the last in our three-part series regarding the fact and the fiction of The Da Vinci Code. The movie is out. I saw it on Friday, by the way. I’d agree with most of the critics I’ve read or seen who rate it about a "C". The book is better. And, again, I’m not discouraging you from reading the book, seeing the movie. There are lots of conversations going on about The Da Vinci Code and I want us all to be good participants in them. So read the book, see the movie if you want, but also be prepared through these sermons, the books at the Welcome Center and the broadcast at 5:00 this afternoon to give an informed response. So, let’s get to it.

First, let’s have a little fun with Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. You’ll recall that earlier in the year, Dan Brown was sued by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail who claimed he plagiarized their book in writing The Da Vinci Code. From the beginning, Brown acknowledged his dependency on some of the "theories" put forth in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, primary among them being the supposed existence of a secret society known as the Priory of Sion. Eventually, Brown was acquitted of the plagiarism charge. By the way, the publisher is the same for both books so I don’t think they were bothered by the publicity. Anyway, Brown’s dependency on Holy Blood, Holy Grail and his enjoyment of puzzles and word games is evident in one of his main characters, the fictional British historian, Leigh Teabing. First, here are the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail: Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent, and Henry Lincoln. Now, let’s highlight two names, Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln. If we remove Mr. Lincoln’s name, take away the Richard and Michael and add the fictional historian’s name, you’ll see that Dan Brown gives Leigh Teabing his name from two of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Leigh Teabing

The Leigh is obvious. Teabing is an anagram of Baigent, anagrams being a key part of The Da Vinci Code. Move the letters of Baigent around and you come up with Teabing. So, obviously, Dan Brown owes some acknowledgement to Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Perhaps he owes Henry Lincoln an explanation also as to why he isn’t part of the fun!

Now, let’s remind ourselves of some of the more foundational quotes from the book—and some of the more controversial as well—because they are very germane to our topic for today.

First, you’ll recall this:

…almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false. p.235

Since that claim is based upon the supposed "facts" about documents in The Da Vinci Code being accurate and relates to our topic today of Mary Magdalene and her relationship with Christ, we need to keep that quote in the back of our minds.

Also, let’s remember this statement of "fact" that comes in the book right before the Prologue:

By the way, there’s no such disclaimer in the movie. But, it is predominant in the book. Since much of what is claimed about Mary Magdalene comes from the Priory of Sion, we need to remember this quote as well. And we need to remember that this statement of "fact" is utterly false. The information for the Priory of Sion, the documents found in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, have been proven to be an elaborate hoax. To be fair, I don’t know if Dan Brown knew that when he wrote his novel. And, he has since removed mention of the Priory of Sion from his website’s section of "Bizzare True Facts from The Da Vinci Code." That had to hurt a bit, however, because the Priory of Sion is foundational to his book…as well as to the bizarre theories of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The Priory is Sion is all a hoax, an elaborate and ingenious fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman named Pierre Plantard who planted the phony documents in the national library. Remember that.

For this final sermon concerning The Da Vinci Code, we want to look at what is claimed about Mary Magdalene and Jesus. There are three main claims made.

1. Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married.

2. Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a daughter named Sarah.

3. Jesus turned over leadership of the Church to Mary Magdalene, not Peter.

Let’s begin with the claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. This is not a new claim. People have pondered the relationship of Mary Magdalene and Jesus for centuries. Some have speculated they were married although there is no credible evidence for such a conclusion. What we know from the gospels about Mary Magdalene is this: She was from the town of Magdala, a small fishing village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee about mid-way between Tiberias to the south and Capernaum to the north. As today’s passage from Luke states, she was one of several women who were part of the entourage following Jesus. Luke adds that Jesus had cast seven demons out of her and that these women supported the entourage out of their own means. We might conclude from the last part of that statement that Mary was a woman of some wealth, but it could also be a simple reference to their serving the group wherever needed. Finally, the gospels inform us that Mary Magdalene was a witness to the crucifixion of Jesus and to his resurrection. In fact, Mary Magdalene is the only person named in all four gospels as being present at the empty tomb. And that’s about all we can say for certain about Mary Magdalene based on what the gospels tell us.

The Da Vinci Code, of course, bases its claims on what are asserted to be more "reliable" gospels. As we have seen earlier, these Nag Hammadi "gospels" hold no claim to greater reliability than the gospels of the New Testament. That aside, their testimony to a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is still weak. For example, one reference made in The Da Vinci Code regarding this supposed marriage is this quote from the Gospel of Philip:

Three women always walked with the master: Mary his mother, [his] sister, and Mary of Magdala, who is called his companion. For "Mary" is the name of his sister, his mother, and his companion. (The Gospel of Philip, underline mine)

Then, in The Da Vinci Code, the now infamous British historian, Leigh Teabing, says this about that passage from the Gospel of Philip:

As any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion, in those days, literally meant spouse. p.246

Only there are a couple of problems with that. First of all, the Gospel of Philip was not written in Aramaic, but in Coptic. Aramaic scholars can’t tell us anything about the word "companion" in that passage. Furthermore, the word used there does not mean "spouse," but rather "friend" or "associate." Etymology of the word "spouse" reveals it to be a 13^th century word, long after the Gospel of Philip was written.

There are other shaky references to the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus which I’m not going to show here, but allow me a few, brief comments about them. One reference deals with another quote from the Gospel of Philip that Jesus often kissed Mary on the mouth. In the actual fragment from the Gospel of Philip the word alleged to be "mouth" is missing—there are several spaces missing in the parchment. The word could have been "forehead" or "hand." The evidence from the Gospel of Philip, shaky to begin with, is even more shaky. A second reference comes from the main character, Robert Langdon (the Tom Hanks character in the movie), who states that Jesus as a Jewish man in the first century was virtually forbidden to not be married and that celibacy was condemned. While true that there was a kind of societal pressure to marry and have children, especially a son (think the story of Abraham and Sarah here), it’s not true to say singleness was virtually forbidden or celibacy condemned. The apostle Paul, for example, was not married (see 1 Corinthians 7:7). The Essene community that existed close to the time of Jesus and from which we get The Dead Sea Scrolls, practiced celibacy and singleness. To say Jesus had to have been married because almost no one in that society wasn’t married is totally lacking in credibility.

The truth is, we have no unambiguous reference to Jesus being married. To claim he was is pure speculation. And if we’re lacking any reference to his being married, we are totally without even an implied reference to Jesus and Mary Magdalene having a child. That is absolute speculation rooted in the hoax behind the Priory of Sion.

So, let’s move on to the claim that Jesus intended for Mary Magdalene to lead the church. On this, I defer to what Bart D. Ehrman, professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina writes in his book, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code. Citing a reference from the Gospel of Mary, Ehrman writes:

Here, then, is a text that highlights the importance of Mary, a woman, as the one to whom Christ has made a special revelation that can bring salvation. I should probably point out that Leigh Teabing completely misrepresents this text in The Da Vinci Code, where he says: "At this point in the gospels, Jesus suspects He will soon be captured and crucified. So He gives Mary Magdalene instructions on how to carry on His church after He is gone…According to these unaltered gospels, it was not Peter to whom Christ gave directions with which to establish the Christian Church. It was Mary Magdalene." (pp. 247-48)

That in fact is not an accurate description. The discussion recorded in the Gospel of Mary takes place after Jesus’ crucifixion, not before, and the revelation given to Mary is not about how to carry on his church but about how to find salvation for the soul. (Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code, by Bart D. Ehrman, p.176)

Again, simply stated, there is no credible support for the claim in The Da Vinci Code that Jesus intended leadership in the Church to be passed onto Mary Magdalene.

By the way, to cite these "alternative" gospels as being more favorable to the role of women is as laughably false as it is to claim they elevate a more human Jesus than do our four gospels, something we looked at last week. As an example, this is how The Gospel of Thomas ends:

2) Jesus said, "Look, I shall guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. 3) For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven’s kingdom." (The Gospel of Thomas, saying 114)

Any woman here want to hold that up as the banner for the role of women in Christianity? I didn’t think so.

To be sure, the role of women in the Church is not a simple topic, but rather a complicated one. We don’t have time to adequately cover it here, but let’s take a moment for a few comments. Too simply stated, the Church, in many ways, has modeled the culture here. In a world that until only recently saw women’s roles limited to home and family, the Church held similar views. In the Presbyterian Church, for example, women weren’t ordained for leadership positions until 1906 when women were first ordained as deacons. Not until 1930 were women ordained as elders. And it wasn’t until 1956 that women were ordained as Ministers of Word and Sacrament. As society moved to a greater understanding of the role of women, the Church also came to new understanding as well. We can bemoan the delay in arriving to such an understanding. But for our purposes today we can only say a few things.

First of all, Jesus was far ahead of the culture on this matter. That women were part of his entourage is unique. That he honored women far above their place in the culture is evidenced in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. When the disciples come upon that scene, as told us in John, chapter four, they are "surprised to find him talking with a woman," (John 4:27). The word for "surprised" there is one that expresses the idea of astonishment, or incredulity of the disciples. One just didn’t do that in that culture. Jesus was ahead of everyone regarding the treatment and role of women. In some ways, so was the apostle Paul. Some of his writings to the church reflect the standard of his culture. But, other statements reflect an attitude far ahead of that of the culture. In the sixteenth chapter of Romans, Paul cites many women involved in leadership in the church, including Phoebe who is described as a "deacon of the church in Cenchreae," (Romans 16:1). A woman deacon in the church some 1,900 years ahead of the Presbyterian Church! Perhaps the closest Paul comes to Jesus’ desire for the church is in Galatians, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," (Galatians 3:28).

All of that, however, does not lead to a belief that Jesus intended for Mary Magdalene to lead the church. There is simply no evidence to support that.

So, there you have it. The Da Vinci Code blurs and confuses the line between fact and fiction and we need to bring clarity to the confusion. Hopefully, these sermons have been helpful. Certainly the resources at the Welcome Center can be helpful—take some to give to others who might be pondering what is fact and what is fiction in The Da Vinci Code. The broadcast later today at 5:00 in Charter Hall will bring even greater clarity—invite others to join you for the broadcast and be prepared for the opportunities that surface to discuss what is fact and what is fiction.

In summary of this series, let’s review these points:

2. Descriptions of "documents" in The Da Vinci Code are not accurate despite Dan Brown’s claim of "facts" at the beginning of his book. For example:

We’ve not said much about this claim from the book, but there is no truth to this claim. Most of the people during Jesus’ time were illiterate. Besides that, writing was a much more difficult task then—there were no "pens" and "notebook paper" for writing!

Again, we’ve not said much about this claim about "documents" in The Da Vinci Code, but there were, at most, 20-25 "gospels" that might have been considered for inclusion in the Bible. We’ll say more about that process in a moment.

While it is true that his baptism was a "death bed" baptism, that was very common in those days—the thinking being to have that moment of "cleansing" as close to the time of death as possible.

Christians were hardly a political force in Constantine’s time. They were a small minority in the Empire and they were in hiding, an underground church due to the persecution they had experienced.

Their major purpose was to discuss how we understand the humanity and divinity of Jesus. They did not concoct a new theology espousing Jesus as divine. The Church had professed that from the very beginning.

The selection of books and letters that become the canon (standard) of holy Scripture was a long process—from long before the Council of Nicea and long after it. Basically, what occurred was that books and letters became helpful and useful in the Church. Through copies and through letters of early Church leaders to others, the helpful ones rose to the surface and were repeatedly used by the Church while others were discarded as not helpful. Long before the Council of Nicea, the standard was pretty much in place. After the Council of Nicea, the standard was formally adopted, but it was pretty much an endorsement of what was already the case. One of the books I read regarding The Da Vinci Code put it this way: It would be like us forming a committee to decide if the music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven was good. Our committee reaches the conclusion that it is, announces it to the world and the world responds, "Duh! We already knew that!" The books of Scripture, particularly the New Testament, went through a long process of use within the Church and the selection of the canon was basically an endorsement of what the Church already believed and practiced. And the Council of Nicea had nothing to do with it!

So there you have it. The Da Vinci Code makes for interesting fiction. But, it absolutely fails in its claims about what is fact…and sadly blurs the line between fact and fiction. Therefore, let us bring clarity to the confusion.