Bashing Christ in Fact and Fiction

Dan Brown is another comrade-in-arms in the long list of Christ-bashers throughout the centuries. His modern peers include The Jesus Seminar, a group of American scholars bent on stripping the New Testament of all supernatural accounts, Martin Scorsese who produced “The Last Temptation of Christ”, and the late Peter Jennings, who featured The Jesus Seminar in his “Search for the Historical Jesus” on ABC. In his novel and forthcoming movie, “The DaVinci Code,” Dan Brown unleashes a dangerous two-pronged assault upon historical Christianity and the Church.

Dan Brown states that,

"The DaVinci Code is a novel and therefore a work of fiction. While the book’s characters and their actions are obviously not real, the artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals depicted in this novel all exist."

Thus, Dan Brown utilizes people, places, and events such as Leonardo DaVinci, an association called The Priory of Sion, Constantine the Great, the Council of Nicea, the Qumran caves, The Gnostic gospels, etc. and weaves together these people, places, and events into a story which is the “fiction” part of his work. His novel consists of a sinister conspiracy involving the Christian church. According to Dan Brown’s fiction, Christianity is one great hoax perpetuated by the church, that the church covered up Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene, that Jesus did not really claim to be God but that he was simply “voted” to be divine by the Council of Nicea, and that this Council suppressed other ancient writings in the process of the cover up. His two-pronged assault on Christianity consists of distortions of historical facts and a fictional story based on those distortions. He attempts to give credence to the fiction through those distortions, and in turn validate those distortions through the fiction. Those distortions are blatant and are easily exposed, as a number of scholars have done, but Dan Brown shamelessly says in interviews that if he were to write The DaVinci Code as non-fiction that he would not change a thing!

Just how far can one go with artistic license? Apparently, there is no limit. The DaVinci Code has sold over forty million copies and has been translated into several languages. The movie which features Tom Hanks will put flesh and blood to the fiction and will be acted out before millions of viewers enhancing the illusion (or should I say delusion?) of Dan Brown, and bring him hundreds of millions of dollars. This is historical revisionism under the cover of art and the First Amendment. Truth is the casualty. The DaVinci Code will cause serious damage to the cause of Christianity but it won’t be a death-blow.

The DaVinci Code has thrived in a culture which cannot distinguish fact from fiction, where “reality” has to be portrayed using an inherently unreal medium such as television, where surveys have demonstrated the population to be ignorant even of current events, a culture whose high school students, in large numbers, cannot even name the Vice President of the United States, or even a single Justice of the Supreme Court, whose knowledge of geography and world events is woefully inadequate, and where absolute truth is confused with religious belief and thus discarded.

Into this culture strides Dan Brown commandeering history and dropping ancient names and places woven with a tale about the largest visible group of people in the world, the Christian church, and how it has been deceived throughout the ages by a secret society. This is just what the culture with its “victim mentality” and growing distrust of the church (due to clerical abuses) wants to hear. Dan Brown is hailed as a hero for exposing the conspiracy concocted by his imagination, and the culture, believing Dan Brown has done it a favor, pulls farther away from the Truth which it so desperately needs.

Such distortions of Christianity as Dan Brown has propagated through The DaVinci Code will only escalate, as the culture continues to abandon its historical roots. For the entertainment value of a novel or a movie, people are willing to cast off any notion of true Christianity they might have and embrace the lies and distortions against the person of Christ. People are always looking for an excuse not to accept the claims of Christ. For a time it may be, “The church is full of hypocrites.” Now they may have found another reason which is, “Christianity is just a gigantic hoax.”

Those who are true believers will strengthen their faith as they use every opportunity, every challenge, to understand the basis of their faith, to know the true history of the church, and to understand Scripture, whose trustworthiness and accuracy have withstood time, and only grow more reliably through the centuries.

It will become harder for those who reject Christ to find truth as the day of Christ’s return draws nearer, and as more and more Jesus Seminars, Martin Scorseses, Searches for Historical Jesus, and Dan Browns manifest themselves.