A banner on The Da Vinci Code movie's Web site encourages visitors to "seek the truth" ... a strange exhortation from a film that so easily confuses history with fiction.
By now most Christians have heard of the book by Dan Brown and the film by the same title to be released in May. So, why should you care about a movie that suggests that Jesus was married and had children, never thought of Himself as divine and had no intention of launching the religion that now reveres Him? Perhaps, as some would suggest, the best way to counteract such a film is to ignore it.
However, because the story is told in such a compelling way, and because many of its themes tap into trends in our culture, it will have an effect—especially among those interested in what is intellectually fashionable without being willing to invest any time in solid research. Well-packaged and marketed (ironically, the same way messages sometimes spread in Christian circles), Brown's novel tales have been accepted as truth in the secular world—and have given pause to many an unprepared believer.
Sadly, if fans of the film are deceived by its message, it will be because Christian leaders have failed to communicate the strong historical evidence for the person of Jesus, instead presenting Him as a teacher of timeless advice, or a symbol of love and peace. The church has allowed Dan Brown to get away with bad research, because people do not know the Bible or history. The good news is that the film offers us a "teaching moment"—an opportunity to explain the importance of study, the evidence for our faith and why these are important. So, where do we begin?
Bad Research
Dan Brown is a master of suspense and an exceptional storyteller, but theological questions aside, he is either a poor historian or laughing very hard at how seriously many readers are taking his work. Although occasionally correct, he is just as often blatantly mistaken:
One of the first rules of sound history is not to use significantly later sources to tell us what happened earlier. For instance:
Questionable Sources
Brown's oldest "sources" are apocryphal gospels—all of which are much later than the historical accounts we have in the Bible. And he sometimes distorts even what is in these gospels. Brown bases much of his bizarre ideology on the view that "alternative" accounts of Jesus were told—but ultimately "suppressed" by the church because of their controversial nature.
One character in The Da Vinci Code claims that more than 80 "gospels" were considered for the New Testament, but in A.D. 325, Constantine chose which four made it in. Unfortunately for Brown, 125 years before Constantine, church father Irenaeus states that the exact four Gospels we now have in our Bible were considered Scripture by the early church. In fact, well before Irenaeus, other church fathers were quoting these Gospels as Scripture.
Other stories about Jesus circulated, but the only other "gospels" that have survived are from the second century or later—that is, not possibly written by Jesus' followers or by anyone who knew them personally. Unlike the Gospels in our Bible, these late "gospels" lack evidence of Palestinian Jewish culture and genuine historical tradition.
These "gospels" fall into two categories. First, some apocryphal gospels were simply novels, written as late as the 11th century. Early Christians defrocked a presbyter they found composing one such novel.
Second, and more useful to Brown, are the Gnostic gospels. Yet very few of these "gospels" are really gospels (i.e., stories about Jesus' life). Despite the name "gospel," most are collections of sayings attributed to Jesus—but written much later than Him—that are not really comparable in genre to our four Gospels.
Gospel Truth
The Gospels the church accepted in the Bible are very different. They bear the features of ancient biographies, as most scholars today recognize. In contrast to the Gnostic writings, they also show many traces of early Palestinian Jewish background, and even many Aramaic figures of speech undoubtedly going back to Jesus Himself.
Further, had these Gospel writers been making things up, they would have made Jesus address debates of their own era (like circumcision), in much the same way that later Gnostic gospels had Jesus giving secret Gnostic teachings. Instead, these Gospels present Jesus accurately in His Galilean setting.
One of the first-century Gospel writers, Luke, even begins by explaining his research method. By the time Luke wrote, many had already written accounts about Jesus' life (see Luke 1:1). This means that written accounts about Jesus were already circulating within the first generation. Luke also explains he had oral reports available that came from eyewitnesses (see Luke 1:2).
How accurate would oral reports be after one or at most two generations had passed? Ancient school exercises focused on memorization, philosophers and rabbis learned and passed on the teachings of their schools, and speakers could recite speeches for hours from memory. Unless Jesus' disciples were unlike all other disciples in antiquity, we should expect them to have remembered His life and teaching accurately.
The best historical research is done by contemporaries who can interview eyewitnesses. Happily, this is just what Luke did: he tells us that he "investigated" the events he was writing about (see Luke 1:3). Luke traveled with Paul to Judea (see Acts 21:18), where he stayed for about two years (see Acts 24:27, 27:1). This gave him plenty of time to interview witnesses. Luke could not invent his stories: he was not teaching something new, but confirming what his audience had already learned (see Luke 1:4).
Dan Brown and others who are skeptical of the Gospels are skeptical because they want to be. The historical evidence for the reliability of the New Testament is strong—just the opposite of the evidence for the later "gospels" on which Brown builds his case!
From Jesus to God?
Until the Council of Nicaea in 325, an "expert" in Brown's novel says, Jesus' followers viewed Him as a mortal prophet. But at that council in 325, he claims, Constantine turned Jesus into a god.
Truth be told, the issue at Nicaea was never whether Jesus was a mere mortal prophet, but whether He, as divine, existed eternally with the Father (as Nicaea concluded), or whether He, though divine, was created before the world began. Although Constantine supported the Nicene formulation, later he persecuted its leading defender Athanasius.
Whatever his role at Nicaea, it is impossible that Constantine had anything to do with the affirmation of Jesus' deity. Even the Gnostics had not contested Jesus' deity. (Instead, many of them actually denied His humanity.) We have plenty of writings from church fathers (even Ignatius, two centuries before Nicaea) calling Jesus God.
Jesus' followers already knew that he was God in the first century:
In fact, the New Testament often applies Old Testament verses about God to Jesus:
Examples could be multiplied, but the idea that Constantine turned Jesus into a God ignores sources more than 250 years older than Constantine. What kind of scholar does that make Brown's "expert" in the story? Brown has not only made up a novel about the present; he has fictionalized 2,000 years of history.
Who Hid God's Wife?
Unlike Brown's views about Jesus' divinity, his claim that Jesus had a wife is not scandalous; but it is surely false. Although the Gospels name all of Jesus' closest associates, they never mention His wife. While singleness was unusual, it suited His itinerant ministry as it fit the ministries of John the Baptist, Paul or Jeremiah.
Brown suggests a cover-up about the marriage. Because the New Testament never makes anything of Jesus' singleness (even in connection with His spiritual marriage to the church), there is no reason to believe that anyone had anything to "cover up" about it.
What is scandalous is Brown's view of God's consort—not Israel, but "Shekinah," a female deity Brown places alongside Yahweh in the Holy of Holies:
Appealing as the idea of spirituality-through-sex may be to many readers today (and in biblical times), the Old Testament repeatedly condemns it. One does not have to appeal to radical myths to honor both genders. The God of the Bible is spirit (see John 4:24); unlike other gods worshiped in antiquity, He is not sexual and does not engage in intercourse. Man and woman together are made in His image and told to rule the Earth (see Gen. 1:26-27). While Christians differ among ourselves on some views about gender, Scripture is clear that adding a goddess (or any other object of worship) or reducing God to a sexual being (male or female) is idolatry.
Ideology Versus Truth
Brown's novel is fast-paced and doesn't bog down until he begins his explanations of religion. Why would a writer risk sabotaging his own novel to "teach" at that point? And why would he get so much information so hopelessly wrong that no academic in the relevant disciplines would take the book seriously? (A "cover-up" among his academic critics is hardly an option—conservatives, liberals and atheists would all agree that many of his "facts" are false.)
Brown clearly has an agenda. Perhaps he partly wanted to create a stir; getting attention sells books and makes money. But he also appears to have a religious agenda, and one based in ideology rather than historical research.
When Brown plays fast-and-loose with history to serve ideology, he reflects an unhealthy trend in our culture. Many people today no longer believe in objective, absolute truth. Without truth as a worthwhile goal, the best people can do is to arrange claims about information in such a way as to advance their own cause.
That Brown can advance a religious agenda by cherry-picking whatever suits him is dangerous, but it is the same method Christians sometimes use when we take verses out of context or ignore facts inconvenient for our arguments. In other words, Dan Brown's bad scholarship highlights a tendency in our culture that also affects the church.
The Da Vinci Code offers pastors an opportunity not only to correct one book's misinformation but to teach truth. It invites Christians to pay attention to the Bible, pay attention to history and—in a shortcut culture driven by sound bites and marketing techniques—to care about truth.
Craig Keener, professor of New Testament at Palmer Theological Seminary, has written 13 books, including three commentaries that have won Christianity Today book awards.
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