maverick's truth

Okay, let me start by saying I haven't read The DaVinci Code. But then again, I don't really have any desire to read it. And this article by Bart Ehrman explains why... Here are some exerpts

Dan Brown begins [The DaVinci Code] by laying out what he calls historical facts, and he includes the statement that all descriptions of art, architecture, sacred rituals, and documents are factual. The difficulty I had reading through "The Da Vinci Code" with that in mind was that most of the descriptions of ancient documents, in fact, are not factual—they’re part of his fiction. But people reading the book aren't equipped to separate the fact from the fiction.

Some of the big [discrepancies]: It's not true that before Constantine, Christians understood Jesus to be human but not divine. That's absolutely false. Most people thought Jesus was divine centuries before Constantine. Second, it's not true that Constantine decided which books to include in the New Testament; he had nothing to do with it. And the Council of Nicea didn't have anything to do with which books to include in the New Testament. It was called to resolve the issue of how to understand Jesus' divinity.

[The novel's character] Teabing says that the council was called because Constantine wanted to declare Jesus divine, and that's what the council was about, deciding whether Jesus is divine or not. And that he used the council as a way of deciding which books would be included in the New Testament, and they just included the books that called Jesus divine and excluded all the others. That's wrong on every point.

There are several gigantic points that have to do with Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene. Maybe the first thing to say is that it's absolutely false that as [the character] Robert Langdon says, it would have been highly unusual for Jesus not to be married because Jewish men were always married. That's false... We know Jewish men from the first century who remained single and celibate. What's most interesting is that the ones we know about are ones with a worldview that's very similar to the worldview ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels—which is an apocalyptic worldview. We know about Jews from Jesus' time from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And by the way, Dan Brown indicates some of these lost gospels were included among the Dead Sea Scrolls. That's absolutely false... [H]e indicates the Dead Sea Scrolls contain some of the earliest records of Jesus, and that's false. The Dead Sea Scrolls don't say anything about Jesus. There are two completely different collections that have nothing in common with each other. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 in Judea, west of the Dead Sea in what was then Jordan, what is now Israel.

The Nag Hammadi Codexes were discovered a year and a half earlier in Egypt about partway down the Nile, not far from Luxor. The Nag Hammadi documents are Christian Gnostic documents; the Dead Sea Scrolls are Jewish documents that have nothing Christian in them. So the Dead Sea Scrolls tell us about a Jewish community living at the same time as Jesus and in about the same place, and what is striking about these Dead Sea Scrolls is that the community that produced them consisted of single, celibate men.

[T]he Gospel of Mary is misportrayed in "The Da Vinci Code." What Dan Brown has his character say is that Jesus entrusted the church to Mary, based on the Gospel of Mary. But in fact, the Gospel of Mary doesn't say that at all. The Gospel of Mary is about Jesus appearing to Mary after the resurrection and giving her a revelation, and there's a debate among the disciples about whether Jesus would actually reveal something this important to a woman.

The Gnostics understood that these revelations could be given to women, and that there wasn't to be a kind of apostolic hierarchy in which you have men who are making all the decisions and were in charge—that everybody had access to the spirit of God. And that the church hierarchy that was beginning to form was, in fact, misguided.

There are a couple of other things I should point out as interesting mistakes in "The Da Vinci Code." One howler occurs when Teabing is trying to convince Sophie Neveu that Jesus' spouse was Mary Magdalene, and proof for this is one place in the Gospel of Philip where Mary is described as his companion. And Teabing points out that the Aramaic word for "companion" actually means spouse. Now, the problem with this is that the Gospel of Philip wasn't written in Aramaic. (Laughs)

It's written in Coptic. And the word that's used there is a Greek word which, in fact, does not mean spouse—it means companion! And there’s another passage from the Gospel of Philip that Dan Brown quotes, but he doesn't realize there's a problem with the text—which is, like many manuscripts from antiquity that have been discovered, it has holes in places where it got worn out. So we're missing some of the words. There's a passage Brown quotes which says, “Jesus loved Mary and he frequently kissed her on the ___ People often assume the word is “mouth” but we don't know what the word was.