What about the Da Vinci Code?

Question 60053.

The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, sold something in the region of eighty million copies, and left a residue of assumptions that is still with us two decades later. I still meet people who believe that the church suppressed rival gospels, that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and that the doctrine of His deity was invented by an emperor at a committee meeting in the fourth century.

Dan Brown wrote a thriller, and thrillers are entitled to their liberties. The difficulty is the page at the front which states that descriptions of documents and secret rituals in the novel are accurate, because a great many readers took that as licence to treat the rest as history. Let me take the main claims one at a time.

The claim that Jesus married Mary Magdalene

There is no evidence for this from any source in the first or second century. The four Gospels never suggest it. Paul, writing in the fifties, actually argues in 1 Corinthians 9 that he has the right to take along a believing wife as the other apostles do, and mentions the brothers of the Lord and Cephas. If Jesus Himself had been married, that argument would have been settled in one sentence and Paul would have said so.

The novel leans on the Gospel of Philip, a third century Gnostic text which says that Jesus loved Mary and used to kiss her. The manuscript is damaged at the point where the location of the kiss would appear, and in Gnostic literature such kisses are symbolic of the transmission of spiritual knowledge rather than romantic. Building a marriage on a hole in a papyrus is not historical method.

It is worth adding that Christianity has no theological problem with marriage. If Jesus had married, that would not compromise His sinlessness or His deity in the slightest. The reason we say He did not is simply that there is no evidence He did.

The claim about the Council of Nicaea

The Da Vinci Code asserts that the deity of Jesus was invented at Nicaea in 325 and imposed by Constantine, and that the vote was close. Both halves are false. The council was convened to deal with the teaching of Arius, who held that the Son was a created being, and the vote at the end was overwhelming, with only a couple of bishops out of some three hundred refusing to sign.

More decisively, the belief was already there long before the fourth century. Thomas addresses Jesus as my Lord and my God in John 20:28. Paul, writing about twenty five years after the crucifixion, applies to Jesus a hymn in which every knee bows and every tongue confesses, quoted directly from Isaiah where the speaker is the LORD Himself. Pliny the Younger, writing to Trajan around 112, reports that Christians sang hymns to Christ as to a god.

Nicaea did not invent the doctrine. It found language to defend what the church already believed and confessed in worship, which is what councils generally do.

The claim about suppressed gospels

The novel speaks of eighty gospels considered for the New Testament, of which four were chosen for political reasons. The number is invented. The texts usually appealed to, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, are second and third century Gnostic writings, considerably later than the canonical four and theologically alien to them.

These works are also, ironically, far less friendly to women than the novel suggests. The Gospel of Thomas ends with a saying that Mary must become male in order to enter the kingdom, which is a strange text to enlist for a story about the church suppressing the sacred feminine. If you want the detail, I have written on the Gospel of Thomas and on the Gnostic gospels generally.

The canon was not decided by a committee handing down a verdict. It emerged through the churches recognising which writings carried apostolic authority and were already being read publicly, a process that was substantially settled long before Constantine was born. The notes on John 20 are useful on the early confession of Jesus as God.

The claim about Constantine and the Bible

A related assertion is that Constantine collated the Bible and destroyed earlier versions. He did commission fifty copies of the Scriptures for the churches of his new capital, which is an act of production rather than of censorship. We can check his work, because we have manuscripts and quotations that predate him.

The manuscript evidence for the New Testament is the largest for any body of ancient literature by an enormous margin, and it includes fragments from the second century. Church fathers writing before Nicaea quote the New Testament so extensively that most of it could be reconstructed from their works alone. A fourth century conspiracy to alter the text would be visible, and it is not there. I have set the evidence out in can we trust the manuscript transmission of the Bible.

Why the Da Vinci Code still matters

You might reasonably ask why I am bothering with a novel from 2003. The answer is that its claims escaped the book. They now circulate as general knowledge, repeated by people who have never read it, and they turn up in conversations at work and in questions from teenagers who have absorbed them from somewhere they cannot name.

There is also a lesson in how the thing worked. The Da Vinci Code succeeded because it flattered the reader with the sense of being let in on a secret, and because it confirmed a suspicion many people already held about institutions. That combination is powerful, and it is being used again in other subjects right now.

Christians should notice something uncomfortable in that. The story landed as easily as it did partly because so many churchgoers could not have answered it. A congregation that knows how the canon was formed and why we believe Jesus is God is not shaken by a paperback.

How the Da Vinci Code handled its sources

It is worth looking at the method the Da Vinci Code uses, because the same technique turns up constantly. The Da Vinci Code takes a genuine artefact, such as the Nag Hammadi library discovered in Egypt in 1945, and describes it accurately enough to establish credibility. Then it attaches to that real object a chain of inferences that no scholar of any persuasion would endorse, and the reader, having verified the first link, assumes the rest.

Much of the underlying material came from a 1982 book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, whose central claim rested on documents deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale by a Frenchman named Pierre Plantard. Plantard later admitted in court that he had forged them. That admission is a matter of public record, and it removes the foundation of the entire structure.

So the Da Vinci Code is not resting on suppressed evidence. It is resting on a confessed forgery, dressed in the language of scholarship and sold as a secret.

Answering it without becoming defensive

When somebody raises these ideas, tone matters more than volume. A believer who reacts as though the faith were under existential threat communicates that it might be, whereas a calm answer communicates that the question has been asked and settled many times. The evidence here is genuinely strong, and there is no need to bluster.

I find it helps to invite people to check for themselves rather than to take my word for it. The Gnostic texts are freely available. The proceedings of Nicaea are documented. The letters of Pliny and Ignatius are in print. Nothing about the Christian case requires anyone to accept a claim on trust, which is more than can be said for the alternative on offer. If you want a wider look at the reliability question, see how we know the Gospels accurately record Jesus’ words.

And keep the conversation pointed at the person rather than at the paperwork. The Da Vinci Code is finally a story about who Jesus was, and that is the question worth spending an evening on. Paul reminded the Corinthians of the resurrection witnesses at 1 Corinthians 15:3 to 8, and the earliest Christians used the Greek word martys, witness, for people who had seen something and would not be talked out of it.

So, now what?

Learn the basic answers well enough to give them without notes. When the canon was settled, what the Gnostic gospels actually say, and where the earliest evidence for the deity of Jesus is found. Those three pieces will handle most of what the Da Vinci Code left behind, and they are not difficult to hold in your head.

And do not be afraid of the question. Every time somebody raises this they are, without knowing it, asking about the identity of Jesus, which is the best subject in the world to be asked about. What would you say if it came up at work tomorrow?

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

John 20:28, ESV