What about the Da Vinci Code?
Question 60053
Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code became a global phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies and generating a major film adaptation. Its influence extended far beyond entertainment, because Brown presented his fictional narrative as resting on historical fact, and millions of readers took the claims seriously. The book alleges that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, that they had children, that the early church suppressed this truth to consolidate power, and that the deity of Christ was a political invention of the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Every one of these claims is demonstrably false, and Christians should be equipped to say why.
The Claim That Jesus Married Mary Magdalene
There is no evidence, in any historical source from any period, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene or to anyone else. The canonical Gospels, written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, contain no reference to such a relationship. The apocryphal texts that Brown relies upon, particularly the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, are Gnostic documents from the second and third centuries, written long after the events they purport to describe, and they come from a theological tradition that the earliest Christians recognised as fundamentally incompatible with the apostolic faith.
The Gospel of Philip, which Brown cites as evidence that Jesus kissed Mary Magdalene on the mouth, is a fragmentary text with a lacuna (a gap in the manuscript) at the very point where the relevant word would appear. The word “mouth” is a speculative reconstruction. Even if it were present, the Gnostic context of the Gospel of Philip used the kiss as a symbol of spiritual transmission, not romantic affection. Building a historical claim about Jesus’ marital status on a reconstructed word in a second-century Gnostic text with a completely different theological framework is not serious historical method.
The Claim About the Council of Nicaea
The novel’s central historical assertion is that the deity of Christ was invented at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, allegedly at the instigation of the Emperor Constantine for political purposes, and that the vote was “relatively close.” This is false at every point.
The deity of Christ was affirmed by Christians from the earliest period of the church’s existence. Paul’s letters, written in the 40s and 50s AD, contain explicit affirmations of Christ’s divine nature. Philippians 2:5-11 describes Jesus as existing “in the form of God” before He took the form of a servant. Colossians 1:15-20 describes Him as the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things were created and hold together. John 1:1, written in the first century, states that the Word was God. These are not late inventions; they are among the earliest Christian documents we possess.
The Council of Nicaea did not invent the deity of Christ. It defined it with precision in response to the Arian heresy, which claimed that the Son was a created being. The vote was not close. Of approximately three hundred bishops present, only two refused to sign the Nicene Creed. The idea that a “relatively close vote” transformed Jesus from a human prophet into a divine being contradicts every historical source we have for the council’s proceedings.
The Claim About Suppressed Gospels
Brown claims that the church suppressed eighty or more “gospels” and selected only four for the canon in order to control the narrative about Jesus. The actual history is considerably less dramatic. The four canonical Gospels were recognised as authoritative from the earliest period of the church’s life. Irenaeus, writing around AD 180, identifies Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the four universally accepted Gospels. The Muratorian Fragment, dated to the late second century, provides a similar list. The so-called “suppressed” gospels, the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, are second- and third-century productions from a movement that the earliest Christians consistently identified as a departure from the apostolic teaching.
The canonical process was not a power grab. It was a community of faith recognising which documents bore the marks of apostolic authority, historical reliability, and theological consistency with the teaching received from the apostles. The fact that discussion occurred over certain books, such as Hebrews, 2 Peter, and Revelation, reflects responsible seriousness, not political manipulation.
Why This Still Matters
The Da Vinci Code is a novel. It is fiction. But Brown’s repeated insistence that the historical framework is factual, combined with the general public’s limited knowledge of early church history, means that the book’s claims have lodged in the cultural consciousness in ways that continue to affect how people think about Christianity. Surveys conducted after the book’s publication consistently showed that a significant percentage of readers believed its historical claims were true. For many people, The Da Vinci Code is the only thing they know about the Council of Nicaea or the formation of the biblical canon.
This makes it a pastoral issue as much as an apologetic one. When a person says they struggle to believe in the deity of Christ because “it was invented at Nicaea,” or that the Bible cannot be trusted because “the church suppressed the real gospels,” they are repeating claims from a novel. The response does not require advanced scholarship. It requires the basic historical literacy that every church should be providing.
So, now what?
The best defence against misinformation is knowledge. The early church’s testimony to the deity of Christ is overwhelming, consistent, and rooted in the earliest documents we possess. The formation of the canon was a process of recognition, not political imposition. The Gnostic “gospels” are late, theologically alien to the apostolic faith, and historically unreliable. Christians who know these things will not be troubled by a novel’s claims, and they will be equipped to help others who have been. The truth about Jesus is far more compelling than Dan Brown’s fiction, and it has the advantage of being true.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1
