(15) The Da Vinci Code: Is it for real?
Vern Peterman · Jan 22, 2006
Apologetics, No. 16
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826234223654

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

It's a book that has sold hugely, 40 million copies in hardback worldwide, and that's a figure of about a week or two ago. And then in March there's going to be a release in paperback, and then May 19th is when the movie is scheduled to be released. Ron Howard, the director, and Tom Hanks, the lead So lots of heavy hitters behind this one.

And so anyway, you look at it here, here's this bestseller. It says it's a novel. So in one sense, you might think, well, why should I be bothered, you know? But if it's a work of fiction, why are some so concerned about it? We want to take a look at that this morning. I've got a handout over here. Everybody fully equipped? Anybody need one? So be sure you catch up with that.

There is an unnumbered page before the prologue. It has no page number or even Roman numeral or anything of the sort. It's an unnumbered page. At the top of it says, in all caps, FACT. It gives from there two paragraph brief ones about the Priory of Sion and the Roman Catholic organization called Opus Dei. Those two paragraphs wouldn't particularly concern us, although they'd concern some folks who are involved or associated with those organizations. The bottom of the page, however, it says all descriptions of artwork, architecture, Documents and secret rituals are accurate.

So what is that claiming to you? If you see a novel and you see this before the book even starts into the prologue, what is that telling you? It's telling you it's based on fact. Yeah, Tom? Yes, right. It is looking as if it were a historical novel. The idea of a historical novel being that you would have some interpolations between things that are established fact. Pardon? Yeah, there would be a cross between fiction and nonfiction.

And so, anyway, that's really why people get upset. I've looked at some reviews online at different places, and some people will say, you know, why are you so upset about this? It's just fiction. Well, they've somehow forgotten that that's what this thing starts with.

It's the claimed effect, and in fact, go outside of what the book says, the fellow has gone on multiple you know, TV broadcasts, special interviews, things like that, and said, oh yeah, this is true. He says, I started off an unbeliever and I became a believer in these facts. That's the way he says it. So it's not just that this is guys. It is what the guy claims when you ask them face to face.

So from the point of view, here we have this fast paced novel, fairly well written, a mystery thriller, you know, kind of thing. It's bestseller status and that's almost an understatement. The figure that I read is that so far the guy's royalties have totaled $380 million off the book and the movie so far. So anyway, he's not hurting for it. The movie has substantial backing. It's got big names. Nancy was just reading this last week. There was a survey among people out in the populace. Who's your most Who's your most favorite actor? Tom Hanks, number one. He's the lead in this one.

The book has stirred concerns and reactions among Roman Catholic leaders and Bible-believing Christians. One of the things we'll see if you take a look at the book is that its primary target is the Roman Catholic Church. It makes secondary statements that have concern and impact for Bible-believing Christians. But its primary target is Roman Catholic Church. That's where it looks at kind of firing the cannons. Secular historians, some of them are quite disturbed about it because they just say, well, this just plain isn't true. And we'll see some examples of what that is.

And the three authors of Sud Brown claiming plagiarism. One of the key people in the book, Thiebing, that those letters are an anagram for one of the guys who have sued. He says, I wrote this book and it's a similar theme and he used my name in an anagram and made that a key player in the book that he wrote. So anyway, and interestingly enough, it's more than one author claims that he took my stuff. My guess is that those guys will only nick his profits. My guess is. By the time you go around in circles with all the lawyers, they're probably not going to get very far.

Here, for example, here is a reference to the Louvre. And this is an instance of just plain factual question, not anything having any spiritual implication. He talks in chapter 4, right there on the first page, as he references the Louvre. And down here, let's make it a little bigger so you can see it. Here's a key player in the book.

Langdon sighed, too tired to play games. Yes, your pyramid is magnificent. This subsequent fellow, and I assume it's a French name, which I have very poor pronunciation skills, so I'll say he grunted a scar on the face of Paris. Strike one. Langdon sensed his host was a hard man to please. He wondered if, and I'll call it fachet, I have no idea if that's right. had any idea that this pyramid at President Mitterrand's explicit demand had been constructed of exactly 666 panes of glass. A bizarre request that had always been a hot topic among conspiracy buffs who claimed 666 was the number of Satan.

Now, interesting thing. Now, do we take with that statement that it's his claim that this is fact? Historical, documented, you know, artworks, etc. Is this a part of the fact? Or is this fiction? Let me back up to this page that we looked at. Architecture? Isn't that a claim that it's fact, right? Okay, let's take a look at it. Zip back through these.

Okay, so here's his claim, 660 exactly, this isn't an approximation, exactly 666, and it was done explicitly at the request of the French president, Mitterrand. Now, here's the Pyramides talking about, does this have 666 panes, what we saw on page 21, or 673? Well, it turns out, you go through the mathematics and look at the number of panes on each side, it's 673. If you had raised the doorway one more row up, it would be 666.

So it's interesting. Close, but no cigar. And it's not exactly. Another way to look at it is 603 diamond-shaped and 70 triangular paints. So that's how you arrive at the count. Now here's another claim that he made. Throughout the book, one of the claims is this. I'll just kind of bring up to speed. I hope I don't spoil it for anybody.

We have all heard of the legend of the grail. This is something that came out during the Middle Ages where everybody is in this hot pursuit of this very fancy goblet that Christ supposedly used at the Last Supper. And so what's interesting is people hear Christ is at the Last Supper and instead of focusing on Christ, you focus on a little cup. I don't know where you get that, there's nothing in the scripture about it. But that's the way legends go.

His contention is that the Holy Grail was never the cup, but Mary Magdalene. That Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus, that they had a child, that Mary Magdalene was the intended leader of the church, but the apostles rejected her leadership. That's the claim. So, thus, he claims that Leonardo da Vinci, who's in on the secret, has Mary Magdalene there. That that's Mary Magdalene.

In a survey of art historians, who are either professors of or curators, with one exception that said that might be a female. All the rest of them say, no, that's John. He's intended to be shown as young, quite young. Nonetheless, that personage there, that's pivotal to his whole argument, and so that's why secular historians, art historians, would be disturbed by his claim.

That would be an example of the kind of thing that's just plain secular fact, not necessarily spiritual, although the claim that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus, that they had a child, that she was the intended leader of the church, that she was in fact the physical representation of the divine feminine. That's the claim of the book. Okay, we have a timeline and this takes up the bottom half of your handout. And the reason for including this is I want us to kind of stay oriented with what he claims.

Here is the New Testament era, basically taking up the first century, specifically starting from about 6 BC to 96 AD. 6 BC being about the beginning period of the announcement of the birth of Christ, pregnancy of Elizabeth, Mary, things of that sort. And then 96 AD, John has completed the book of Revelation and has taken home to be with the Lord. That period of time comprises the New Testament.

Now, you come up to here, Constantine declares Christianity legal in 312. The book makes a great claim that Constantine really caused a huge shift in what was Christianity. And he is the one responsible for suppressing Mary Magdalene's position as the divine feminine, as the intended leader, as the one who was married to Jesus. And that he is the one responsible for changing the Scriptures.

That's his claim. The Council of Nicaea is one in which the book makes multiple claims that that's the time when Constantine really twisted the arms and had scriptures changed, had all kinds of documents dropped out. He makes the claim that there were 80 Gospels and that we'd narrowed it down to four and had those doctored in order to come up with what we've got.

So, let's take a look at that. Here is Nicaea, just so we know where it is. Ephesus is on the western coast there that we've seen of what is now Turkey. Nicaea is near that little bridge, almost a land bridge, except for the waterway between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. And that is where this council took place. And it did take place. We'll talk about that in a minute. Here's sort of an ancient representation of this council.

And you can go there and visit the ancient ruins of Nicaea today. I would also point out that's where St. Nicholas went from Myra, which is at the bottom end there. That's where Paul actually ported on his trip back to Rome. Went from Myra up to the Council of Nicaea.

That's the fellow from whom we get our legends of Santa Claus. So the Council of Nicaea was an actual event. legends have been developed about people like St. Nicholas. He probably never saw snow in his life, not even the slightest chance he went to the North Pole, even less chance that he lives there now, and even less chance than that, that he flies over all the earth and delivers presents with flying reindeer dropping down chimneys.

Okay, all right. But anyway, here is this lateebing, and this by the way is the anagram of one of the suing you know, authors of an earlier work. The Bible is a product of man, not God. Basic, bold statement there. It is about halfway through the book that these statements come out boldly. You'll see a few things that will kind of trip you up before that, but it's halfway through the book where things really come out. Yes, Art? Is this where the Nicene Creed came from? This is where the Nicene Creed came from.

However, it has had some changing over time because it's been translated two or three times. By the time we get to our English version, that translation is distorted a little bit. One of those being the phrase descended into hell. That's gotten changed around. But anyway, quick answer. Yes. Here is the next one. And we're on page two of your handout, by the way, if you want to track this.

Teebing says more than 80 Gospels were considered for the New Testament and only a relative few were chosen for inclusion. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them. Sophie, now Sophie is the person who asked these, you know, kind of innocent, ignorant questions and so plays the part. Now you have the Teebing who is the scholar coming forth and saying, aha, the fundamental irony of Christianity, the Bible as we know it today was collected by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great, page 231.

So, what really happened? Only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were around and quoted by the end of the first century. We don't have a bunch of others. The closest that we have any record of is that Luke says that, this is Luke chapter 1, verse 4, Luke says that others have made an effort to take some kind of record of what took place. Luke said he went and gathered information together and examined everything carefully, and that's what he reported. The other things that Luke speaks of, the other records we have no record of.

So basically it's those four Gospels. Only in the second, and by that I mean the middle to the last part of the second and following centuries were other Gospels written. I put, say, Gospels in quotes because they're definitely not apostolic by that time. You think like the Gospel of Thomas, that Thomas was 140 years old when he wrote the Gospel of Thomas? I think not.

Anyway, here's the Ryland's Papyrus, 125 AD. It's the oldest portion of the New Testament Gospel of John. It's just two sides of one piece of you know, papyrus. That's the oldest portion of any part of the New Testament that we have. But it predates the earliest of these so-called other Gospels.

The Old Testament was completed by 400 BC, so that's not something Constantine's going to mess with. Josephus recorded that when the line of prophets ended, which was about 400 BC, he says, no, the Jews didn't accept any other scriptures after that. They didn't add to it. Nobody dared to it. Yeah, Tom. Yeah, there are other comments and like the Talmud and different writings that have other indications. You're right. Josephus' writing is perhaps the most clear on that point.

The New Testament was completed by 96 AD when John finished writing the book of Revelation. What about the books that we have that aren't in the New Testament? The Gospel of Thomas is one that is repeatedly referenced in this book, the Da Vinci Code. There are a great many of other books that in subsequent centuries, so that before the year 1000, there was an author who said there are about 280 pretend New Testament books. by his time.

So people kept producing fake books. Paul makes reference to a letter to the church at Laodicea. We don't have any copy of it. So a few centuries later, guess what? Somebody made one up. Those kinds of things. People made extra Gospels. One of the points we take a look at here, I have a copy of the Gospel of Thomas, which you're welcome to take a look at. It's about eight pages. It's 114 verses long.

Let me read you the last verse. Simon Peter said to them, let Mary go forth from among us for women are not worthy of the life. Jesus said, behold, I shall lead her that I may make her male in order that she may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who makes herself male shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. How about that? Talk about sexist, okay? It's nasty.

What is odd is he'll make repeated reference to the Gospel of Thomas with verses like that in there. We're not done taking a look at it, but that's the one he really harps on that we're somehow missing. And it was supposedly excluded by the action of Constantine. Here's the Gospel of Thomas, written about 140, was known but not accepted by Origen, Hippolytus, and Cyril of Jerusalem, Irenaeus. Two versions of the book in circulation. The more complete one is the one that I just read from here. They are Gnostic in character. Gnosticism tended, contrary to what the book said, tended to be very sexist, just like I read to you. We'll change the females into a male so they can be saved, because otherwise they can't be saved.

The Gospel of Thomas tells about Jesus, age five, making clay out of brook, then turning the clay into five sparrows. It tells of Jesus making a young boy wither like a tree and making another boy fall dead for bumping into a shoulder. Does that sound like the Jesus of the New Testament? I'm afraid not. It sounds like somebody made something up. It does not even begin to reflect the character of Jesus or the things that Jesus did in the way of miracles. Not even sort of.

You have this on page six of your handout, and it basically is to show the sequence of people who reference the various books. We have, because of writings by people outside of the New Testament, but writing about the New Testament, if you were to take all of the writings and forget the New Testament manuscripts that we have, we could complete the entire New Testament from those writings, with the exception of less than a dozen verses. So, plenty of record that the New Testament was recorded, used, referenced, studied, read, the whole thing, prior to the time of Constantine. All right, now here's another quote. Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan's veneration of the sun. Any initial reactions on that one? Yeah, Tom? That's right. That's right. Several things.

The Jews did not and do not observe Sabbath simply on Saturday, which is a pagan name. Our inclination is to think it's a certain day to a certain day. They start when? Yeah, what's that? Friday evening. When I was getting together with my rabbi friend Yossi, I gave him a few different times to get together and one of them I gave was Friday at about one o'clock. And he said, no, that's too close to the Sabbath time. So it's not just a light incidental thing, but it's Friday afternoon, not just Saturday. So that's a little piece of ignorance there.

Also, we have Saturday as a pagan name. All the days of the week that we use have pagan origins, every single one. So it isn't just picking Sunday because that happens to stand out in English as relating to the sun. Saturday, Friday, Thursday, every day of the week has a pagan origin, every one.

Monday, what's that about? The moon, yeah. And this is crazy. Anyway, yeah? What's really ironic is that the Spanish rejects kind of a thumping majority that is at least a couple of Catholics, deemed Sunday as the Lord's Day, but Saturday as a Sabbath. Sábado, yes. Sábado, yeah.

The Christians are repeatedly recorded as gathering on the first day of the week. On the first day, here's Acts 20, verse 7, and basically subsequent records of Christians for the centuries up before Constantine repeatedly make reference to gathering on the first day of the week. They called it that, not Sunday. First day of the week when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul began talking. What was he doing? He was giving a message. This is the one where Eutychus falls out of the window.

Here's the first day of the week. Why? Matthew 28 records after the Sabbath that it began to dawn towards the first day of the week, not at Sabbath sundown, but after the Sabbath. And why the shift in time of day, not just day? It's resurrection. And you see that again in Mark the first day of the week, the first day of the week. You can look also at the references there in Luke and in John. All four Gospels record that the resurrection took place on the first day of the week.

We have the reference from Acts, and then we have the fact that what Tom pointed out, here as you observe days and months and seasons and years, in the end, a big difference that apparently the Da Vinci Code author doesn't understand is that For the Jews, what happens if you fail to observe the Sabbath? What's the penalty? What does it cost the Jews if you fail to observe it? Death penalty, yes. Yeah, you're going to die.

And that's why it was very important for the Jews, at least with their mindset, to define what's work. That's why you say, you can't do this, you can't do that. Definitions even have been extended into modern times. Is it work to press the elevator buttons? They said yes, the rabbis said. So you've got all these laws. Why?

The dividing line is you're going to die. Did the early Christians practice the death penalty if you failed to observe Sunday? No. There is not only a change of days, and it isn't just a change of days but a change of times, it's a change of significance. And that's what the author Dan Brown fails to pick up here.

Yes. Yeah, you think about it, the Jews had certain days that they have to observe, you know, this is the day of the Passover, this is the day, you know, Yom Kippur, all their days. And of course, they add to that by New Testament times, John chapter 10, they had added what they celebrate now is Hanukkah, the Feast of Lights. John chapter 10 records that, not as Hanukkah, but as the feast. Hello?

Well, here's an interesting thing. And of course, it was a conflicted situation. They were supposed to be able to practice it. They were supposed to practice it. There's nothing about going to Gentiles in the Old Testament to get the death penalty enforced.

So the fact that they were under the Romans and Jesus underscored the point, they came to him, do we pay taxes to Caesar? He says show me a coin whose face is on it. He had them produce the coin and asked them to answer the question. The confession that you have a coin in your pocket and it's got, by the way, a graven image. of who, and you tell me who it is, that's Caesar, that's saying right there, and you just said it out of your own lips, that's saying right there that you're not obedient, because if you were obedient, you wouldn't be under them.

So they basically admitted themselves, out of their own hand, out of their own pocket, out of their own lips, that they were not obedient to the Lord, otherwise they wouldn't be subservient to the Romans. They then had the problem of, now we can't carry out the death penalty without going to these filthy pig-eating Romans.

It was their way of looking at it. And so what happened is there were instances where they went and carried it out, where they thought they could get away with it. Stephen would be one instance. But in fact, if something was very high profile, or if they wanted to keep their distance for political reasons, they would have the Romans pull it off, as with Jesus. Remember they were afraid of the crowds, right? So how do you pull this off? You make sure that the Romans do it. So they were kind of straddling a fence there and it was a difficult time.

They officially did not have the authorization so the only way that they would pull off a killing is if they felt they could get away without specific penalty. It was also the case with them trying to kill Paul later in the book of Acts. He was taken over to Caesarea without being killed, but the attempt was there to kill him. Okay, the Lord's Day. Here's Revelation 1 as we looked at it. It says, I was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day.

What's interesting is that's the only phrase, the only place where that phrase pops up. It's at the last book of the New Testament, and it's in very much the later times. What's interesting, John writes here is identical to the way it was written by several other early church authors. John appears to be developing a pattern, revealing a pattern, and then that pattern was used by early church authors, including some that we know or strongly suspect were directly discipled by John or second-generation disciples of John. And we can find multiple evidences of that. By the second century, the decades right after John had left this earth, that pattern, the way he said that, was the pattern that was used. So that it meant Sunday. Here is an example. Ignatius, we've mentioned him before, 110. So he died not too long after John. Ignatius was martyred.

These are the same Greek words as John used in Revelation 1.10, the Lord's Day.

And look at the basis on which it was. No longer observing Sabbath, which is also a contradiction to the statement that Constantine was the one who set the Sabbath. No, 1.10, here he is referring to the Sabbath, saying we don't do that, but fashion their lives after the Lord's Day, on which our life also rose through him.

Okay, here's another quote here from the Da Vinci Code. Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet, a great and powerful man, but a man nevertheless. Hmm, let me think about that. Sophie, not the Son of God? T-Bing, right. Jesus' establishment as the Son of God was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea. He's got a little different spelling there. a relatively close vote at that. So let's think about this. Was Jesus not declared the Son of God? That was imposed later. Was this Council of Nicaea a close vote? Was Jesus a man and not deity?

Let's check that out. Here is the Gospel of John. Jesus has seven different identifications in the Gospel of John where he says, I am. The Greek words are ego eimi. What does that mean? Yeah? I am that I am. He uses the same Greek words that are used by the Lord speaking to Moses at the burning bush. In the Greek Old Testament it says ego eimi. I am that I am. It was seen as a statement of I am deity. And I am self-existent, living in the eternal present.

Tom? Oh, okay. Alright. You can find other references to it. Here's another one. Caiaphas. Here's leading the council of elders. They all said, are you the son of God then? And he said to them, I am. King James translates the words a bit more literally. You say that I am.

The form of the Greek comes across, it's not just, I am not the Son of God, but you claim that I am, because look at the response in verse 71. What further need do we have of the testimony? It was clearly understood that when he made that statement, he was claiming deity. So, did Jesus claim to be the Son of God? He didn't just say, I am. He could have said, Eimi, I am. Instead he said, Eiko, Eimi.

I am living in the eternal present. I am the same as the one in the burning bush. I am the self-existent one. I am deity. That was his claim. At that point, we don't need any more testimony. We have it from his own mouth. There are places where it says not just Ego Emi, but Ego Emi, Ego Emi. I mean, it's like, how can I tell you any more emphatically? Do you get it?

So certainly Christ claimed to be the Son of God. Everybody understood Him, even His enemies understood it that way. Even those who wished He were dead understood what His claim meant. Notice there wasn't any contention among the assembly. They said, now we've heard it. Now we've got it straight, right from His own mouth. Here's something else to take a look at, and I don't know how well it came out in your copy. Yeah, you can see the difference.

The lower half are those before the year 300. That was before the time when Constantine had any power. And then the upper half are papyrus documents of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John after that time. Do you know how much difference is between the ones before that time and the ones after?

Zip. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. No difference. No doctoring. Nothing like is claimed in the book. Jesus' claims to deity, his claim to be ego eimi, is the same in the documents before as they are after. No change. Constantine didn't do any tweaking of the documents. And some of those documents are before Constantine was born.

Okay, how close was the vote? That was another point that we brought up. Remember, it was a relatively close vote at that? Not even sort of close. 300 bishops, two of them voted that Jesus was a created being. How close is that? Is that close to you? You call that close?

Not even sort of, okay? So, there's no evidence that Constantine was attempting to have influence over the council. Basically, what Constantine was doing, yes, he was a politician. So he wanted resolution. He says, I don't want any division over this. I want solidarity. But he didn't tell him how to vote, didn't tell him what to do. He just said, I want a decision. And that's how they voted.

300 bishops, one of them was the guy that eventually became Santa Claus in legend. Yes, he was there. But When all was said and done, two said that Christ was a created being. That's the teaching that you will have in the Jehovah's Witnesses now, Arianism. Now, here's T-Bing, also says here, because Constantine upgraded Jesus' status, Alright. Because Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after Jesus' death. Wait a minute. How many centuries? Jesus died about 30 AD. Constantine had the Council of Nicaea 325. How many centuries we got? Not quite three. Okay. Alright. But we'll let him go on that one. Okay.

These thousands of documents already exist in chronicling his life as a mortal man. Do you know how many we have that chronicle his life as a mortal man only? We have some that, pardon? What's interesting is Josephus' words are speculative, unclear, unclear. Some of the copies claim, you know, it says things like, if he may be called a man, that's that sort of unclear statement. But that's as close as you get. There are not thousands of copies.

There are relatively few documents by the time of Constantine, and none of them are even close to being apostolic. Written a century later and more. To rewrite the history book, Constantine knew he would need a bold, strokey commission and financed a new Bible, which omitted those Gospels which spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those Gospels which made him God-like. The earlier Gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned."

Now, for that whole paragraph, the actual basis for anything in the paragraph? Zip. Nothing. There is no basis behind any of that. The Gospels are the same before and afterwards. He didn't doctor the Gospels. The other Gospels that were not included were not even within a century of the time of the Apostles, of the time when the actual events occurred. They were not written by Apostles by any means, and many of them were later. Nothing to support the entire paragraph. Constantine never upgraded Jesus' status nor changed any Bible books whatsoever. We could look not only at the Bible itself, but the Church Fathers' writing and the time from there until Constantine.

A great many of them looked at Jesus as God. Even the Roman governor of northern, what we now call Turkey, wrote to the Emperor just a few decades after John's death. couple decades after John's death, and said these people worship Jesus as a God. That was the statement. He did commission the writing of 50 complete copies of the scriptures as they were, because the Romans had been responsible for destroying so many. But not one evidence that he commissioned to change. Not the slightest. Then we turn to page 245.

These are photocopies of the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea Scrolls, which I mentioned earlier. Teebing said, the earliest Christian records, troublingly, they do not match up with the Gospels of the Bible. Well, a little problem there. Dead Sea Scrolls dated from 250 to 70 AD, most of them from 150 BC to 70 AD. The total number of uniquely Christian documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Zip. They're not Christian, they're Jewish. If you came to the people who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls with Christian teaching, they just went BAH! That got them really ticked. Not even the slightest chance. The only reference that I'm aware of, let me know if you find any others, to the Essenes, the group who is held to be responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls, is in the Sermon on the Mount, and the only thing that happens there is Jesus corrects their teaching. Do you hate your enemies? No. The Old Testament doesn't teach that, but the Essenes did. So, no chance.

Not even the slightest. The Nag Hammadi text, notice the change of words? Do you see a scroll there? They aren't scrolls. The Nag Hammadi texts, the documents, were not scrolls. There were stacks of documents together, not in a scroll form. So there's another error.

But those were written at least a century after the New Testament was completed, written by a group that John the Apostle warned about. What did John say in 1 John 4, 1 through 6? Jesus Christ came in the flesh, and anybody who denies it is of the Antichrist. this group who had the Nag Hammadi texts, not scrolls, were not Christian, and John very specifically and explicitly distanced himself from them. He says, these are not of Christ, they are the Antichrist, because they deny Christ came in the flesh. Here's the only thing he said there that's true, they do not match up with the Gospels and the Bible. I don't know, it's troubling, but At least the last part of the sentence is true. They don't match up. Not even sort of.

Okay, then we read that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Philip is always a good place to start. No it isn't. Anyway, so if you read the passage, the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. Okay, Gospel of Philip.

Then, on page 246, as any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion, see that's the word up above there, in those days literally meant spouse. Well, that's a very interesting thing for him to say. Let's look at it. The only problem is, there's more than one problem.

And it goes this way, the Gospel of Philip was written at least a century and a half after the New Testament was completed. In Greek and in Coptic, we have no copies in Aramaic whatsoever. None. So as any Aramaic scholar will tell you, we can't read Aramaic in the Gospel of Philip, because it wasn't written in Aramaic by any record we have.

But that's not all. The Coptic version translates the Greek word for companion, koinonos. So rather than use the word in the Coptic language, they took the koinonos Greek word and carried over in Coptic spelling the word koinonos from Greek. I put Luke 5.10 there because it's the word used for partner to say that James and John were fishing partners with Peter. Does the word companion mean spouse?

No. It does not. The damaged copies that we have don't say that Jesus kissed her on the mouth, but kissed her on the... nothing. Blank. It's damaged right there. So just multiple errors with what's stated there. Lots and lots of errors. And there are other problems.

There are claims in the Da Vinci Code that art historians and the historians of Western European history would take issue with, but the book carries other sweeping spiritual messages, some I've told you about. Brown says that the first temple in Israel was actually a center for worship of deities, both male and female, with cult prostitutes, much like we read of in Corinth and in Ephesus, that originally the Temple of Solomon had male and female deities, and the Shekinah, by the way, the Shekinah, that's actually a female deity, according to Brown. Just like the other religions around the Mediterranean and the Canaanites had.

Doesn't that sound interesting? Now, what evidence is there to support that? None. None whatsoever. It was Four centuries plus beforehand that the Jews were explicitly told in their law, you are not to have male and female cult prostitutes like the Canaanites have. Four centuries before Solomon's temple. So historical development, written record, nothing squares up with that schema.

The Jewish tetragrammaton Yahweh, The sacred name of God, in fact, derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Yah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah. Does that sound weird or what? So God's male and female and he tries to come up with it out of the names.

The name Jehovah was not actually developed until the Middle Ages. Okay, we say Jehovah in some of our, you know, Bibles and Bible books say Jehovah, but the truth is that term wasn't developed until the Middle Ages. What we have, see the Hebrew representation, what is YHWH? That's what we have written, okay? So it's been anglicized as many words are in our English Bibles, it's been anglicized over into Jehovah. But that's not the way the Hebrews said it. If you came up to them and said Jehovah, they wouldn't know what you're talking about. That's problem one. The Hebrew name YHWH has found the Dead Sea Scrolls over 2,000 years ago, well before any concern like this. That's the oldest record that we have and it just says Yahweh.

The idea presented by Brown that Jewish worship was originally male and female in balance but suppressed by the males under Constantine has no basis in history whatsoever. Pure fiction. No record at all that that was ever the case. And it even violates the records that we do have on every stroke.

There are other references and let you be aware. Here's a video I'd be glad to distribute. It's the Da Vinci Code Deception. It draws on some scholars that I wouldn't necessarily agree with on certain points, but nonetheless, I think it's helpful and I'll put that out. You're welcome to borrow it. I have a few limited copies of this Rose Publishing pamphlet and I'll leave that out for anybody that's interested. There's also this book by Daryl Bach, Breaking the Da Vinci Code, and you can take a look at that.

And you can read the Da Vinci Code if you don't mind putting up with my markings and flags and everything else in it. And then there is this link here. What I'll do is probably the safest thing to do is email that to folks who... I just email it to everybody. You can do with it what you like. It's one that has some further information, and it has links to other things, so you can chase it down as far as you want. All right, now, we've covered a lot of ground here. Yeah, Art?

Do you think that the errors in this invention, or the author of it, are because of his ignorance of biblical knowledge, or whether it's intentional? I believe, this is personal opinion, I believe that what he has is he has an agenda, he is anti-Christian, obviously specifically he's against the Catholic Church because that's where the book is really targeted, but he's anti-Christian, he is himself philosophically a Gnostic, and although it's a little odd how he comes up with things, the Gospel of Thomas is not doesn't claim to have the divine feminine. You heard the last verse there where, you know, if you're going to be saved, you're going to be changed from a female to a male. But I think he has an agenda, and I think he wants to take a slam at Christianity, and he doesn't really, in fact, care what the facts are. He's got a philosophy he's trying to sell. He's doing a very good job of it. A survey that I read last summer, done in Canada, that a significant percentage of the people of Canada had read the book, roughly a third believed that the things that it claimed were true.

So if you think of that, I have no idea what the movie is going to present. By the time you get, you know, 40 million copies sold worldwide, about a tenth of those, for example, are in Britain. By the time you add to that paperback release and a movie, who knows, there's probably video games going to come out over this thing. By the time you add up, and the movie's got heavy hitters, we're talking world famous directors, actors, actresses. It's got some heavy hitters, it will have heavy marketing, I'm sure, to lead it on, that kind of thing. A lot of people will believe its content, and yet its contents are selling something that, as we've seen here this morning, has lots of problems just in terms of pure fact.

It is only ignorance that allows it to be for people to bite the hook. Because once you, I mean, you've seen enough stuff here now, it's like, you know, you shake your head and you say, forget it, you know. Basic stuff, even before you get to anything spiritual, you know, how many panes of glass are there in the pyramid at the Louvre?

Yeah. Yeah, this is this is something that has had such, you know, good backing and response among the population. It's obviously striking a chord. And I think you have to figure the significant number of people are going to believe its claims, even though we can point out multiple places where it's groundless.

And I, by the way, only scratched the surface. There's a lot more. I mean, I just, I went through and flagged it and underlined, made notes. And I just, it, I could spend a lifetime, you know, pointing out the errors in it, but it's, it's, it's believed by many. And I don't know exactly what the movie will present. A lot of times, as you're aware, books and movies go different directions. My guess is at least some of this will come out. Right now the trailer isn't even posted up on the web.

Alright, well we've run out of time. Let's pray. And let's pray for Christians to have discernment and for them to speak the truth boldly before those who will hear and believe this stuff. Lord, we look at this and we see certainly there's a lot to shake our head out and wonder and certainly a lot that's just patently false. And yet at the same time, it provides an opportunity because there is at least discussion in bringing up the things about the Bible. And it leads to the opportunity for us to ask in front of others, what is true? And what does the Bible really say? And what really happened? And it is at least the possibility, although the book itself has wicked statements, the possibility to bring forward what is true and to bring that to people's hearts and minds. And I just pray for each of us and other believers who will face this opportunity now or in the months to come. In Jesus' name, amen.