18.06.06

The Da Vinci Code Lecture

Posted in Lectures at 11:15 pm by dowboy

The Da Vinci Code: Win, Spin or Bin?

Good evening and a very warm welcome to St. Vincent Street Free Church. I want to talk tonight about the most read book of the last 10 years – a book which spent over 40 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 2003 and has, at present, sold over 61 million copies and is the sixth bestselling book of all time. The film, spawned from the book and carrying the same title, stars top Hollywood actors Tom Hanks, Sir Ian McKellen and Audrey Tautou has, to date, grossed over 410 million dollars worldwide. Of course, I am speaking of the Da Vinci Code.

Sir Leigh Teabing, played in the film by Sir Ian McKellen, provides the launching pad for all I want to talk about tonight when he says of those secrets which comprise the Da Vinci Code, “In my experience … men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.” It is my contention that Teabing is absolutely correct in this assertion – human beings go to great lengths to avoid what they fear – but it is also my contention that what Teabing, and the author Dan Brown fear, is not a cover-up of the marriage and lineage of Jesus Christ, but of the consequences of the Holy Bible as we have it on our shelves and desks being true. It is my contention that the Da Vinci Code is the latest in a long line of attempts to avoid the fact that Jesus Christ was really who He said He was –the Son of God, that the Bible really is the Word of God and that as a result of these two truths our lives have to change; they can no longer be lived for ourselves, they must be lived for God.
I want to divide what I will say tonight into four sections: first, what is the Da Vinci Code, where I will offer a synopsis of the storyline (sorry if you haven’t read the book, I promise not to spoil the ending); secondly, why is the Da Vinci Code so popular where I will offer suggestions as to why the Code has found such fertile ground in 21^st Century Western society; thirdly, is the Da Vinci Code true in what it proposes, where I will seek to answer what the book says about the Priory of Sion, the supposed marriage of Jesus, the role of women in Christianity and the formation of the Christian Bible. Lastly, I will outline a Christian response to the Da Vinci Code both for those of us who are Christians, and by way of challenge to those of us who aren’t. At the end I hope to leave a time for questions and discussion.
[A] What is the Da Vinci Code?
The Da Vinci code revolves around the star figure Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University’s attempts to solve the murder of Jacques Sauniere, Curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Sauniere is found murdered, with his body arranged in the figure of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man and with a cryptic message written in blood across his chest. The message leads to a code hidden in Da Vinci’s paintings, the meat of which threatens the very existence of the Christian church. Langdon, together with Sir Leigh Teabing, an English Royal Historian, piece together the mystery of the Da Vinci code, all the time being hunted by Silas, an albino monk assassin sent by the Opus Dei sect of the Catholic Church. Langdon and Teabing follow clues which lead them to the Holy Grail, a relic they believe not to be an object, but a bloodline – the bloodline of Jesus Christ through His marriage to Mary Magdalene. This bloodline has been kept secret for 1,000 years by an organisation known as the Priory of Sion, an organisation founded by Templar crusaders who discovered the secret of the Holy Grail whilst in on crusade in Jerusalem. Thrilling to the very last page, the Da Vinci code, drawing on supposed historical evidence, questions the formation of the books which make up the Bible, the celibacy of Jesus, the role of women in the early Church and the Godhood, of the Lord Jesus Christ. If true, the Da Vinci Code threatens to destroy the Christian Church.
[B] Why is the Da Vinci Code so Popular?
The Da Vinci Code could not have been written 50 years ago, but even if it had, it would never have gained the same readership and interest it has today. Why is that? I want to suggest four reasons:
1. Postmodernism – we live in a society where truth has become relative; meaning is no longer attached to what was intended by the person who said something, it is more important what you think he meant by it. This is typified in the Da Vinci Code when Inspector Fache asks Robert Langdon what the symbol of the pentangle means. Langdon thinks to himself, “telling someone what a symbol ‘meant’ was like telling them how a song should make them feel – it was different for all people.” (Of course, that doesn’t stop Langdon from proceeding to tell Fache what he thinks it means). Fact is no longer crucial to decision making; it is more important to find your own truth. 50 years ago, people would have judged the facts presented in the Da Vinci Code and either accepted them or rejected them, but now, fact has become a matter of what you want to believe. Thus, when I was speaking to a Barista at Starbucks this week about the Da Vinci Code her reply to me was, “it depends upon whether you want to believe it or not.” To her, objective fact is not the most important element in whether she accepts it or not; it is whether she wants to believe it or not.
2. Fear – despite Britain being a democracy, I’m sure all of us agree that from day to day, we live in fear. The Da Vinci Code is the ultimate evidence of that fear, a fear directed in two areas:
·         Institution – institution, whether it is the institution of government or of church are fair game for our fears of conspiracy. Just think of all the films and conspiracy theories concocted over the last few years directed against institutions. Sir Leigh Teabing says of the institution he calls the church (although he consistently misunderstands that the church is more than the Roman Catholic church), “the Church should not be allowed to tell us what notions we can and can’t entertain.” Of course, this only goes so far – very few of us fear the NHS or the Education system. But for most people in Britain today, they fear or just plain ignore Christianity, because they equate it with the institution of the church.
·         Fundamentalism – fundamentalist is probably the worst tag you can attach to anyone – fundamentalist ranks right up there with paedophile and rapist. When most people think of fundamentalist, they think of Islamic fundamentalism. The Da Vinci code is so popular because it represents an attack on Christian fundamentalism (of course, no-one nowadays would ever dream of attacking Islamic fundamentalism – they’re just too afraid, so Dan Brown picks the easy target). The problem is that most people do not know what the fundamentals of Christianity are – these fundamentals which we hold to fanatically – for me, at least, they are the golden rule of loving the Lord my God with all my heart, and loving my neighbour as myself. Are those bad fundamentals to have?
3. Isolationism – conspiracy theories thrive on the disenfranchisement which people feel in Western society today. There is no such thing as community anymore and the knowledge people have is carefully filtered through the pages of the Daily Record and the Glasgow Herald. No wonder people feel as if there is more to a story than just what they have been fed. Everybody lives on an island in the middle of a crowded sea, and conspiracy theories make them feel important, as if knowledge means power to the powerless.
4. Narrative – Truth is no longer expressed in propositional terms – that is, if I make a bald statement about how 1 + 1 = 2, it is far less likely to be understood today than it was 50 years ago. What I have to do now is to tell a story with the hidden meaning that 1 and 1 is 2. Narrative and story are incredibly powerful media of communication. The postmodern philosophers Jacques Derrida and Francois Lyotard know this all too well, writing novels to teach their philosophy. Historically, the Christian church had its storytellers, none more so than John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress and Holy War, and C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia series, in which Biblical Christian truth is woven into the woof and warp of good narrative. Our master Jesus Himself did the very same thing through the parables. Above all else, the Da Vinci Code is a cracking good read, a thriller from page one to the end – a perfect vehicle to carry Dan Brown’s subversive truths.
[C] Is the Da Vinci Code True in what it Proposes?
I want to look at 4 ‘facts’ (amongst many) the Da Vinci Code rests upon:
1. The Priory of Sion – According to Dan Brown on pg. 15 of my copy of the Da Vinci Code, “Fact: The Priory of Sion – a European secret society founded in 1099 – is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale disovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci.” The Priory of Zion, directly descended from the Templar monks who discovered the secret of the bloodline of Jesus Christ through Mary Magdalene, are responsible for keeping the ‘real’ truth alive. And so straight away, before even the story has begun, we are confronted with an unequivocal fact, an unquestionable fact – not fictional thriller material, but fact. Likewise, we are presented with the greatest intellects in the history of the Western world – men like Isaac Newton and Botticelli. In other words, not to believe in the existence of the Priory of Zion is to go against fact, and not to accept the truth which the Priory of Zion is protecting is to go against the greatest intellects in history. And so, of course, most of us, presented with such a stark statement of fact will believe what Dan Brown says – and we will believe that there really is a 1,000 year old organisation called the Priory of Sion which boasts members such as Da Vinci and Victor Hugo.
But does this claim to fact stand up under scrutiny? The answer is no. I use as my source for this section the internet Encyclopedia Wikipedia. If you type in ‘Priory of Sion’ into its search engine, you will find the following information. The Priory of Sion was registered as an organisation in 1956 by 4 men, the leader of which was Pierre Plantard, a French royalist who believed that he was the legitimate heir to the French crown. The priory was created as a type of Masonic lodge to develop chivalry and royalism. In order to give the Priory of Sion a historical pedigree, Plantard created a history for it that stretched back to 11^th Century Jerusalem and the Templar knights. In order to provide independent evidence for the Priory’s authenticity, Plantard and a colleague Philippe de Cherisy, planted a series of forged documents called Les Dossier Secrets at the National Library of France, and then commissioned a well known author to write a book on them.
The hoax was discovered by Jean Luc Chaumeil, who began to publish details about Plantard’s con-man history, and about the Priory conspiracy. Later on, under oath in a court of Law, Plantard admitted that everything was made up. In 1996, Andre Bonhomme, one of the four men who had registered the Priory of Sion gave an interview to the BBC and said “The Priory of Sion doesn’t exist anymore. We were never involved in any activities of a political nature. It was four friends who came together to have fun. We called ourselves the Priory of Sion because there was a mountain by the same name close-by. I haven’t seen Pierre Plantard in over 20 years and I don’t know what he’s up to but he always had a great imagination. I don’t know why people try to make such a big thing out of nothing.”
Get the message – there is no Priory of Sion – the only fact is that Brown has been conned. Botticelli, Newton and da Vinci were never involved in something which started up in 1956 as a piece of ‘fun’ between four friends. And if the Priory of Sion doesn’t exist, nor has ever existed in the form the Da Vinci code presents it as, then the Da Vinci Code stumbles at the first hurdle – the first fact it presents is actually … a lie. And if it’s a lie, can you trust anything else about it? The enlightened Sir Leigh Teabing says, “Learning the truth has become my life’s love”. Poor Sir Teabing – if he believes the Priory of Sion to be descendents of the Knights Templar, protecting a secret sure to destroy the Christian church, he’s lived his life loving a lie.
2. Was Jesus Married? – according to Sir Leigh Teabing, “the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record.” Thus, the offspring from Jesus and Mary’s marriage constitutes the royal blood, the sangreal, the holy grail which they have spent their lives looking for. As far fetched as this may sound, Teabing presents three strands of evidence to suggest that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
(i) The Last Supper – according to Teabing, if you look carefully at Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, three features jump out at you:
·         The figure on Jesus’ right, commonly thought to be the apostle John, is in fact feminine, with flowing red hair and the semblance of a bosom. Da Vinci, as a master of the Priory of Sion, knew that in fact it was Jesus’ wife, Mary Magdalene, and not John who sat at Jesus’ right hand side.
·         Jesus and the figure to His right are joined at the hip and the space between them forms a V-type shape – the V being the symbol of the sacred feminine.
·         If you take Jesus, the V and the figure to His right together, they form an M – the M which was traditionally understood to be Matrimonio or Mary Magdalene.
And so, Da Vinci, master of the Priory of Sion was encoding within the painting of the Last Supper the shocking truth that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. As Teabing says, “The Last Supper practically shouts at the viewer that Jesus and Magdalene were a pair.”
(ii) Jewish Custom – Teabing says, “Jesus was a Jew … and the social decorum during that time virtually forbade a Jewish man to be unmarried. According to Jewish custom, celibacy was condemned, and the obligation for a Jewish father was to find a suitable wife for his son.” In other words, Jewish social custom was that men must marry, and if they did not, it was a matter of disgrace. And therefore, if Jesus had not married, the gospels would have gone out of their way to have told us.
(iii) Gnostic Gospels – Teabing goes on to read out two passages from the Gnostic Gospels, books that were relatively recently found and which, Teabing suggests, are good places to start. He first reads from the Gospel of Philip where it is written, “And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth.” Here the Aramaic word for companion literally means spouse, or wife. He secondly reads from the Gospel which Mary Magdalene herself wrote, where the disciples say of the relationship of Jesus with Mary Magdalene, ‘he loved her more than us.’
And so it would seem that Dan Brown has compiled an impressive body of evidence to suggest that Jesus Christ was, in fact, married to Mary Magdalene. But what is our response to these points – has Sir Leigh Teabing, the lifelong lover of truth, got it wrong again or should we change they way we think about Jesus? Unsuprisingly, it is my contention that Teabing has been sold another lie.
(i) The Last Supper - Teabing’s analysis of the Last Supper seems failsafe doesn’t it? Except when Art Historians get their hands on it. Robert Baldwin, professor of Art History at Connecticut College has critiqued the Da Vinci code’s handling of the Last Supper. Concerning the supposed femininity of the figure on Jesus’ right hand side, and that figure therefore representing Mary Magdalene, Baldwin points out that the apostle John, being the disciple whom the Bible says, Jesus loved, is always portrayed by Renaissance artists in feminine tones. Such a representation is not unique to Leonardo da Vinci, you can also find it in Perugino, Botticelli, Michaelangelo and Cellini. Back in renaissance times, it was fashionable to represent male youth and vigour in terms of feminine looks. Thus, as Fred Sanders has rightly pointed out, “every age has its own standards of fashion, taste and human beauty. In the Italian Renaissance, a handsome young man was usually portrayed in a way that emphasized his rosy cheeks, conspicuous beardlessness and curly hair … all the Da Vinci Code proves in this respect is that John looks girly to Dan Brown, but not to Leonardo [Da Vinci].” And concerning the symbolism of the V and the M in the Last Supper, Bishop N.T. Wright has written, “You can take any great painting and play this kind of game with it. That’s not to say that some painters may not have implanted coded messages in their work. It would be surprising if they didn’t. But you won’t find too many serious art critics giving Brown’s reading of the painting more than a passing smile.” So much then for Mary Magdalene being portrayed in the Last Supper.
(ii) Jewish Custom – it is simply not true to say that it was compulsory for Jewish men to marry. Recently discovered scrolls, the same scrolls which Teabing uses to suggest that Jesus was married, show that extremely pious Jews often did not marry so as to pursue their religion more seriously. In particular, one group, called the Essenes, lived in exclusively male communities in the desert. Women did not live in these communities – any women associated with them lived outside the camps. Darrel Bock, an outstanding modern New Testament scholar has written, “There were good religious reasons why some Jews did not marry, most often out of religious dedication.” Furthermore, in 1 Corinthians 9:5, when the apostle Paul is talking of the right he passed over, namely to have a wife like the other apostles did, he does not mention that Jesus had a wife. If Jesus had a wife, Paul would not have been able to use this argument. Again, in Matthew 19:12 Jesus talks about those who have renounced marriage because of their devotion to the kingdom of heaven. Would Jesus Himself had issues such a statement of devotion without Himself having followed it. So much then for the Jewish custom of all men being married.
(iii) Gnostic Gospels – supposing we accept the truth of the Gnostic gospels, supposing we acknowledge that they are authoritative, there are only two texts, among literally millions, which even begin to hint that Jesus and Mary Magdalene may have been married. Hardly decisive historical evidence! But I am not even willing to accept that the Gnostic Gospels are true. For a start, they were written between the 2^nd and the 10^th Century AD – a long time after the time of the apostles. Likewise, literary studies show that they are heavily dependant upon the four Biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for their material. The reference from the Gospel of Philip is not nearly as clear cut as Teabing makes it out to be. For a start, it was written not in Aramaic, as Teabing suggests, but in Coptic. The word ‘companion’ is a Greek loan word – the word ‘koinonoj’ – a word with no suggestions of spouse at all. Furthermore, the text is incomplete – the original text literally reads, “And the companion of the … Mary Magdalene … loved her more than … the disciples … kiss her … on the ….” Early Christians did greet one another with a holy kiss on the mouth, cheek or forehead, so a kiss in itself means nothing. In other words, as Darrel Bock points out, “she was a companion of someone (perhaps Jesus) since she was in the travelling party and that Jesus kissed her (but where or in what context is not known).” Hardly compelling evidence for Mary and Jesus being married! The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, of course, was not written by Mary Magdalene, and is a 4^th Century production, and the reference Teabing uses from there proves nothing at all. In short, from the two references in the inauthentic Gnostic Gospels, we have no proof whatsoever that Jesus was married.
John Dominic Crossan, a prominent New Testament scholar has sarcastically written, “There is an ancient and venerable principle of biblical exegesis which states that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it must be a camel in disguise. So let’s apply that to whether or not Jesus was married. There is no evidence that Jesus was married (looks like a duck), multiple indications that he was not (walks like a duck), and no early texts suggesting wife or children (quacks like a duck)…so he must be an incognito bridegroom (camel in disguise).” It wouldn’t shatter my faith completely if Jesus had been married, but the Bible says He wasn’t, logic says He wasn’t and Jewish culture says He wasn’t. Therefore, however hard the Da Vinci code tries to say to the contrary, we can be absolutely certain that Jesus wasn’t married.
3. Christianity and Women – according to Sir Leigh Teabing, the Christian Roman emperor “Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion for ever.” Indeed, the conception that most people have of the Christian church is that of a male dominated, chauvinistic, repressive atmosphere, where women aren’t respected and definitely not treated as equals. And so Brown here is sowing onto fertile feminist ground. But is it true that Christianity is anti-woman – did Jesus and His followers repress women and treat them as inferiors?
Let’s analyse this claim by looking first at what the Bible has to say about the role of Mary Magdalene, and then what it has to say about the role of women in general:
[A] Mary Magdalene
(i) Disciple – the first record we have of Mary Magdalene is in Luke 8:1-3, where we find that Jesus exorcised seven unclean spirits from her. She then, with other women, became a camp follower of Jesus and the 12 disciples and supported them out of her own means. So Jesus was quite happy to have a woman following Him. Let’s just clear something up at this point in which the da Vinci Code is absolutely correct – there is no indication anywhere that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.
(ii) Present at the Cross – when Jesus died upon the cross, Mary Magdalene, and other women, were watching from a distance (Matthew 27:55-56). They were present with Jesus at the last, even when Jesus’ closest male disciples had deserted and betrayed Him. The Bible is thus painting a picture of the loyalty and love that women had for the Lord Jesus.
(iii) Present at the Burial – Matthew 27:61 tells us that Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and John (two of the male disciples) were present at the burial of Jesus in the tomb of Joseph of Arimithea. Again, there is no mention of any of Jesus’ male disciples being loyal enough to Him to have attended His burial.
(iv) Witness to the Resurrection – Matthew 28:1 tells us that Mary Magdalene was the first person to be told by the angel, and to see for herself, that the Lord Jesus had risen from the dead. The most important event in all history was committed in the first instance, to women, who in the Jewish society of the day, were considered so untrustworthy as to be prohibited from giving evidence in a court of law. It was Mary Magdalene who informed the other disciples of the resurrection of Jesus, and it was Mary Magdalene in John 20:11-18 who was the first to have a conversation with the risen Lord Jesus Christ. And so, far from painting her in a negative light – far from demonizing the feminine, the Biblical account of Mary Magdalene shows the respect with which the Lord Jesus and His followers treated women.
[B] Other Women
The Bible is full of stories about women, and in particular the New Testament. Thus, from its pages we learn much about Christianity’s view of women. We see 4 things:
(i) Jesus breached cultural norms to engage with them – in John 4 we have an account of the Lord Jesus meeting with a Samaritan woman. Never mind the fact that she was a hated Samaritan, she was a woman – it just wasn’t right in the culture of Jesus’ day for Him to be speaking to a woman. Thus, Jesus was counter-cultural in His attitude towards woman and far from treating them as dogs, he treated them as human beings, being concerned for them and for their status in society.
(ii) Jesus treated them differently from other pious Jews – listen to this quote taken from a Jewish Rabbinic document called Avoth 1:5, “don’t talk too much with women.” Chattering with women brought trouble upon yourself, it was better just to spend time studying the Torah. Again, pious Jews exempted women from any of the Jewish religious practices as an indication that they didn’t have the same religious obligations as men. Nowhere in the example of Jesus or the teachings of Christianity do we even approach this kind of sexism. Rather, the Lord Jesus talks to women, heals women and places upon them the same privileges and responsibilities as men.
(iii) Jesus treated them differently from Gnostics – the Gnostic Gospels, those from which Dan Brown tries to prove that Jesus was married to Jesus, are also full of anti-woman sentiments. They saw women as being defective males. Listen to this from the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, “Simon Peter said to them, ‘Let Mary leave us, because women are not worthy of life.’ Jesus said, ‘Look, I shall lead her so that I will make her male in order that she also may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Gnostics treated women as second class citizens, but the Christian gospels never present women as defective human beings who need to become male in order to enter into the kingdom of heaven; rather, they present women as recipients of the mercy and salvation of God in the same way men are.
(iv) Christianity asserts their equality with men – in Galatians 3:28, written some 20 years after the death of the Lord Jesus by the Apostle Paul, Paul writes, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” One of the reasons Christianity spread like wildfire amongst slaves and women was because of its radical egalitarian view, that in Christ all men and women were equal. Albeit that males and females have different roles within society and the church, the Bible is at pains to assert the ontological equality of male and female before God. And this, to the world of Jesus’ day, was a truly radical idea.
Over history, the church has emancipated women and freed them to be who they really are. One example of this is to be found in the history of our own denomination, the Free Church, who gave women the vote in ministerial elections back in 1843, 80 years before women got the vote in British society. So don’t for one second be carried away by the Da Vinci Code’s claims that Christianity is oppressive to women and destructive of their femininity.
4. The Bible – in many ways, this is the most sinister of all attacks which the Da Vinci Code makes; I don’t have any time to talk about it, but as you can appreciate, up until this point, we have shown that Teabing is wrong about the Priory of Sion, the marriage of Jesus and the role of women in Christianity. If he’s wrong about these, then it stands to reason that he’s wrong about everything else. For 2,000 years, Christians have believed that the Bible is the Word of God, and have experienced the life changing power of God as they give in to what He says in His Word.
So, in all these areas, the Da Vinci Code falls far short of what we would expect of a robust, historical, factual account of the birth of Christianity.
[D] How should we Respond to the Da Vinci Code?
Very briefly, I believe we should espouse four responses:
1. Debate not Death – the response to the publication of the Satanic Verses amongst the Islamic world was the pronouncement of a Fatwah of Death upon its author Salman Rushdie. Recent caricatures of the prophet Mohammed brought demonstrators to London’s streets carrying hideous placards proclaiming, “We will cut off your heads.” Is that the only way Islam knows how to react to opposition? However, my Bible talks of a different weapon that we as Christians are to wield; Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 10:4, 5 – “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of this world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretention that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient unto Christ.” We do not pronounce Fatwahs, we do not use violence; we use debate.
2. Fact not Fiction – Edwin Lutzer PhD wrote, “We can’t compete with people’s desires, but we can show that all the hard evidence is on our side.” The Da Vinci code begins by trying to set orthodox Christianity up against the greatest intellects of the Western world. As we have seen, it is the Da Vinci code which shows itself to be non-intellectual by basing its storyline upon made-up stories. The opposite is in fact true – intellectualism is on the side of orthodox Biblical Christianity. Be confident – in becoming a Christian you are not throwing away your brain, nor are you being brainwashed (if anyone has done any brainwashing, it is the supposed ‘facts’ of the Da Vinci Code) – in fact you are beginning to use your God-given intellect.
3. Scripture not Story – how do we know anything? The barista at Starbucks who said “it depends upon whether you want to believe it or not” knows things on the basis of what she wants to know and whether she, herself, feels it is credible. In other words, her basis for knowing comes from within herself, and in the case of the Da Vinci Code, it leads her down a blind alley. As Christians, we know not on the basis of a hunch, or a personal feeling, but on the basis of the Bible – God’s revelation of Himself to mankind. In becoming a Christian you are being released from the slavery of blindness into the freedom of knowledge.
4. Faith not Fantasy – perhaps people accept the Da Vinci code because they see its claims as amazing compared to the almost mundane of what they learned in Sunday School. As Sir Leigh Teabing comments, “almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.” Of course, we have discovered that what Dan Brown teaches us about Christ, though fantastic, is palpably false. But I want to tell you that the truth about Jesus is more fantastic than you can even begin to imagine. Robert Langdon devotes his life to looking for the Holy Grail, the supposed bloodline of Jesus Christ. We Christians do something more amazing by far – we know and have devoted ourselves to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself – a man who died upon a cruel Roman Cross, but rose from the dead and is alive forevermore as our Saviour and Lord. Now that’s far more fantastic than the Da Vinci Code ever is, but it’s also true.
So in conclusion, let’s go back to the question which forms the title of tonight’s lecture, the Da Vinci Code: win, spin or bin? Well, if you like thrillers, the Da Vinci code is a win. Concerning the truth, the Da Vinci Code spins more than Alistair Campbell and the Labour party. And concerning the facts of the Da Vinci code, bin them. Sir Leigh Teabing says, “In my experience … men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.” We live in a culture which is haunted by the Lord Jesus Christ – the question for us all is this; do you believe the Da Vinci code because if it is correct you will be able to avoid doing what you fear, namely bowing the knee to the Lord Jesus and becoming a Christian? Well tonight, you can obtain what you know you have always desired and come to the living Holy Grail, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself who invites you saying, “come to me, all you that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

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