The DaVinci Deception
The DaVinci Deception
com
Copyright © 2004 by Erwin Lutzer. All rights reserved.
Author photo copyright © by Jim Whitmer Photography. All rights reserved.
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Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible,
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Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard
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PREFACE
xiii . . . THE DA VINCI CODE AT A GLANCE
CHAPTER 1
1 . . . . . . . CHRISTIANITY, A POLITICIAN,
AND A CREED
CHAPTER 2
19 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THAT OTHER BIBLE
CHAPTER 3
39 . . . . JESUS, MARY MAGDALENE, AND
THE SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL
CHAPTER 4
59 . . . . BANNED FROM THE BIBLE: WHY?
CHAPTER 5
77 . . A SUCCESSFUL SEARCH FOR JESUS
CHAPTER 6
95 . . . . DIVERGENT PATHS: THE CHURCH
AND ITS COMPETITORS
AFTERWORD
113 . . . . . . . FROM MY HEART TO YOURS
The Puzzle of Jesus 119. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ENDNOTES
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE PUZZLE OF JESUS
1
Justin Pope, “Books Examine Jesus, as Part of U.S. History, Culture,” The Chicago Sun Times,
13 February 2004, p. 48.
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PREFACE
THE DA VINCI CODE AT A GLANCE
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THE DA VINCI CODE AT A GLANCE
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THE DA VINCI CODE AT A GLANCE
person to the right of Jesus is not John after all, but rather
Mary Magdalene. And, tellingly, Leonardo did not paint a
cup or chalice on the table—another hint that the real Grail is
Mary, sitting to the right of Jesus!
While Robert, Sophie, and Sir Leigh continue their investi-
gation, the powerful Catholic organization Opus Dei is ready
to use whatever means necessary—including assassination—
to keep a lid on the secret. Flush with church money, Opus
Dei is determined to force the top officials of the Priory to re-
veal the map to the Grail’s location. If the secrets of the Priory
were revealed, the church would be exposed as a fraud built
on centuries of deceit.
Dan Brown’s agenda is not so thinly veiled: This book is a
direct attack against Jesus Christ, the church, and those of us
who are his followers and call him Savior and Lord. Chris-
tianity, according to Dan Brown’s novel, was invented to
suppress women and to turn people away from the “divine
feminine.” Understandably, the book appeals to feminists,
who see a return to goddess worship as a necessity to combat
male supremacy.
The upshot of this theory is that Christianity is based on a
big lie, or rather, several big lies. For one thing, Jesus was not
God, but his followers attributed deity to him in order to
consolidate male rule and to suppress those who worshipped
the divine feminine. Indeed, according to Dan Brown, at the
Council of Nicaea Constantine invented the idea of the deity
of Christ so that he could eliminate all opposition, declaring
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THE DA VINCI CODE AT A GLANCE
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THE DA VINCI CODE AT A GLANCE
• Did Constantine invent the deity of Christ? And did the Council
of Nicaea, which he convened, determine which books should be
in the New Testament?
• Are the Gnostic Gospels reliable guides to New Testament
history?
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Christianity, a Politician, and a Creed
ONE
CHRISTIANITY, A POLITICIAN, AND A CREED
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new doctrine that would give him the clout he craved. Sir Leigh
Teabing, the Holy Grail enthusiast, explains to Sophie that at
the council the delegates agreed on the divinity of Jesus. Then
he adds, “Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by
His followers as a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man,
but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”
So Constantine “upgraded Jesus’ status almost three cen-
turies after Jesus’ death” for political reasons.1 In the process,
he secured male dominance and the suppression of women.
By forcing others to accept his views, the emperor demon-
strated his power and was free to kill all who opposed him.
The second allegation in the novel is that Constantine re-
jected other gospels that were favorable to the divine femi-
nine. To quote Teabing again, “More than eighty gospels were
considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few
were chosen for inclusion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
among them . . . . The Bible, as we know it today, was collated
by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”2
In other words, Constantine recognized a good deal when
he saw it and therefore called the council to ensure male
power and accept those canonical documents that were
favorable to his political agenda. In the novel, Langdon says,
“The Priory believes that Constantine and his male succes-
sors successfully converted the world from matriarchal pa-
ganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of
propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterat-
ing the goddess from modern religion forever.”3 With this
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CHRISTIANITY, A POLITICIAN, AND A CREED
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CHRISTIANITY, A POLITICIAN, AND A CREED
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CHRISTIANITY, A POLITICIAN, AND A CREED
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• Justin Martyr was born in Palestine and was impressed with the
ability of Christians to face death heroically. When he heard the
gospel, he converted to Christianity and became a defender of
the faith he loved. He said Christ was “the son and the apostle of
God the Father and master of all.”11 He was born about AD 100
and martyred in AD 165.
• Irenaeus became the bishop of Lyons in AD 177. He spent much
of his life combating the heresy of Gnosticism that we will
examine in the next chapter. Speaking of passages such as John
1:1, he wrote that “all distinctions between the Father and the
Son vanish, for the one God made all things through His
word.”12
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CHRISTIANITY, A POLITICIAN, AND A CREED
were issued at Nicaea, and the contents of all of them are still
in existence; not one of them refers to issues regarding the
canon.
Thankfully, I was able to track down the source of the er-
ror. Baron D’Holbach in Ecce Homo writes, “The question of
authentic and spurious gospels was not discussed at the first
Nicene Council. The anecdote is fictitious.”14 D’Holbach
traces the fiction to Voltaire, but further research reveals an
even earlier source of the rumor.
An anonymous document called Vetus Synodicon, written
in about AD 887, devotes a chapter to each of the ecumenical
councils held until that time. However, the compiler adds de-
tails not found in the writings of historians. As for his ac-
count of Nicaea, he writes that the council dealt with matters
of the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the canon. He writes,
“The canonical and apocryphal books it distinguished in the
following manner: in the house of God the books were placed
down by the holy altar; then the council asked the Lord in
prayer that the inspired works be found on top and—as in
fact happened. . . .”15 That, quite obviously, is the stuff of leg-
end. No primary documents pertaining to Nicaea make ref-
erence to such a procedure.
Even if this story were true, it would still not prove the
claim that the council rejected certain books of the New Tes-
tament because they promoted feminism or the notion that
Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus. These matters simply
did not come up for discussion.
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CHRISTIANITY, A POLITICIAN, AND A CREED
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ENDNOTES
ENDNOTES
Preface
1 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 308.
2 Ibid., 309.
3 Ibid., 125.
Chapter One
1 Ibid., 233.
2 Ibid., 231.
3 Ibid., 124.
4 Mark A. Noll, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1997), 50.
5 Ibid., 51.
6 William E. Hordern, A Layman’s Guide to Protestant Theology (New York: Macmillan, 1955),
15–16.
7 Reinhold Seeberg, The History of Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1964), 211.
8 E. H. Klotsche, The History of Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 18.
9 Geoffrey Bromiley, Historical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Pub. Co., 1978), 4.
10 Seeberg, History of Doctrine, 69.
11 Bromiley, Historical Theology, 14.
12 Ibid., 20.
13 Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True
Identity of Christ (New York: Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster, 1998), 261.
14 http://www.tertullian.org
15 As above.
16As above.
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