I'm almost finished with The Da Vinci Code and I have to say that I enjoyed it a lot more the first time I read it when it was called The Illuminatus! Trilogy. The first half of DVC was pretty engaging, but as soon as the premise of the book was revealed I quickly lost all interest in such a far-fetched, purposeless, facile reinterpretation of history.
To sum it up it for anyone who hasn't already heard, DVC is about a modern quest for the Holy Grail, except the Grail isn't a cup, it's Mary Magdalene's vagina. Surprise! The Grail didn't catch Christ's blood while he was on the cross, it caught other fluids and in fact spawned a brood of decendents that survives to modern times. The human Jesus, who was a wise teacher despite being a little crazy for falsely claiming to be God, intended his wife/girlfriend Mary Magdalene to carry on his ministry after his pointless death, but the male disciples decided it would be better to oppress women and erase "the sacred feminine" from theology. So they made up the story about Eve eating the fruit first (nevermind that the story was around long before Jesus' time) and put theological restrictions on sex to keep women down and rule the world. Pre-Christian paganism was a paradise of free sex and egalitarianism, epitomized by Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and then the Catholic Church squashed it all and ruined the party.
If you wade through all 400+ pages you'll see that it's even dumber than it sounds. I'm personally glad that I read it because now I've got a new yardstick to measure other peoples' stupidity: anyone who likes the book or thinks it's "deep" is a moron.
I can hardly blame the Vatican for implicitly comparing the upcoming release of The Da Vinci Code movie with the recent Mohammad cartoon nonsense, but I'd like to think that Christian beliefs can stand on their own without government intervention.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - In the latest Vatican broadside against "The Da Vinci Code", a leading cardinal says Christians should respond to the book and film with legal action because both offend Christ and the Church he founded.Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian who was considered a candidate for pope last year, made his strong comments in a documentary called "The Da Vinci Code-A Masterful Deception."
Arinze's appeal came some 10 days after another Vatican cardinal called for a boycott of the film. Both cardinals asserted that other religions would never stand for offences against their beliefs and that Christians should get tough.
"Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget," Arinze said in the documentary made by Rome film maker Mario Biasetti for Rome Reports, a Catholic film agency specializing in religious affairs.
"Sometimes it is our duty to do something practical. So it is not I who will tell all Christians what to do but some know legal means which can be taken in order to get the other person to respect the rights of others," Arinze said.
Here's something practical: tell people what's wrong with the movie and explain the truth about Christ, his ministry, and his church. Lawsuits aren't going to convince anyone.
It's fiction.. and has never been said to be anything else.
The level of concern among Christian conservatives over this book and movie is ridiculous.
I suppose what I always suspected is probably true: no one's pragmatic about anything anymore. Everyone gets their undies in a bunch over nearly everything.. with the "war on Christmas" and this whining about the Da Vinci Code book and movie being among the more recent examples.
Mark: Oh sure, it's just not particularly interesting fiction.
Mark - Many Christians like me have the level of concern about this book/movie because of the reaction "Wow, it's really interesting to learn the bible was put together as part of a power play and the gnostic gospels are the truth!".
Christians like me want people to know the truth, as told in the bible, of their sins and seperation from God, and of the hope they could have by repenting and trusting in Jesus. We don't discount these lost souls just because they fill the 'stupidity yardstick' and get sucked into the book/movie. Steering people away from the truth of God is pretty concerning to me. However, hysteria and lawsuits aren't an effective way to share the truth.
LT: Then maybe the legions of Christians who are like you.. sensible and restrained.. should spend at least as much time taming the not-so-restrained-and-sensible among you as you do spreading "the truth" about what you believe.
I'm a pastor and the author of "Jesus Unplugged". And I'm not worried that Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code book or movie will harm anyone's faith. If a mediocre novel brimming with falsehoods can destroy your faith, then your faith wasn't very strong to begin with.
I'm really only concerned about one thing, and it stems from Brown's statement of "fact" at the beginning of The Da Vinci Code. His novel contains this quote: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." This is on a page titled "FACT". This page is the first thing in the book. Historians and biblical scholars alike have debunked this claim over and over in dozens of articles and books (buy Ben Witherington's), yet the public seems to have, by and large, bought this fabrication.
Let me give you one from hundreds of possible examples of why this statement of Brown's is not fact, as he claims, but false.
If you read page 231 of Brown's book, you'll find this statement about ancient documents called "gospels": "More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament and yet only a relatively few were chosen for inclusion - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John among them." Brown says this statement is "FACT", since the gospels are among the documents that he claims to describe accurately in his novel. But he is wrong. We know of 32 gospels--34 if you include the hypothetical gospels of "Q" and "Signs". 32 is far from "over eighty". Therefore Brown's universal claim of accuracy/fact concerning descriptions of documents in The Da Vinci Code is patently false.
The most absurd claim to me in Brown's novel is the claim that the 4 gospels in the Bible suppress Jesus' humanity and emphasize his divinity. He further claims that the gospels not included in the Bible have been suppressed, and that they emphasize Jesus' humanity, and are therefore more true than the Bible. Dan Brown has this exactly backwards! Our 4 New Testament gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, John - emphasize Jesus' humanity, and the bulk of the other gospels not found in the Bible emphasize Jesus' divinity. Brown couldn't be more wrong.
Is Dan Brown intentionally lying about Jesus and the Bible? I don't know. Either he is a very bad researcher or he's misleading the public on purpose. If the former, why not just apologize for the "fact" claims he made? If the latter, shame on him and buyer beware!
http://www.netdoor.com/com/umcos/jesusunpluggedindex.htm