1 Timothy 4:3 5/7/06 THE DAVINCI CODE: FACT OR FICTION (Part 2)
Slide : Galatians 1:8-9
Galatians 1:6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 which is really no gospel at all.
Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of
Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! 9 As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!
As we continue with this series on the debunking the DaVinci code, I just think it would be helpful to know that this is not the first time in the church’s history that we have faced attempts to steal away the authority of the world of God and particularly the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news that Jesus by his death and resurrection has paid the penalty for our sins and through faith in Him we have forgiveness and life with Him forever in heaven. People were trying to do that already in Paul’s day within 30 years of the resurrection of Jesus. They were “perverting the gospel of Christ” – at that time, trying to get people to believe that Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross wasn’t enough – that they had to cooperate and do enough good deeds and abide by all the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament in order to really be saved. And to put it mildly, Paul did not have a whole lot of patience with that. In fact, he says in his letter to the Galatians that someone who tries to do that should be “eternally condemned!” Folks, that’s some pretty serious stuff. And you need to know, that is what is going on with the presentation of the
DaVinci Code and many other similar books and articles today. People are trying to pervert the
Gospel of Jesus. And so we need to have answers to the questions they are planting in people’s minds today. I showed you this “man on the street” quote last week
Slide : Man on the street #1
“Yes, I think Dan Brown makes a lot of sense, especially the part about Jesus just being a mortal. I’d always kind of thought that way, but the facts in the book back it up.”
Here’s another one:
Slide : Man on the street #2
“I think that the interpretation Dan Brown gave is possible. It’s interesting and refreshing to hear another take on it. I don’t think the Bible is word-for word accurate in that sense either.”
You what’s common to both of those statements? “I think…” “I don’t care what the Bible says, ‘I think…’” We live in a day and age when people’s opinions and thoughts are placed on an equal level with fact and truth. People are literally creating an individualized truth – that’s truth for them, irregardless of reality. Which kind of explains how a book like the DaVinci
Code, which is chalk full of errors can have such a big influence in our society today…
Folks, as many of you know, I continue to try to play basketball occasionally at the Y, even though it has, shall we say caused me some discomfort in the last few years – particularly regarding my back. I do it for exercise; I do it as a release and because I love the game; and I go because it gets me out and rubbing shoulders with quite a variety of people, many of whom are non-Christians. And that gives me the opportunity to be a witness for my Lord Jesus. Well,
I had one of those experiences this week. Unfortunately, it did involve hurting my back. It had been feeling a little bit better, so I decided to try it out. And it held up pretty well for the first couple games … and then it didn’t. So afterwards in the locker room I was having some

difficulty taking off my shoes and socks. And I must have groaned because a guy asked if I was all right. And I was honest, I said “No, I hurt my back.” “Well, is there anything I can do for you.” “You might offer up a prayer,” I said.
He held up his hand, walked right up to me and said, “Do you really pray?” “Yes, of course I pray.” “Why would you do that,” he said. “If there is a He or She or It out there somewhere, doesn’t it already know what you’re thinking?” And of course, that started it… back and forth we went: I doing my best to introduce him to Jesus and he doing his best to get me to give up the foundations of my faith. I literally felt like I was talking to a mini Dan Brown, with the arguments he was using to try to say that the Bible was not reliable. He believed that it was written hundreds of years after the events, after oral tradition had corrupted the real facts. He trotted out the Dan Brown idea that the winners were the writers of history and constructed it the way they wanted people to see it. His basic premise was that all religion was just a creation of man trying to describe something that may or may not be out there. For him, faith was something outside reality. He didn’t mind my having a faith – but he wanted me to have faith in something out there – He literally resented the fact that my faith also has foundations in fact and recorded history – reliable history…
Anyway, I’m very thankful to that guy and I’m praying for him. I’m thankful because he got me so fired up that I forgot for a little while how much my back hurt and I was able to get my socks off while we talked. I’m thankful for the opportunity he gave me to confess my faith and to give the reasons I believe. I’m also thankful that he gave me the perfect sermon illustration to use to tell you once again how very important it is for Christians today not to ignore phenomenon like the DaVinci Code. The bible commands us:
Slide
1Peter 3:15 But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
This week I was prepared. And it was a good feeling. Hopefully I sowed a seed that will have that guy reconsidering his ideas about God and about the Bible. But just as importantly, instead of having my faith shaken, and becoming filled with doubts, my faith was tested and found to be strong and steadfast. That’s what I want for all of us and that’s why I’m doing this series and that’s why I’m going to have to do another week in this series after Mother’s day.
One of the things I’ve been finding as I continue to research the DaVinci Code is that there are just some great resources out there in the Christian church to answer the questions that Dan
Brown has brought with his book/soon to be movie. One of them is an excellent set of small group materials called “Discussing the DaVinci Code”. If there is still interest in that when the movie comes out on DVD, we might pick that up and work through it with congregational small groups. But for now, I want to take the time this morning to show part of the first lesson in those materials. Lee Strobel has found a format that works well for him in his materials, and that is interviewing various Bible scholars and using their expertise to answer the questions that people are asking. His first interview is with our own Paul Maier a Lutheran Church – Missouri
Synod pastor and a professor of ancient history at Western Michigan university, not to mention an outstanding author. Now, he’s going to cover some of the information that we presented last week, but I like what he has to say and I think you will too, so let’s watch…
Slide: Strobel/Maier interview

So Paul Maier, kind of lines up with the Apostle Paul. They both give people who pervert the Gospel an “F.” You know, a number of things stood out for me in that interview. One of them was right at the start when Dr. Maier handled the idea that “the winners write the history.”
He did a good job refuting that and mentioned a couple of examples from Greek history and
Christian history where the opposite happened. But that whole notion of discrediting history is just wrong. I guess we should hunt down Nazi historians to give us the real picture of Hitler's
Germany and relegate all opposing views to that of dogmatic apologists who just happened to be on the winning side, right?
When it comes to that, you might as well list the whole Old Testament. Folks, you can put a lot of handles on the Jewish people throughout history, but I don’t think you can call them the winners who wrote the history. Think about it. The first parts of the Bible survived the enslavement of those people for 400 years in Egypt. Now it’s true that after the Exodus from
Egypt they did capture the promised land, but they didn’t hold it all that long. And even during the time they did have it, often times their own people rejected the word of God and sometimes caused it to be destroyed. In fact, at one point in Israel’s history, they were down to one copy of the first five books of the Bible, what is called the Pentateuch. After that they were conquered and controlled by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Egyptians again and finally the Romans. The Jews were anything but the winners of history, and yet, as we’ve seen, God managed, through them to preserve and protect His written word in a marvelously accurate fashion.
Again, at the time the Gospels were written, those guys were not exactly the winners of history. They were the guys that were losing to the lions (I mean how bad is that…) You’ve got to be pretty bad to lose to the lions… They were losing to the cross, to the stake. In fact, they knew that to record the sacrificial death and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead was to put themselves into the crosshairs of first Jewish persecution and then Roman persecution. But they would not stop preaching and writing of what they had seen and heard – because it was the truth. And because it was God’s truth, He caused it to be preserved, and preserved very well, as we’ll see again today and throughout this series…
Well, let’s get to some more of the DaVinci Code statements: We talked a little bit about this one last week…
Slide
Brown’s supposed expert Teabing, says: "Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence… Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land."
Teabing paused to sip his tea and then placed the cup back on the mantel. "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.
"Who chose which gospels to include?" Sophie asked.
"Aha!" Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. "The fundamental irony of Christianity! The
Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great."
And we answered some of those questions last week, we talked about the formation of the canon – that Constantine had nothing to do with it. The canon was well established and in use by the Christian church long before his time, and also before the other gospels he mentions. By the way there are not 80, but more like around 40 are known to have existed. Most of those are

called the Gnostic gospels and the vast majority of those are not stories of the life of Jesus, but rather explanations of the Gnostic worldview, which was a pretty messed up worldview. For instance, here are a couple examples from the Gospel of Thomas:
Slide: Examples from the Gospel of Thomas
“Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.” (70)
“Every woman who makes herself a male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” (114)
One can easily see from the content why this document was rejected by the early church.
In fact, one of the interesting things about all this is that Dan Brown tries to use the Gnostic
Gospels to show that the Christians put down and subjugated women, when in fact the very opposite is true. For the Gnostics, Humanity, marriage, sex and women were all bad. In fact, for the Gnostics, the only way a woman could receive enlightenment was by becoming a man!
In the Gnostic gospels, Jesus is taught as not even being human. He doesn’t touch the ground,
He doesn’t defecate. He certainly didn’t take on flesh, nor would he have linked flesh with
Mary Magdalene as Dan Brown tries to indicate. In fact Brown makes this statement through the novel:
Slide:
“The early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible. Unfortunately for the early editors, one particularly troubling earthly theme kept recurring in the gospels. Mary Magdalene…More specifically, her marriage to Jesus
Christ… It’s a matter of historical record.”
Then he says:
“I shan’t bore you with the countless references to Jesus and Magdalene’s union.”
I remember when I first read that line in the book I felt like saying “Come on, bore me – let me check ‘em out.” The truth is:
Slide:
The story of Mary as Mrs. Jesus didn’t surface until the ninth century AD.
And references to any possible fling between Jesus and Mary can indeed be counted: there are only two! One from the Gospel of Phillip and one from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, both late Gnostic writings rejected as spurious by the early church.
And even these two references say nothing of any marriage or sexual union between the two.
There is not a single spark of evidence from any ancient document even speculating that
Jesus may have gotten married. It is purely fiction.
Here’s the Gospel of Phillip quote. It’s so fragmented we don’t have the parts in the brackets:
Slide
“And the companion of the […] Mary Magdalene. […] her more than the disciples […] kiss her
[…] on her […] (63:33-36)
The Letter of Peter to Philip is usually dated at the end of the second century or possibly into the third. Since this is long after Peter's death, it is considered to be pseudepigraphic, falsely attributed to a noteworthy individual for added credibility. Now the new Gnostics like Elaine
Pagals creatively supply the missing brackets this way:

“And the companion of [the Savior] is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than [all] the disciples [and used to] kiss her [often] on her [mouth. The rest [of the disciples were offended] by it [and expressed disapproval].”
Then there is an example from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene where the writer has Peter in a struggle for power with Mary and has John say:
Slide
“Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why
He loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect Man, and separate as He commanded us and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said.”
Those two quotes make up the “countless references” to Jesus and Mary and make their union a matter of historical record according to Dan Brown. Even if one gave credibility to the
Gnostic gospels, which we don’t, I think you can see there is just nothing there.
There are also Infant Gospels of Jesus in existence. For instance, one of them has Jesus as a 5 year old making 12 sparrows from the dirt – when he clapped they flew off chirping and as an 8 year old – with Joseph in the carpentry shop, extending a board cut too short
Another false Gospel is the Gospel of Barnabas-often used in defense of Islamic teachings. It claims that Jesus did not die on cross. It was really Judas Iscariot. Which is just nothing but revisionist history. It has no basis for authenticity and was probably written in 16 th cent.
Now folks, we’re scratching the surface here, but I think it’s important so we’re going to spend at least another week on this stuff after Mother’s day. We’ll wrap up the Gnostic gospels, including the gospel of Judas, we’ll look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we’ll look at
DaVinci’s painting of the Last Supper in which he supposedly paints in Mary Magdalene next to Jesus. It’s all very conspiratorial – which makes for a good murder mystery novel or movie, but as we have been seeing, it does great damage to the truth and I don’t believe it makes God very happy. In fact folks, just for fun I have to show you another little clip I came across. It’s called “Da Dummy Code.”
Slide: Da Dummy Code
Folks it’s a good thing God doesn’t typically act in that way today because there would be a lot of folks, walking around putting out fires on their suits. Nevertheless, he warns us not to give up the truth. At the end of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, He writes:
Slide :
“You were running a good race. Who cut in on you and kept you from obeying the truth? 8
That kind of persuasion does not come from the one who calls you.” Galatians 5:7-8
Folks, you’re here. You’re hearing the Word and receiving the sacrament. You’re running a good race. Don’t let Dan Brown or anyone else cut in on you and keep you from obeying the truth…