The Da Vinci Code

[localboyz]

Tweethas anyone here read it? if so, what did you think about it. i just finished that book, and Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. Both were very compelling. definitely made me raise my eyebrows. any thoughts??

[kite]

TweetThe Da Vinci Code is purely fiction. I haven't read Angels and Demons though.

[solidground]

TweetI started reading ..and like it so far..it's all based on fact so it should be interesting

[beachgirl]

Tweeti heard it was an awesome book, id like to read it.

[maya]

TweetRead Final Dawn Over Jeruselum by John Hagee. Talk about reality and spine chillin'. Speaking of chillin', I have had a fever for four days. I haven't been able to do anything and my kidneys hurt.

[localboyz]

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Originally posted by kite
The Da Vinci Code is purely fiction. I haven't read Angels and Demons though.

what makes you say that?

[Cipher]

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Originally posted by localboyz
what makes you say that?

Says so on Dan Browns website. This book is fiction although some of the items mentioned are real such as Da Vinci's paintings etc etc.

Ciph

[localboyz]

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Originally posted by Cipher
Says so on Dan Browns website. This book is fiction although some of the items mentioned are real such as Da Vinci's paintings etc etc.

Ciph

actually the website says that the story line is fiction, ie, the characters and their adventures. however the stories in the book surrounding the painting, groups, etc. are theories. neither true nor false. historically they do have some truth.

there are a lot of people that disagree about this, im simply trying to spark a dialogue.

[kite]

TweetHere's one of many aritcles that I've read about this book and it's intentions to mislead.
"Brown draws from various unreliable sources such as the Gnostic Gospels, The Templar Revolution, True Identity of Christ, The Goddess in the Gospels, etc... A writer who thinks the Merovingians founded Paris and forgets that the popes once lived in Avignon is hardly a model researcher. The 5 million women burned as witches that he sites was actually more like 30-50000.
He claims that the motions of the planet Venus trace a pentacle (the so-called Ishtar pentagram) symbolizing the goddess. But it isn't a perfect figure and has nothing to do with the length of the Olympiad. The ancient Olympic games were celebrated in honor of Zeus Olympias, not Aphrodite, and occurred every four years.
Building on Barbara Walker's claim that "like a pagan temple, the Gothic cathedral represented the body of the Goddess," The Templar Revelation asserts: "Sexual symbolism is found in the great Gothic cathedrals which were masterminded by the Knights Templar...both of which represent intimate female anatomy: the arch, which draws the worshipper into the body of Mother Church, evokes the vulva." In The Da Vinci Code, these sentiments are transformed into a character's description of "a cathedral's long hollow nave as a secret tribute to a woman's womb...complete with receding labial ridges and a nice little cinquefoil clitoris above the doorway."

These remarks cannot be brushed aside as opinions of the villain; Langdon, the book's hero, refers to his own lectures about goddess-symbolism at Chartres.

These bizarre interpretations betray no acquaintance with the actual development or construction of Gothic architecture, and correcting the countless errors becomes a tiresome exercise: The Templars had nothing to do with the cathedrals of their time, which were commissioned by bishops and their canons throughout Europe. They were unlettered men with no arcane knowledge of "sacred geometry" passed down from the pyramid builders. They did not wield tools themselves on their own projects, nor did they found masons' guilds to build for others. Not all their churches were round, nor was roundness a defiant insult to the Church. Rather than being a tribute to the divine feminine, their round churches honored the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Actually looking at Gothic churches and their predecessors deflates the idea of female symbolism. Large medieval churches typically had three front doors on the west plus triple entrances to their transepts on the north and south. (What part of a woman's anatomy does a transept represent? Or the kink in Chartres's main aisle?) Romanesque churches — including ones that predate the founding of the Templars — have similar bands of decoration arching over their entrances. Both Gothic and Romanesque churches have the long, rectangular nave inherited from Late Antique basilicas, ultimately derived from Roman public buildings. Neither Brown nor his sources consider what symbolism medieval churchmen such as Suger of St.-Denis or William Durandus read in church design. It certainly wasn't goddess-worship.

If the above seems like a pile driver applied to a gnat, the blows are necessary to demonstrate the utter falseness of Brown's material. His willful distortions of documented history are more than matched by his outlandish claims about controversial subjects. But to a postmodernist, one construct of reality is as good as any other.

Brown's approach seems to consist of grabbing large chunks of his stated sources and tossing them together in a salad of a story. From Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Brown lifts the concept of the Grail as a metaphor for a sacred lineage by arbitrarily breaking a medieval French term, Sangraal (Holy Grail), into sang (blood) and raal (royal). This holy blood, according to Brown, descended from Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene, to the Merovingian dynasty in Dark Ages France, surviving its fall to persist in several modern French families, including that of Pierre Plantard, a leader of the mysterious Priory of Sion. The Priory — an actual organization officially registered with the French government in 1956 — makes extraordinary claims of antiquity as the "real" power behind the Knights Templar. It most likely originated after World War II and was first brought to public notice in 1962. With the exception of filmmaker Jean Cocteau, its illustrious list of Grand Masters — which include Leonardo da Vinci, Issac Newton, and Victor Hugo — is not credible, although it's presented as true by Brown.

Brown doesn't accept a political motivation for the Priory's activities. Instead he picks up The Templar Revelation’s view of the organization as a cult of secret goddess-worshippers who have preserved ancient Gnostic wisdom and records of Christ’s true mission, which would completely overturn Christianity if released. Significantly, Brown omits the rest of the book’s thesis that makes Christ and Mary Magdalene unmarried sex partners performing the erotic mysteries of Isis. Perhaps even a gullible mass-market audience has its limits.

From both Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation, Brown takes a negative view of the Bible and a grossly distorted image of Jesus. He's neither the Messiah nor a humble carpenter but a wealthy, trained religious teacher bent on regaining the throne of David. His credentials are amplified by his relationship with the rich Magdalen who carries the royal blood of Benjamin: "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false," laments one of Brown's characters.

Yet it's Brown's Christology that's false — and blindingly so. He requires the present New Testament to be a post-Constantinian fabrication that displaced true accounts now represented only by surviving Gnostic texts. He claims that Christ wasn't considered divine until the Council of Nicea voted him so in 325 at the behest of the emperor. Then Constantine — a lifelong sun worshipper — ordered all older scriptural texts destroyed, which is why no complete set of Gospels predates the fourth century. Christians somehow failed to notice the sudden and drastic change in their doctrine.

But by Brown's specious reasoning, the Old Testament can't be authentic either because complete Hebrew Scriptures are no more than a thousand years old. And yet the texts were transmitted so accurately that they do match well with the Dead Sea Scrolls from a thousand years earlier. Analysis of textual families, comparison with fragments and quotations, plus historical correlations securely date the orthodox Gospels to the first century and indicate that they're earlier than the Gnostic forgeries. (The Epistles of St. Paul are, of course, even earlier than the Gospels.)

Primitive Church documents and the testimony of the ante-Nicean Fathers confirm that Christians have always believed Jesus to be Lord, God, and Savior — even when that faith meant death. The earliest partial canon of Scripture dates from the late second century and already rejected Gnostic writings. For Brown, it isn't enough to credit Constantine with the divinization of Jesus. The emperor's old adherence to the cult of the Invincible Sun also meant repackaging sun worship as the new faith. Brown drags out old (and long-discredited) charges by virulent anti-Catholics like Alexander Hislop who accused the Church of perpetuating Babylonian mysteries, as well as 19th-century rationalists who regarded Christ as just another dying savior-god.

Unsurprisingly, Brown misses no opportunity to criticize Christianity and its pitiable adherents. (The church in question is always the Catholic Church, though his villain does sneer once at Anglicans — for their grimness, of all things.) He routinely and anachronistically refers to the Church as "the Vatican," even when popes weren't in residence there. He systematically portrays it throughout history as deceitful, power-crazed, crafty, and murderous: "The Church may no longer employ crusades to slaughter, but their influence is no less persuasive. No less insidious."

Brown's revisionist interpretations of da Vinci are as distorted as the rest of his information. He claims to have first run across these views "while I was studying art history in Seville," but they correspond point for point to material in The Templar Revelation. A writer who sees a pointed finger as a throat-cutting gesture, who says the Madonna of the Rocks was painted for nuns instead of a lay confraternity of men, who claims that da Vinci received "hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions" (actually, it was just one…and it was never executed) is simply unreliable.

Brown's analysis of da Vinci's work is just as ridiculous. He presents the Mona Lisa as an androgynous self-portrait when it's widely known to portray a real woman, Madonna Lisa, wife of Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo. The name is certainly not — as Brown claims — a mocking anagram of two Egyptian fertility deities Amon and L'Isa (Italian for Isis). How did he miss the theory, propounded by the authors of The Templar Revelation, that the Shroud of Turin is a photographed self-portrait of da Vinci?

Much of Brown's argument centers around da Vinci's Last Supper, a painting the author considers a coded message that reveals the truth about Jesus and the Grail. Brown points to the lack of a central chalice on the table as proof that the Grail isn't a material vessel. But da Vinci's painting specifically dramatizes the moment when Jesus warns, "One of you will betray me" (John 13:21). There is no Institution Narrative in St. John's Gospel. The Eucharist is not shown there. And the person sitting next to Jesus is not Mary Magdalene (as Brown claims) but St. John, portrayed as the usual effeminate da Vinci youth, comparable to his St. John the Baptist. Jesus is in the exact center of the painting, with two pyramidal groups of three apostles on each side. Although da Vinci was a spiritually troubled homosexual, Brown's contention that he coded his paintings with anti-Christian messages simply can't be sustained."

Sandra Miesel

[JohnnyB]

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Originally posted by localboyz
neither true nor false. historically they do have some truth.

How can something be neither be ture nor false? That doesn't make sence. Some truth, if it's not all ture it's false.

Here's what the Lord says.

Deuteronomy 18:22 "When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him."

Does the Da Vinci Code stand up to this test? I say NO if it has half turths in it, half truths are lies and lies are false no matter how you slice it.

JohnnyB

[maya]

TweetThat's right Jonny B. A half truth is a whole lie.

[BM]

TweetAmen to that Johny B.

GOD SAID IT, I BELIEVE IT, AND THAT SETTLES IT!

[beachgirl]

TweetI just have to add something here.

Just because something is neither true nor false doesnt mean it is in fact "completely false"...

For instance...Christians believe that their religion is true as a theory and belief yet it has not been proven to be either true or false. Thats what i think he meant there.

I have heard the same..that the book has some underlying truthfullness to it but that it has been "fictionized"

[Cipher]

TweetPreach it Johnny

Ciph

[localboyz]

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Originally posted by JohnnyB
How can something be neither be ture nor false? That doesn't make sence. Some truth, if it's not all ture it's false.

true nor false= theories, hypothesis. cant be proven correct, but can also not be proven wrong. I.E.=== GOD.

Here's what the Lord says.

Deuteronomy 18:22 "When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the LORD has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him."

Does the Da Vinci Code stand up to this test? I say NO if it has half turths in it, half truths are lies and lies are false no matter how you slice it.

JohnnyB

this is where i dont argue, every man has the right to believe what he wants. when i step in is when men begin to impose their beliefs upon other people, not preach, but impose.