The Da Vinci Code

[DJDIGGLER]

TweetDon't know who here is into reading, but if you are I highly reccomend this book! I've read 550 pages of it so far in two days. I can't put it down no matter how hard I try! Lots of eye opening facts that most don't know are revealed. Funny though because while your reading it you start to know the facts before the book spells them out for you. Almost as if you already knew the truth all along but you just didn't want to say the words aloud.

[diggi]

Tweetwhat is it about ?

[kite]

TweetNot to bust your bubble or anything, but you do know it's fiction right?

[O2BESOHUGE]

Tweeti read it....great book!!

o2

[snickers1]

Tweeti keep hereing it is a great book but i have not sat down to read it yet

[DJDIGGLER]

TweetYeah I just finished reading it about an hour ago. Very mind numbing book. Yes the story is fiction, but all the facts mentioned throughout are not. Obviously the characters are fiction.

Funny thing is my wife read it before me, so while I was reading it I would comment to her on what I think it was going to say and I usually ended up being spot on. I know that I've read alot of the information in this book in other places, and I've seen a few documentaries on some of the speculated theories. I find them very interesting and believable. Just goes to show how feeble minded the average person is without even realizing it. Accepting what we are taught is what we're trained to do. Just listen and fall in line. It definetely answeres alot of unanswered questions!

btw, if anyone is going to be skeptic of the facts in the book do some research to see if what is said in this book is true. You'll be very surprised! I was!

[kite]

TweetAuthor Dissects Fallacies Of 'Da Vinci Code'

PRISCILLA GREEAR, Staff Writer

Published: August 19, 2004

ATLANTA—While everyone knows “The Da Vinci Code” is fiction, why is it that same group—over seven million readers— are speculating about its “truth,” some 17 months after its debut?

What’s all the intrigue surrounding this great mystery read?

Reflecting this curious phenomenon, an ABC special was repeated Aug. 5 that explores the book’s “theory,” embedded in fiction, that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had a child. The program even featured an interview with a Scottish aristocrat who thinks his family married into Jesus’ bloodline in the 12th century.

Father Paul Williams, for one, has been puzzled by the interest and reports fielding numerous questions raised by it at his church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Carrollton, particularly from teens, where he’s learned “they found it misleading and persuasive” despite its “off-the-wall” assertions. He preached on it one Sunday, and several parishioners came forward afterward, surrendering their copies and vowing not to read it.

“It’s not like I’m censoring, but they brought it to me and said now they don’t want to read it—it was kind of funny,” he said.

For those left wondering what perhaps is true in the book, Catholic author Amy Welborn gave answers during a speaking engagement in Atlanta about why this centuries-old theory should not be taken seriously. Speaking during CTK’s “Reason to Believe” apologetics series, she called on attendees at a Friday evening talk Aug. 6 at the Cathedral of Christ the King to use discussions about the novel as “teaching moments” to point out the facts behind the fiction of “Da Vinci.”

Welborn, who is speaking around the country, challenged everyone from orthodox Catholics to “cod-ifiles” to read or reread something much more fascinating than fiction. She encouraged them to open their hearts and minds in the same way as they did to fiction and to crack open the real thing, the Gospels, to unlock their truth about life and God’s love.

“The truth may not be stranger than fiction, but it’s better because it’s true,” she said.

For that matter, Welborn said, why not read the nation’s great Catholic authors like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, who raise questions of faith and salvation “to engage us at our deepest level and make us confront what’s true and what’s not.”

She tied a contemporary lack of biblical knowledge in with the larger modern mentality that truth is all relative to one’s experience. Today some people assert “the Gospels in the New Testament were written so long after events in question they’re totally unreliable, nothing more than people putting ideology into a narrative framework,” she said. This reflects, she believes, a failure of church catechesis. “A lot of people say facts don’t matter, but I think we need to work to make them matter again.”

Father Williams, clad in his clerics and a cap, said, “We need people like Amy to bring people back to what the church teaches and what’s important.”

Written by Dan Brown, “The Da Vinci Code” has sold over seven million copies since it was published in March 2003. Welborn, who holds a master of arts degree in church history from Vanderbilt University, said the book is filled with errors about religion, history and art.

For starters the book alleges that Jesus intended for Mary Magdalene to be the head of the church, that St. Peter seized power from her and that church leaders suppressed evidence of his real intentions and began nearly two millennia of her demonization.

In reality, while her identity was overlapped for many centuries in church history with that of a prostitute and sinner recorded earlier in the Gospel of Luke—a confusion that was corrected by the Vatican in 1969—she has always been honored for her faithfulness and as a sinner who found salvation and is a saint of the church whose feast day is celebrated on July 22.

Other allegations in the plot include that Jesus didn’t really preach what is in the Gospels but the “sacred feminine,” was married to Mary Magdalene, whom he appointed to lead his movement, and that this “secret,” passed down through a Priory of Sion society, was depicted in code by master artist Leonardo Da Vinci in his depiction of “The Last Supper.” The depiction supposedly made the disciple John very feminine looking to represent Mary Magdalene, and left out the Holy Grail, the chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper, to imply that Mary is the cup.

The fictional mystery begins at the Louvre Museum in Paris, where a curator who was head of the Priory of Sion has been murdered, and his granddaughter, a cryptologist, investigates. Deciphering clues, those investigating are led to the paintings of Da Vinci, the documents of the society and the “secret.”

Brown claims that all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in the novel are accurate and that the Priory of Sion is a European secret society founded in 1099. He also claims that in 1975 the Paris National Library discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets identifying members of the priory including Sir Isaac Newton, Da Vinci and Victor Hugo.

On his Web site, Brown claims “many scholars believe that Leonardo’s work intentionally provides clues to a powerful secret … a secret that remains protected to this day by a clandestine brotherhood of which Da Vinci was a member.”

Welborn said she first cranked out a 700-word review about the novel and gave it little more thought. But she was surprised to start receiving a flurry of negative letters from people telling her as a woman she should be ashamed to criticize the story, and even worse, by people believing the book was true. She recalled attending an exhibit of papal treasures in Cincinnati where one elderly woman commented to another about the art, “You know that’s not John, that’s Mary Magdalene and everybody knows this now.”

So Welborn wrote her book “De-coding Da Vinci,” which was published in spring 2004 by Our Sunday Visitor. One of three Catholic authors to have written books debunking it, she has also written books on prayer and saints, guides for studying Scripture and the “Prove It!” series for teens.

Welborn recommends that persons “start with the art” in discussing the book. She said during the Renaissance period of 1450-1600, before and after the life of Da Vinci, it was common for men who were students to be painted with feminine features and long hair, and St. John was traditionally painted as a young, attractive youth. She added that Brown doesn’t even get the artist’s name right, as his last name is actually Leonardo, and Da Vinci is where he was from.

While the novel asserts the majority of his work was commissioned by the church, Da Vinci actually did a much smaller number of church commissions and was primarily interested in drawing and scientific experiments, Welborn said.

The Priory of Sion, as Brown describes it, was established to carry the secret of the Holy Grail by descendents of French Merovingian kings of the 6th to 8th century. This claim was determined to be a fraud originated in the 1950s by an anti-Semitic Frenchman named Pierre Plantard, who claimed he was heir to the French throne through the Merovingian line, Welborn said. He planted false documents attesting to the antiquity of the priory in French libraries and propagated the royal bloodline of Jesus myth.

In a February 2004 New York Times article entitled “The Da Vinci Con,” Laura Miller states that “as early as the 1970s one of Plantard’s confederates had admitted to helping him fabricate the materials, including genealogical tables portraying Plantard as a descendant of the Merovingians (and, presumably, Jesus Christ) and a list of the Priory’s past ‘grand masters’…and it’s the same list Dan Brown trumpets, along with the alleged nine-century pedigree of the Priory, in the front matter for ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ under the heading of ‘Fact.’”

Welborn said that the reason there is no Holy Grail in “The Last Supper” is that it is based on the Gospel of John, which doesn’t mention the institution of the Eucharist through the breaking of bread and wine, possibly because it was written in the late first century, a time when Christians were persecuted and had to be secretive about rituals.

Brown claims that the Roman Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. pressured church leaders to make Jesus’ divinity official church teaching, and that Christians before that time viewed him as merely a moral teacher.

In fact, Welborn said, the historical record shows that the four core Gospels, which clearly reflect Jesus’ divinity, were regularly cited as the most reliable sources of information about Jesus’ life and the faith of the apostles by the middle of the second century. The novel contradicts itself, she said, in stating that after Jesus’ death Peter’s movement focused on his divinity, which contradicts the notion that it was the emperor who first promulgated the idea of Christ’s divinity.

St. Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, Colossians and Philippians reflecting Jesus’ divinity “were probably written about 30 years after Jesus was crucified,” she said.

“The Da Vinci Code” refers to the Dead Sea Scrolls and documents found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 as telling the “true grail story.” But Welborn reports only two of the 45 Nag Hammadi documents, which were from the Gnostic movement that claimed special knowledge about Jesus, describe a unique Mary Magdalene-Jesus relationship, not an unambiguously marital relationship. The Dead Sea Scrolls only refer to the monastic Jewish sect of the Essenes and not to Christianity.

Contrary to Brown’s story, she said, it was not under Constantine that the canon of Scripture was formally accepted, but decades later, with the process of selecting all the books of the New Testament lasting some 300 years.

It’s ironic that the novel would assert the church has repressed the sacred feminine, as the Virgin Mary has been revered throughout its history as the most venerable human model of obedience and virtue, she continued.

She said that even in the most liberal U.S. seminaries “few scholars are skeptical about the historicity of the Gospels.”

While Brown may be a smart writer, he’s definitely not original as “everything he says in the book about Jesus and early Christianity, about Leonardo, about Mary Magdalene, is cribbed from other sources,” including “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” and “Templar Revelation” and “Woman with the Alabaster Jar.” Brown admits this himself.

“What Brown says is so obviously false they’re not even worth taking seriously,” she concluded.

“Why can they decide the Gospels aren’t reliable history and these other books are?” she asked rhetorically. “And don’t let them get away without an answer . . . When you bring an open mind to the Gospels you meet Jesus Christ of Nazareth, which I’m afraid most of the readers of Da Vinci haven’t done.”

Jackie Tabelli of St. Ann’s Church, Marietta, said after the talk that the book made her want to go read her Bible.

“It wasn’t even a well-written book. The whole theory is so far-fetched. (But) the doubts and questions it raises are potentially damaging,” she said.

Her husband, John, added, “If it weren’t about the core beliefs of Christianity it wouldn’t be a best-seller.”

Attendee Rich Wharton said that the discussion reminded him of the need to continually learn more about his faith. While he hasn’t read the book, he hopes to use information gained as “teaching moments.”

“The tide in social discourse is such that Catholics owe it to the Lord to become informed and share the truth with greater zeal …We need to get a solid foundation under us, and be able to identify errors and heresies, as well as present the truth to a grossly misinformed world … This point was dramatically illustrated by Welborn when she shared with us the letter she received from a Catholic teacher in a Catholic school in response to Welborn’s book, espousing the fiction presented in ‘The Da Vinci Code’ as true,” Wharton said. “It was good to learn what some of the errors are, and the counterbalancing truths in the light of which the book appears rather trivial, despite the massive media celebration surrounding it.”

“As Ms. Welborn pointed out, one of the main traps into which unsuspecting or ill-informed modern readers are falling into is its claim that the Catholic Church has oppressed the sacred feminine—which becomes untenable if one but considers the great honor the church has always given to the Blessed Virgin Mary,” he said.

[Merc]

Tweetthe first book is really good too!

[Fit2bLarge]

TweetDigital fortress was a great Dan Brown book

[supasaiyan99]

TweetI wish I liked to read!!!The book sounds interesting but It'd take me 1 hour to read 10 pages!

[Merc]

Tweetyou would be surprised its a very easy read and you fly through the book really quick

[solidground]

Tweetthe story is ficition but not the whole book..i like angels and demons better, it;s about the illuminati etc..i believe the davinci code movie with tom hanks is coming out in the summer..should be awsome

[DJDIGGLER]

TweetKite I don't think you read what you just quoted. The statement you just quoted doesn't disspell much at all. Actually it is coinciding with a lot of stuff the book tells you. Did you even read the book kite?

Of course a bunch of die hard christians are going to use any creative writing they can think of to alter people's thoughts. Just another way to follow the machine, just fall in line!

[Lily]

Tweet

the story is ficition but not the whole book..i like angels and demons better, it;s about the illuminati etc..i believe the davinci code movie with tom hanks is coming out in the summer..should be awsome

Angels and Demons was awesome!!

[T-Man007]

Tweet

Not to bust your bubble or anything, but you do know it's fiction right?

LOL! My thoughts exactly! It's not a factual book.