Cracking the Code
by Andy Perry

I wouldn’t consider myself someone who gets angry easily. I would like to think I have the ability and maturity to listen objectively to viewpoints and beliefs contrary to my own. But last week I lost my cool! I verbalized logical rebuttals against an unseen opponent hundreds of miles away. Finally I could take it no more and had to turn my car radio off before I smashed it with my fist!

I happened to be listening to a radio call-in program when the host announced that the next issue to be discussed was an upcoming conference at a liberal Presbyterian church in Bismarck called “Mary Magdalene and the Media: The Emerging Feminine Spirit in Contemporary Culture.” I braced myself for the worst, but what followed surpassed my worst expectations.

The radio guests included one woman and two men, all presenters at the upcoming conference, all hailing ‘new understandings’ of God and Scripture through the lens of ‘the feminine.’ According to one of the presenters, a woman’s body is now recognized as the ultimate location of the sacred. Were they Catholics speaking of Mary the mother of Jesus we would not be surprised. Rather, they are Protestants convinced that the bodies of all women define what is most sacred in religion. As a student of ancient comparative religion I immediately noticed shades of Mesopotamian fertility cult worship - in other words paganism. But according to the voices coming through my radio speakers, it all began with one special woman from the Bible whose body was chosen by God as the locus of the holy: Mary Magdalene. How was she chosen? Say the supporters of understanding God through ‘the feminine,’ she became Jesus’ wife and, consequently, the vessel that held the blood of Jesus Christ in her womb while bearing His child.

Now, perhaps, you begin to understand my rising indignation as the radio voices droned on and my grip tightened on the steering wheel. But how could they believe and promote such a belief - especially under the name ‘Christian’? On what grounds do they claim Jesus married Mary Magdalene, she bore Him a child and so, not only deserves veneration herself, but provides the basis for veneration of all women in some sense? The Bible? Surely not. A more popular source at the present time according to the New York Times Best-seller’s List: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

Brown’s phenomenally popular novel (and I stress - novel) is quickly becoming gospel truth for many unwary readers - even some less discerning Christians. The book builds on the fact that some people believe Mary Magdalene, though the Bible tells us little about her, actually played a much more significant role in Jesus' life: as His wife, the mother of His child, and the most important of His disciples. This truth, they believe, was deliberately suppressed for centuries by church leaders. There is a theory that the truth about Mary was kept alive by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion, whose members included some of the greatest artists and thinkers of Western civilization, including Leonardo Da Vinci. Author Dan Brown weaves a riveting tale, leading us to believe that the renaissance master encoded the truth about Mary in some of his most famous paintings.

The danger of this book is how Brown claims that much of it is drawn from historical evidence. Other questions challenging some of our foundational beliefs from Scripture also arise from The Da Vinci Code, such as

• Was Jesus’ divinity decided by a council of bishops?

• Did the Gospel of Thomas (an heretical text) pre-date the New Testament?

• Is the New Testament a reliable source of understanding Jesus at all?

At one point in the book one of the code’s academic experts, Teabing, remarks, “What I mean is that almost everything our fathers taught about Christ is false.” Such a blatantly alarming statement wouldn’t be so difficult immediately to refute if the entire novel had not been convincing the reader along the way to place ever greater trust in such experts who prove indispensable to help one solve the racy murder mystery around which the plot revolves. Against Brown’s deftly handled shell game played with truth most nominal church-goers will quickly find themselves questioning the credibility of basic biblical fact.

I am not writing this thinking that a true warning against The Da Vinci Code’s deceptive persuasion is needed by many here at Trinity. Most of you are well equipped to discern between such crafty rubbish and biblical truth. But, all of us have family and friends we’re praying for and trying to reach with the gospel. Many of them have or will read The Da Vinci Code. Worse many will believe what they read. Don’t be surprised if they ask you questions like, “Did Jesus and Mary Magdalene have a son or daughter?” Such questions could seem discouraging, especially if your friend or relative should, in your mind, have more sense than to be so easily taken in. Still, Brown’s book could provide some of us with the door to the spiritual conversations we’ve been praying for. Not only that but the challenging questions we may have to face about the reliability of the New Testament documents and the historicity of Jesus as the sinless Son of God may, more than ever before, be used by the Lord to push us Christians to dig deeper and study harder to “see if these things are so (Acts 17:11).”