Debating 'Da Vinci'
With the arrival of the movie, criticism of the Dan Brown blockbuster heats up
Why all the fuss over a movie and a novel? "This is a work of fiction," Ron Howard, the movie's Academy Award-winning director, told the Los Angeles Times. "It's not theology. It's not history ... Spy thrillers don't start off with disclaimers." Brown, the book's reclusive author, has sent mixed messages regarding the proportions of history and make-believe in his book. Although he declines interviews now, he told National Public Radio during a 2003 publicity tour that the book's characters and action are fictional but that "the ancient history, the secret documents, the rituals, all of this is factual. "He also told CNN at that time that "the background is all true."
Historical facts. What the church finds so potentially damaging in The Da Vinci Code is precisely the impression it leaves that the historical background woven into the fictional story is true. Some of the supposed historical facts contradict central tenets of the Christian faith, such as the divinity of Jesus and the authority and authenticity of Scripture. At one point, Brown has a leading character in the book say, "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false."
Enter an army of Christian apologists--to set the record straight. Since the book's debut in 2003, dozens of books, tracts, and Internet sites have appeared, aiming to debunk The Da Vinci Code and its perceived assault on Christian doctrine and tradition. Chief among their targets:
The divinity of Christ. In Brown's version of history, the early Christians thought of Jesus as "a great and powerful man but a man nonetheless"--a mere mortal. It was the Roman Emperor Constantine, according to Brown's fictional scholars, who imposed the doctrine of Christ's divinity on the church at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. And the emperor did so largely for political purposes: He wanted to unify the empire around the Christian faith, which he recently had come to embrace.
But as Catholic writers Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel point out in their book The Da Vinci Hoax, "any historian, whether Christian or not, knows that the early Christians most definitely believed that Jesus of Nazareth was somehow divine." The central issue at the Council of Nicaea, they note, "was not whether Jesus was merely human or something more but how exactly his divinity ... was to be understood."
Biblical scholars cite an abundance of explicit and implicit evidence of early Christian belief in Christ's divinity in the writings of the New Testament--in the primitive confession "Jesus is Lord," for example, which appears in the apostle Paul's letters from the middle of the first century, and in the prologue to John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God ... and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." The conviction that Jesus was both human and divine, concludes Oxford University scholar J. N. D. Kelly in his seminal study Early Christian Doctrines, was "all but universal" in the centuries prior to the Council of Nicaea.
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