Debunking the Da Vinci Code Hoax - Life of Paul Part 77

Now, you know, here at McLean Bible Church, it's time for the truth to get our boots on.

I mean, enough is enough. And so we're going to talk today about this book. This grows out of a series that we're doing entitled Modern Theological Myths. We're challenged to do this in Acts chapter 20, where Paul said to the leaders of the church of Ephesus, he said, keep watch over God's sheep and protect them from theological error. And so even though we're in a message on the life, a series on the life of Paul, I did a tiny little digression to talk to you about some of the most insidious theological errors that are around today that are being shoved down the throat of the American public. Two weeks ago, we talked about, do Jewish people really need Jesus? And we said, the New Testament is clear.

Absolutely they do. Get the tape or the CD. Last week, we talked about the agenda of the homosexual activist community, whereby they say homosexuality is a genetic predisposition that people can't help. And therefore, we in America must accept homosexual behavior as normal sexual practice. And what we saw last week is that their premise is unbiblical, their behavior is offensive to God, and they are caught up in a bondage from which only Jesus Christ can set them free.

If you missed last week, get the tape or CD. Today, we want to go on and do the last part of this little series, talking about debunking the Da Vinci hoax, because that's exactly what it is. Now, I was out with my son John, who's 19 this week for dinner, and I told him I was going to be talking about this, and John said, Well, what exactly are you going to talk about? Like, what exact issues are you going to cover? And I said, John, you know, the truth is, this book is so full of error, I don't even hardly know where to start. But I've picked three, three of the most significant ones to talk to you about, and there are these. We want to talk about the formation of the New Testament, we want to talk about the person of Jesus Christ, and we want to talk about the esteem, or the lack of esteem, as Dan Brown would say, given to women by Christianity. And I think that that'll pretty well fill our plate for this morning.

Now, let's look and see what's going on here. First of all, the formation of the New Testament. Here's what Dan Brown said in his book, and I quote, The Bible did not arrive by facts from heaven. The Bible is a product of man, not God. The Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine. He was a lifelong pagan, who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest. Constantine was a very good businessman, he could see that Christianity was on the rise, and he simply backed the winning horse. End of quote. Now is this true? Was Emperor Constantine just a cheap opportunist who used Christianity for his own political agenda and his own political purposes?

Friends, the answer is absolutely not. Let me tell you the truth about Constantine. Constantine, in 312 AD, was away with his army in Gaul, modern-day France. When there was a riot, there was a mutiny in Rome, and a man named Maxentius took over in Rome.

Mutiny. Constantine turned his army around and marched back to Rome to face this mutineer, and yet he was overwhelmed. He was outnumbered. He knew the chances of victory were small. And the night before the battle, he was so scared about losing the battle that he spent the whole night in prayer to his pagan gods.

But something interesting happened. While he was praying, he suddenly saw in the heavens a cross shining in the clouds. And under the cross, the two Latin words, haque vinque, which means by this, by the cross, conquer. Later that evening, he had a dream in which Jesus appeared to him and told him to put a cross on the Roman standard of war, and to follow the cross held high in front of the army in the battle, and Jesus would give him victory. Constantine did this, and he won this battle against overwhelming odds.

It's interesting. Let me just say that this was 312 AD. Constantine was not on his deathbed.

He was not too weak to protest. He gave his life to Christ immediately after this and ruled for 25 more years. Now, because he gave his life to Christ, he did a bunch of other things. For example, he took the Roman eagle off the top of the military standard of the armies of Rome.

There you see a picture of the standard. He removed the eagle and put the cross on the top of every military standard in the Roman army. He also erected a statue of himself in Rome holding a cross high and having the inscription under it by this sacred sign, I deliver this city. He abolished all persecution against Christians in the Roman Empire. He became a friend of all the Christian bishops and would often call them together to councils where he would personally preside. He erased all the pagan symbols in Rome.

The statues of Zeus and Apollo and Mars got rid of them all. He paid for churches to be built all over the Roman Empire out of his own personal funds. He declared Sunday to be a day of worship for the entire Roman Empire. He attended church every week, and out of respect, he had this curious habit. Out of respect, he would stand for the entire time the sermon was being preached. He held a Bible study in the palace that he taught himself on a weekly basis, and he made sure that his sons were raised and given a Christian education. The point is that Constantine embraced Christianity not because of political expedience. He embraced it because he had had a true spiritual experience with Jesus, and the next 25 years' worth of his actions proved this was not a political thing. It was a true spiritual experience.

Now, Dan Brown goes on. He says Constantine needed to strengthen this new Christian tradition, and so he held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea. Let me stop and say this was a real council. It really did happen in 325 AD, and Constantine was really there. That's true.

Dan Brown continues. Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet. Jesus' establishment as the Son of God was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea. Because Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after Jesus' death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling Jesus' life as just a mortal man. Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible. He commissioned and financed a new Bible that omitted those Gospels. The modern Bible was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ so they could use his influence to solidify their own power base. Constantine's Bible has been the church's truth for ages. Therefore, almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.

Now, is this true? I mean, did the Council of Nicaea decide on the makeup of the Bible? Did the Council of Nicaea radically define which books were in the Bible? Friends, absolutely not.

Let me tell you the truth. The formation of the New Testament had taken place long before the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. In fact, a sense of which writings were inspired by God and belonged in the New Testament goes all the way back into the first century. Even Peter, 2 Peter 3.16, writing in his letter about 61 or 62 AD, refers to Paul's writings as Scripture.

This is in the 60s AD, and he's calling Paul's letters Scripture. In the writings of the earliest church fathers from 100 to 250 AD, these include the writings of Polycarp, Papias, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius. We find listings in all of these church fathers' writings of the books that they considered inspired and part of the New Testament. And for all practical purposes, it's the exact same New Testament that you have sitting on your lap this morning.

In fact, usually in the same order of the books that you have sitting on your lap. One more example, the Muratorian Canon, which was written in 170 AD. It was a list of all the books that were recognized as inspired by the church, and it is almost identical with the list of the books in your New Testament today. R. Laird Harris, in his monumental work, The Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible, says, and I quote, In the Muratorian Canon, we have a history of the New Testament books as an authoritative collection, almost exactly like our New Testament. And they were written by someone who wrote less than 70 years after the death of the last apostle, John, and by someone who may well have talked with many others who knew the apostles personally. So by the time the Council of Nicaea came around, folks, in 325 AD, it's important you understand that the makeup of the New Testament was already a foregone conclusion. Dan Brown's assertion that the Bible as we know it today was collated by the pagan emperor Constantine, and that Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, those assertions are simply bogus. He goes on, you say, well, wait a minute, Lon, before you go on, wait a minute. What about all that stuff he said about thousands of other gospels that talk about Jesus as a mortal man, that he deliberately left out?

What's he talking about? Well, friends, he's talking about the Gnostic gospels. The Gnostic gospels were discovered in Egypt in 1946 in a little town called Nag Hammadi in central Egypt. They were all written in Coptic. They're dated 250 to 350 BC, and they belong to a group of heretics that lived in central Egypt called the Gnostics.

We'll show you a map. Here's where Nag Hammadi is, the red star you see on the map, and you can see where they were found. These Gnostics, their name comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. They believed that they had secret knowledge that Jesus had given just to them, and to the initiated, they were kind of like the Masons, a very secret sect, who passed on this secret information only to the initiated. And here's some of the things that they believed. They believed that the true God originally made two divine beings, a male and a female.

They had sex. They had an offspring, an evil offspring, an evil son, who became the God of the Old Testament. His goal, this evil son of theirs, the God of the Old Testament, was to see to it that the divine spark in man never got back to heaven again. And that's why Jesus had to come to bring this secret Gnostic information so that the initiated people in the Gnostic order could get their divine spark back to heaven. In these Gnostic Gospels, these Gospels had Jesus saying things and doing things that are the wildest, most phantasmagorical things you ever heard of in your life, crazy things. And listen, it's not that the early church fathers didn't know about these Gnostic Gospels. They knew about all of them, and they rejected them all as heresy centuries before the Council of Nicaea ever met. In fact, Irenaeus, the famous church father, wrote a treatise called Against Heresies in 180 AD, a century and a half before the Council of Nicaea, and he outlined in his treatise all of the teachings of the Gnostics and said, and I quote, such are the falsehoods that deluded people have invented, end of quote. R. Laird Harris, once again the inspiration in canonicity of the Bible, says, and I quote, we have no evidence whatever that there were true writings of the true apostles which the early church refused, rejected, or lost, end of quote.

So let's summarize. Neither Emperor Constantine nor the Council of Nicaea nor a bunch of bishops with a political agenda rewrote the Bible at the Council of Nicaea for their own political gain. In fact, the Council of Nicaea had absolutely nothing to do with which books were in the Bible.

I'll tell you in a minute what it did have to do with. But also I want you to remember that these bishops who came to the Council of Nicaea were not cheap political hucksters the way that Dan Brown presents them. These were men who had suffered for their faith in Jesus Christ. These are men who had been beaten and tortured for their faith in Jesus Christ and who had watched comrades of them go to their deaths rather than deny Jesus Christ. These were godly men who came to the Council of Nicaea for godly purposes.

You say, well, like what? Well, that leads us to our second issue, the person of Christ. Here's what Dan Brown says, and I quote, Until the Council of Nicaea, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet, a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. Jesus's divinity was the result of a vote here at the Council and a relatively close vote at that. Establishing Jesus's divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman Empire and to the new Vatican power base. Thus, almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false, end of quote.

Now, is this really true? I mean, did the Council of Nicaea change the church's understanding of who Jesus Christ is? Did the Council of Nicaea radically alter their understanding of the deity of Christ?

Friends, absolutely not. Let me tell you the truth about the Council of Nicaea. The Council of Nicaea, 325 AD, met to deal with a heresy that had arisen in the church at the beginning of the fourth century. Remember, the deity of Jesus Christ was never a fluid issue, was never an issue that was unsettled and open for discussion in the first three centuries of the church. Thousands upon thousands of followers of Christ went to their death. They were burned at the stake. They were crucified. They were thrown to animals in the Colosseum and torn into bits rather than deny the deity of Jesus Christ. They were killed over the very issue who is God, the emperor or Jesus, and they refused to recant that Jesus was God. There was no confusion at all about this in the early church. But in the early 300s, a guy named Arius, who was a church leader in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, began teaching that Jesus wasn't really God 100%. And a lot of people began following him. He was opposed by Athanasius, the bishop of the church of Alexandria, and the fight became so acrimonious that Emperor Constantine called the bishops from the entire Roman Empire together to Nicaea to settle this once and for all. At this conference, these bishops, along with the full support of the emperor, reaffirmed the historic position of the church. And that is namely that the essence of Jesus Christ is identical with the essence of God the Father, that Jesus Christ is an uncreated being on the exact same level as God, and reading part of what they approved to you, and I quote, We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, begotten, not made, who is of the same exact substance, the Greek word is homoousios, the same exact essence as the Father, end of quote. And by the way, the vote was 300 to 2.

So it was not close, as Dan Brown implies. You say, well, Lon, where did they get this historic position on the person of Christ from? Friends, they got it from Jesus, from the mouth of Jesus. John chapter 5, where I ask you to turn, Jesus said to them, John 5, 17, My Father works on the Sabbath day, and I too am working. For this reason, the Jewish leaders tried all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was also calling God, his own Father, making himself equal with God.

John chapter 10, verse 30, Jesus said, I and the Father are one. Therefore the Jewish leaders once again picked up stones to stone him. Jesus said to them, I have showed you many good works.

For which one of them are you stoning me? And they said, For a good work we do not stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, are claiming to be God. Don't you ever let anybody tell you that Jesus Christ never claimed to be God. He claimed to be God every time he talked about the subject. And these Jewish leaders who were standing there listening to him, who, unlike the so-called scholars of the day, heard the very words come right out of his mouth, they knew exactly what he was claiming to be, which is why every time the subject came up, they picked up rocks to throw at him. They knew exactly what he was claiming to be.

Let's summarize. The Council of Nicaea did not redefine who Jesus Christ is. Up until the Council of Nicaea was Jesus viewed by his followers as nothing more than a mortal man? Absolutely not. That's not true. Did the Council of Nicaea vote the deity of Christ into existence?

Preposterous, friends. The church's position on the deity of Christ has never changed from the first day Jesus opened his mouth in John 5 and John 10 and told him that he was. In fact, Paul, in Colossians chapter 2 verse 9, writing in about 60 A.D., said, For in Jesus Christ all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form. That was almost 300 years before the Council of Nicaea. So, Dan Brown says everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.

Is that so? Well, it depends what your father taught you. But if he taught you that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, Jehovah God himself in the flesh, your father taught you right. Now, what about this third issue, the esteem or lack thereof given to women by Christianity? Let me tell you what Dan Brown says.

Hold on to your seats here. He says, and I quote, There was a smear campaign launched by the early church. The church needed to defame Mary Magdalene and call her a prostitute to cover up her dangerous secret, her role as the Holy Grail. The threat that Mary Magdalene posed to the men of the early church was ruinous, namely that she was the woman to whom Jesus had assigned the task of founding the church. Gosh, I thought that was Peter he said that to. Maybe I'm mistaken.

Let's go on. He goes on to say, Early Jewish tradition involved ritualistic sects in the temple, no less. Early Jews believe that the Holy of Holies in Solomon's temple housed not only God, but also his powerful female equal Shekinah.

Men seeking spiritual wholeness came to the temple to visit priestesses with whom they made love and experience the divine through physical union. For the early church, this sacred female presence posed a serious threat to the church's power base. Friends, that is so nonsensical and preposterous that it's hardly even worth dignifying with a response.

There's no evidence ever that that happened. Finally, it was man, not God, who created the concept of original sin, whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. The power of the female posed such a threat to the rise of the predominantly male church and so the sacred feminine was demonized and called unclean. Christian philosophy decided to embezzle the female's creative power and make man the creator and the church use this to subjugate women. End of quote.

You say, what in the heck is going on here? What is he talking about? Well friends, what he's talking about is the fact that there is a crusading feminist agenda that runs through the entire book of the Da Vinci Code. From the first page to the last page, there is the underlying implication that a bunch of devious, power-hungry men commandeered the Christian faith, that they took it away from their roots, its roots in secular feminism, sexual feminism, and they institutionalized the church as a male-dominated, female-subjugating religion. Now I wish I had more truth to deal with this lie of the devil, but I don't. More time, rather.

But let me just say a couple things in the time that I've got. Let me remind you ladies that Christianity, the Christian faith, and the truth of the New Testament is the best friend women on this planet have ever had. And if you don't believe me, you just look and see how women are treated in every culture in the world where the Bible has not been dominant in that culture. You look in the Islamic cultures of our world today and see how women are treated barely as good as dirt in those cultures.

I'll tell you why. Because the truth of the Bible has not been to those cultures. Look at the tribal cultures of Africa where women are mutilated by female circumcision. Look at the Chinese culture where women's feet are tied and female slavery is rampant. In the ancient Hindu culture, women could own no property.

If a wife left her house without her husband's permission, he had the right to cut off both ears and her nose. If her dowry was too small, he could burn her at the stake. And if a woman was accused of adultery in the ancient Hindu culture, she was made to walk through a real fire, and if any part of her clothes or her body showed the slightest traces of burn, she was assumed to be guilty and killed.

Now how can you walk through a real fire and not have some indications of getting burned? Which means you get accused of adultery as a woman in the ancient Hindu culture, you're gone, that's it, you're assumed guilty. Hey, in the Roman world, before the time of Christianity taking over the Roman world, women were a disenfranchised lot. Cicero, the great Roman poet, wrote, and I quote, Our fathers in their wisdom considered that all women, because of their innate weakness, should be under the control of a male guardian. Essentially, women were slaves in their own homes in the Roman Empire, they couldn't vote, they couldn't own property, they had no legal rights, their husband could divorce them at the whim of just a word.

There was what was called Pater Familias in the Roman Empire before the time of Christianity taking over the Roman Empire. And what this meant is that when a man, the head of a home, had a daughter, brand new daughter, they would bring the daughter to him. Now, you couldn't do this with a male child, but they would bring the female child, his brand new daughter, to him, and he could give a thumbs up or a thumbs down, and if he gave a thumbs down indicating he just didn't feel like raising another girl, they took her down to the river and they drowned her.

No charges pressed. Now, if you did that to a male child, you'd be accused of murder. Female children, ah, you don't feel like raising her, just drown her.

You'd say, wow, that's pretty bad. Yeah, but listen to what the Illustrated History of the Roman Empire says, and I quote, women in the Roman world were the most liberated in the world at that time. You think it was bad in Rome, you should have seen the way it was in the rest of the world. And then along comes the Christian faith. And then along comes the New Testament truth declaring Galatians 3.28, In Christ there is neither male nor female, for we are all one in Jesus Christ. Ephesians chapter 5, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.

Husbands are to love their wives as they love their own bodies. 1 Peter 3, men are to grant women honor because they are equal heirs of the grace of life. And men, if you don't, your prayers will be hindered. Into this world where women were treated so abjectly comes the truth of God saying, women are to be honored, women are to be dignified, women are to be treasured, women are to be treated as equals and as worthy individuals in our world. And let me tell you, all the societies today where women are treated with dignity and where women are allowed to be all that they can be, you will find every single one of those societies has been molded by the world view of Christianity and the Bible on this subject. They may not be walking those cultures with God today, but you look back and you will find the warp and the woof of that culture was formed by Biblical truth. And in those cultures where Biblical truth has not had that level of formation, you will find women are not treated well. Hey, I think just the fact that the feminist movement exists in America today has proved that the Bible and Christianity is a woman's best friend. Hey, you try taking the American feminist movement to Saudi Arabia and you watch what happens. You take the American feminist movement to Iran or you take it to India or you take it to tribal Africa and you watch what happens.

It won't be pretty. But it exists here in this country because we have a view of women that says women are worthy and women are honored and women are dignified. And that position came right out of the Word of God. The feminist attack on Christianity and the Da Vinci Code that Dan Brown mounts, friends, it is historically ignorant and it is sociologically ill-informed. This book makes me so mad.

I don't even know what to do. This book makes me so irritated. But let me just say in closing, Dan Brown may be an excellent writer, but he is, in my opinion, a bad historian, a miserable theologian, and an ill-informed sociologist. Can I repeat that?

Because it just makes me feel better to say it. He is a bad historian. He is a miserable theologian.

Wait a minute. And he is an ill-informed sociologist. In fact, at the end of the book, the heroine of the book, Sophie, says, and I quote, my friends who are devout Christians, definitely believe that Christ literally walked on water, literally turned water into wine, and was born of a literal virgin. And Dan Brown has the character in his book say, well, their reality is false. I'm sorry, Dan.

God says those people's reality is true because the Bible is true and the Da Vinci Code isn't. And listen. All right.

Wait a minute. If you're here and you haven't read this book, don't go buy it, don't waste your money, and don't give him any more money. If you've read the book, my suggestion is it's wonderful to start a fire with on a cold evening. But don't you dare let this book shake your faith, friends. Jesus said that the people who build their lives on the rock of the Word of God, the winds come, the rains fall, the floods beat against the house, and the house stands because it's built on the rock.

You build your house on the rock of the Word of God. None of the stuff he says undermining the Word of God in Jesus Christ is true. You build your life on the Word of God, and I promise you, when all the dust clears in heaven, I don't know where Dan Brown will be, but I can guarantee you, you'll be there with Jesus if you build your life on the Word of God because the Word of God is true and the Da Vinci Code isn't.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thanks for talking to us today about this book. And we pray that you would help us today to really understand what truth is and what it isn't.

And that there would be a real sense in our hearts and lives that the Word of God stands the test even of a historical evaluation of this book. Help us to give this tape to our friends whose faith may have been shaken, so that they might not have this lie of the enemy undercut their faith in Jesus Christ or their willingness to consider him. Lord, thanks for telling us truth today. Lord, thank you for letting the truth get our boots on here today. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.