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 The website of good reasons for why you can be a Christian

Debugging “The Da Vinci Code”

Dan Brown’s best selling novel “The Da Vinci Code” is making people ask hard and important questions.  This intriguing novel is great on plot, but the arguments made about the history of the early church in general and the divinity of Jesus in particular are inaccurate at best.  It is because Brown claims that his historical facts are accurate that this work of fiction is so unsettling and so clearly problematic.  The book knits together a story about Leonardo Da Vinci, a secret society called the Priory of Sion, and various aspects of the Catholic church – a story about a conspiracy to cover up the real truth about Jesus Christ, Mary Magdelene,  and the early church.  Therefore, if his arguments about the early church are shown to be faulty, the entire conspiracy theory crumbles, as the reason for its existence disappears.  In the book, one of Brown’s characters states “People fear what they do not understand.”  That is exactly what this book depends on – the fact that our culture has a deep mistrust of Christianity precisely because we are so ignorant about it.  Brown himself does not grasp some of the most basic presuppositions of Christian faith or of the historical critical method of evaluating ancient texts.  

Brown claims that:  

 In fact, modern archeology and the historical documents we do have show that the exact opposite of each of these four points is the most reasonable conclusion.  Click on any of them to see why.