Let’s start off with Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code. First, here is a good approach to understanding The Da Vinci Code: Walk into your nearest book store and ask the clerk where you can find a copy of The Da Vinci Code. He will either tell you or lead you to the start of the fiction section and look under the B’s for Brown.
Why do they file Dan Brown’s book under fiction if it is this huge secret against Christianity? Simply because it is a fictional story! There are a number of real life events and places listed in the book; Dan Brown does an awesome job of making his story come to life by including them. That does not mean that because Mars exists a story about a colony of people on Mars is true. People really get stirred up by things that question their religion and rightly so in some cases. In others, however, just know that the book is a work of fiction and move on.
There are cases where you find someone who wishes to use The Da Vinci Code as proof that Christianity is wrong or that it is vastly different than the modern day church believes. It that case it would be handy to have some information about the “facts” the book claims as true and then the story that it never claims as true.
When you open a copy of the book, you very quickly come across a page that very boldly claims “FACT:”; See this one would assume that the following information is true and factual and will be what the book’s story is based off of. In the first section of the FACT: page we see this:
The Priory of Sion –
a European secret society founded in
1099 – is a real organization.
In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale
discovered parchments known as Les
Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous
members of the Priory of Sion, including
Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo,
and Leonardo da Vinci.
Hmmm, sounds official! The National Library in Paris discovered the documents so you would tend to lend them credit. Unfortunately, you would be wrong, because this fact is based on false documents that were created by a man named Pierre Plantard. Plantard and his fellow members of the Priory decided to play a little hoax. In 1956, they formed a “secret society” that they were bound by law to register with the government of France. The goal of this group was to give Plantard a fake claim on the French throne. He worked at the Bibliotheque Nationale, so he had access to all sorts of knowledge about documents. He and his friends used this to create the forged Les Dossiers Secrets to claim himself as the heir to the throne! He admitted this in 1993 after a big scandal involving high ranking government officials. He had reached too high and was brought to trial for fraud. CBS even did a web piece on it which can be found on their site.
So how can we based a religious decision on a book that is known to be fiction and one of its major facts that it is based on it a know fraud? The truth is that you can’t! Next week we will dive a little deeper into The Da Vinci Code and see about some of the events that did and didn’t take place.
