The book opens with a one word bold statement–FACT. It then contains four hundred fifty three pages in an attempt to get the reader to believe the biggest lie I have ever read!

The lie you are asked to believe is that God does not exist, Jesus Christ was a whoremonger who fathered many children, Mary Magdalene was His live-in lover, she is the one who the whole of the Christian church has knowingly suckered millions into believing a vast cover-up scheme by hiding the truth about her and Jesus’ children for two thousand years. The Catholic Church is the primary progenitor of this lie and of course, as you would expect, the primary profiteer of their own elaborate lies. Everyone is assumed to be either a part or a victim of this lie, except Dan Brown who alone is given the fate of exposing it by his version of history.

You are asked to approach this book with an open mind. Every time I hear this statement I get the mental image of people running around with their brains falling out. God asks people to guard their minds and not be open to deceptive information, Romans 8:7; 14:5; Philippians 2:5;4:7.

If you have not discovered this practice already, let this become a part of your reading habit for the rest of your life. It is the common practice of writers, reporters, researchers, historians, yes, and this includes theologians.

" Always remember that Satan will fill an ocean full of truth in order to sail a battleship of error."

I wrote this statement down in 1957 and it has helped guide my studies since then. It is not my statement; it is the statement of Dr. David Gillespie, then a professor at Wayne State University, Bible scholar and teacher. If I remember right, he had a plurality of earned doctorates. I might add that my first meeting with the man lasted hours as he publicly demonstrated my near ignorance of almost everything during the oral examination at my ordination on March 17, 1957—a day I cannot forget, even now! I was twenty-three at the time. His questioning of my reasoning powers, Biblical knowledge, theological understanding and general overview of both Christian and secular history lasted all afternoon and wore out three moderators. In spite of my lack of competency, he favored the motion that the church proceed with my ordination and was one of the first to sign my Certificate of Ordination. He later befriended me as a young preacher and became my tutor. My reason for telling this story is to impress you with the seriousness of his statement. I can not over emphasis how important it has been to me for nearly fifty years. It added great perceptive power. Brown records pages of assumed factual details about the Louvre museum, curators, cryptologists, artists, painter locations, etc in his ocean of "truth" in which he floats his one battleship lie. The lie is that all Christianity is a hoax, planned and practiced by the church for over two thousand years. Dr. Gillespie’s follow up statement fifty years ago was, "Always remember, it is the battleship that will destroy you!"

The fact that French Louvre houses 65,300 pieces of art and which has a three mile perimeter, contributes nothing to his argument that Jesus fathered many bastard children! What if Monet inspired the birth of the Impressionist movement by painting in the Tuileries gardens where the clay was once dug for tile roofs? Does that make Christianity a two thousand year multi-billion dollar elaborate deception? There simply is no factual connection. It is however, the setting for Brown’s deception, which has doubtlessly netted him millions.

Beating the paths back to the graves of dead people who can not defend themselves is another popular sport among writers. Brown takes you to the grave side of Sir Isaac Newton, mathematician, natural philosopher (1642-1727), Botticelli, Renaissance painter (1445-1510), Victor Hugo, French poet, novelist, playwright (1802-1885) and Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, architect, engineer (1452-1519) and others in an attempt to say they all knew of the proven universal deception of Christianity. To Brown, they not only knew of it, they were the guardians of Jesus’ genealogy and paid by the Catholic Church to keep their mouths shut. Corporal mortification is a part of his story. To beat yourself until your back is a bloody mess only proves the stupidity of individuals who think salvation results when God is appeased by pain instead of the subsitutionary death of His Son. It certainly does not prove anything else.

I have not read much of Hugo’s writings, but I did read his Les Miserables when I was a kid and have seen it in Broadway play form three times. Nothing that I know in his writing connected him to a cover up of Jesus’ life as a fabled fornicator. I remember the book was about 1100 pages and I was fascinated with the French characters, political injustice and his ability to tell a story. I still am. I also remember the musical is full of prayers invoking God’s mercy, forgiveness, salvation and assistance. I also know of the bell ringer Quasimodo’s passionate love for the gypsy girl, Esmeralda, his hatred for the evil priest, Frollo and his fatal attempt to save Esmeralda and get together with her at Notre Dame. I know of Hugo’s hatred of the memory of Napoleon and his twenty-year exile from France, his election to Academie Francaise in 1842 on his third attempt. I know of his questionable love life. However, I also know of his work, La Fin de Satan, in which he writes of Satan’s fall and its complication in human history but don’t know anything of his defending an immoral life of Jesus Christ and the protection of the Lord’s children through the centuries.

If you believe Brown’s report of Da Vince’s work, you are believing that Da Vince was one of four or five men that were trusted to know the details about the immoral life of our Lord and who secretly reported this through his paintings. It is the reason for the smile on the face of Mona Lisa. In case you ever wondered, now you know. According to Brown, it was an "inside joke." She has one side of her face as male and the other female. She was painted as a hermaphrodite. From this you are asked to also believe Da Vinci was a "fag" and painted himself in "drag". (p120)

You are also asked by Brown to believe that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute who Jesus used to produce his children,

(p 243). As Jesus’ favorite mistress, she was given a place of honor at the Last Supper. Assumedly, Leonardo some how knew this and painted her in The Last Supper, at his right side in a private place of honor. According to Brown, Jesus gave the instruction to lead the future of his church to Mary Magdalene and not Peter. Of course you are asked to believe that Peter then hated Mary. You are also asked to believe the Catholic Church recasts Mary as a whore, "in order to erase evidence of her powerful family ties." He wants the reader to believe that Mary is the "female womb that carried Jesus’ royal bloodline."

(p 249)

To Brown, the Crusades’ purpose was to gather all the information and records of the children Jesus fostered through Mary Magdalene, who he says, was pregnant at the time of the crucifixion. Joseph of Arimathea hid the fact and then also hid Mary in France. In his style of writing, Brown immediately connected hiding Mary to Walt Disney, Sleeping Beauty, the Masonic order as well as The Last Supper. All this on one page! (p 261) Add to this the Green Knight, King Arthur, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mozart’s Magic Flute.

One reason for the confusion of Da Vinci’s Last Supper is that, including Jesus, it has thirteen people in the painting. Critics point out that Judas left, John 13: 26,27,30, after receiving the sop, (psomos morsel, fragment)). Da Vinci painted a picture of the Last Supper not the Lord’s Table! There is a difference. The Last Supper was a Jewish celebration. Judas had every right to be present along with the other disciples and Jesus, for a total of thirteen. However, when the gospel writer’s accounts are harmonized, it is clear that following Judas’ departure, to arrange a price for betraying Jesus, the Lord’s Table was Instituted. As an unbeliever, Judas had no place at the Lord’s Table. To explain why Da Vinci confused the two celebrations is no more difficult than to explain the way preachers, priest and theologians continue to do so to this day. There is a major theological difference between the Jewish Passover celebration, the Last Supper and the Lord’s Table. One remembered the offering of lambs slain in Egypt just before the Jewish exodus. The other calls for remembrance of Jesus body and blood as a substitute payment to God in exchange for our sins.

A subtle sub theme that Brown presents in this book is that free sexual orgies are the true religions of the world. This theme is really the conclusion of the book, p 453, in which he writes of the "... primeval nature-worshipping festivals... the joyous rites to celebrate fertility and the Goddess." This is offered as the full explanation of an earlier sexual ritual to a pagan goddess worship cult, page 113.

For his defense of the pagan ritual religions, Brown interacted Egyptian, Greek, Roman religious gods, goddess, cult and symbols to prove his point. I found it impossible to follow the connections. It is easy to believe something is true if you are flooded with so much information and details that you lose track of what is being presented. This is a good place to learn that authors often find it is easier to confuse, than to convince! I found it impossible to follow any of the hundreds of unrelated entries Brown used to fill his ocean in order to float his battleship. Here are a few: corporal mortification, the legendary keystone, The Way, Napoleon, Claude Monet, the obelisk of Ramses, the Louvre, astrological symbols, Satan number 666, Greek shrine in Delphi, Horus being nursed by the goddess Isis, the Catholic Church, Opus Dei, cilice belts, the pentacle--five pointed star, Eastern Star, Ishtar, Astarte, Mother Earth, Venus, Hollywood, the devil’s pitchfork, the Vatican Bank, the Vitruvian Man, Nature’s divine order of homosexuality, the Fibonacci sequence, cryptology, The Female Pope, Tarot cards, PHI, Mona Lisa, Last Supper. All these are in the first one hundred pages. Don’t forget Walt Disney and Sleeping Beauty!

The author makes much out of ancient symbols of Egypt and their Greek and Roman counterparts. The implication is that these groups knew about true worship of gods and goddesses. He seems to trace free sexual rituals to these religious cultures and thus true spirituality and religion may be experienced through them. Since they are ancient and mysterious to us, these cultures are used, without evidence, to offer an alternative to Christianity.

I have been to Egypt on six study trips and I did not find his presentation to be fair to their ancient religions. In fact, some of the Psalms are written on ancient temples. One period of Egypt’s history was clearly based on the worship of a single creative God. Egypt was used by God to give birth to the nation of Israel and treated them with special honor. They promoted Joseph who became the second most powerful man in the world. They gave the Hebrews land the Bible describes as the best in Egypt. God used Egypt to protect Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus against the attempt of Herod to kill him. Early Christianity flourished in Egypt and Alexandria became the center of the Christian church. The scriptures were protected and copied there. Until 636 AD, when it was taken by force by the Moslems, it was ninety six percent Coptic Christian.

I have been in the Pyramids, the museum, the Valley of the Kings, some of the ancient tombs, and talked in detail with Egyptian historians. I did not find anything to support Brown’s tie of ancient Egypt and sexual freedom as a form of true worship. I’ve read the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and it certainly doesn’t support Brown’s argument. It calls for the sins of a person’s heart to have, "no more weight than a feather", if they want to experience the afterlife. Egypt has a peace treaty with Israel. It cost President Sadat his life for signing it but Egypt is not mentioned in the scriptures as part of the multi-national force that is yet to invade Israel.

Brown would have his readers believe that Constantine invented the New Testament as we have it. Nothing could be more deceptive. Christianity was alive and well 300 years before Constantine’s supposed conversion to Christianity and his merge of Christianity with pagan religions to form the state religion. He did this in an effort to save his empire. To make Constantine responsible for the canonization of Holy Scripture is what Christianity Today calls, "bad—really bad—history".

Brown, like others, builds on people’s ignorance of terms. Apparently, he does not expect anyone to look them up. His claim that the early gospels written by the Gnostics, were rejected because they contained truth about Christ that the church did not want known is without defense. The Gnostics were a philosophical sect that taught a soul’s salvation depended on an individual securing some mysterious quasi-intuitive knowledge (gnosis) of the truth contained in the universe through magic formulas. These individuals sought and claimed to have special information from the spirit world apart from and in contradiction to revelation and inspiration. They considered themselves the "enlightened" thus saveable and all others intellectually dead and beyond redemption. Of course this philosophical group would denounce Jesus who claimed to be the "Light of the world". The Apostle Paul warned of this sect in the Book of Colossians. This is the reason the Apostle John wrote his gospel.

The hidden gospels that Brown refers to came well after the New Testament writings were firmly established. The time difference is from one to two hundred years later. The earliest, Gnostics Valentinus was written about 125-150 AD. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts were published about 250-450 AD. These writings were found in 1945 and translated into English in 1977. There is no way they could have evidence equal to the eye witness accounts of the Apostles who wrote (60-100 AD). They wrote while other eyewitnesses were alive and could attest to their trustworthiness and authenticity.

When the "Q" (Quelle, source) documents are called on to challenge apostolic Christianity, it should be stated that there is no real historical evidence that anything like this had ever existed! It is an imaginary reconstruction of what might have been sources for the apostles’ writings. The thinking of this postulation is that Matthew, Luke and John got their information from Mark who got his information from Peter. The information contained in Matthew, Luke and John that is not in Mark’s gospel supposedly came from some unknown source, hence, "Q" or Quelle, a German word meaning, "source". It is very unfortunate that evangelical scholars use this system instead of what the Lord said, "when the Holy Spirit comes He will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." John 14:27.

To quote Christianity Today again, the attempt to show that the "process of forming the New Testament was arbitrary and manipulative is a failure and something other than historical scholarship." This is true of the defense to include Gnosticism as a valid expression of Christianity and it is also true of Brown’s attempt to destroy the Christian faith in his book, The Da Vinci Code.

A fair statement of purpose in writing The Da Vinci Code is stated in the words of the author about the Vatican Observatory, " Unbiased science could not possibly be performed by a man who possessed faith in God..." P 149. Brown considers Christianity as, "the Greatest Story ever sold!"

To assume God will disappear and truth will depart from the earth is to have it backwards. Heaven and earth will disappear, but God and His word will not! In the meantime, God is building His church and it will stand against the gates of hell and even against the Da Vince Code

PS: If you buy the book, read it and believe it, do yourself a favor, don’t admit it!

GAA 6/9.2004