Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code

[at8n1981]

ok rman ang da vinci code if you are an opend minded person nya imo sa i weight b4 nimo i consider ang imong g basa. pero ug dili ka open minded ayaw nlang kay makaguba jud na s imong pagtuo. para nako ang da vinci code man gud kay usa na cya ka produk2 sa usa ka tao nga MASON. MASON, meaning groupo na or organization na cya nga ang ilang goal mao ang pagtumpag sa simbahan, ang pag guba sa pagtuo ug pag guba sa pope.

I'm part of the masonic family and never in our teachings that mentioned in destroying the church...especially ang pag-guba sa pagtuo...ug ang pagguba sa santo papa.....in fact, it is the other way around...... ang simbahan ang gustong mugguba sa masonry(by excommunicating its members), kay they felt they were threatened by the powerful influence on most of its members to the society....

so bai, ayaw pataka ug tabi, kung di ka sigurado nga tinoud na imong gipangyawyaw.

ouch....nibalik ra jud iyang username "WAY ALAMAG"....hehhe

[HoundedbyHeaven]

\"way alamag\" may be an ironic name but his assertion on the hostility of Freemasonry to the Catholic Church is not without basis. Read this http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09771a.htm and make a judgment for yourself. Of course, Masons may deny this, as expected-- same thing as they may automatically dismiss the information I cited as being biased, because it comes from the Catholic encyclopedia.

Oh, and just because someone is making a claim you disagree with does not mean the person is uncertain of his claims-- that is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy.

Pax.

[at8n1981]

nice info bro!

[StyM]

some info i found in the philippine star.

Falsehoods peppering Da Vinci Code exposed
POSTSCRIPT By Federico D. Pascual, Jr.
The Philippine Star 05/16/2006

BROWN LIES: I have spotted many assertions of Dan Brown in his book The Da Vinci Code that do not jibe with what I know to be true.

But like many other bothered Catholics, I feel inadequate to challenge all his lies. I therefore throw at him James A. Beverley, associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara and professor of Christian Thought and Ethics at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto.

Exposing the falsehoods on which the book and the movie rest, we create, according to Beverley, "an unprecedented opportunity for believers to witness about the reliability of the Bible and its central redemptive message – that the Son of God became flesh, died on the cross and rose again."

Lack of space limits us to just a few of the points that Beverly raises in an article in Charisma magazine (http://www.charismamag.com/display.php?id=12860), but better a few than none at all.

Why all the fuss over a work of fiction? Beverley says the answer lies on Page 1, where Brown asserts that "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." Yet, critics have noted its mistakes in mathematics, French geography and even the layout of the Louvre. Brown’s claims about Jesus, the Bible, secret societies and ritual *** are "based on shallow research, sloppy investigation and careless thought."

POINT-BY-POINT: Here are some of the lies that peppered Brown’s book followed by Beverley’s remarks:

1.The Bible was invented by Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.

The Da Vinci Code reports that "Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible," one that left out the Gnostic texts and included the four traditional Gospels. The fact is: Constantine had nothing to do with the making of the Christian canon. He is not even mentioned in the standard Cambridge History of the Bible. The traditional Gospels were recognized by virtually all Christians 150 years before Constantine.

2. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels are the "earliest Christian records."

Not so. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 and date from 250 B.C. to A.D. 100. However, these documents have virtually nothing to do with Christianity but with various Jewish groups, rituals and ideas before and during the time of Christ. The Gnostic Gospels offer a twisted and heretical version of the Christian faith, but they did not come into existence until about a century or more after the death of Christ.

3. The Gnostic Gospels present a positive view of the feminine.

The Gnostic texts are said to picture a human, sexualized Jesus who embraced the sacred feminine. Actually, the Jesus presented in the Gnostic material is often simply weird, and the underlying ideology tends to be radically anti-feminine. Consider this bizarre passage from the Gospel of Thomas: "Simon Peter said to them, ‘Make Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life.’ Jesus said, ‘Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.’"

4. Early Christians did not believe Jesus was God’s Son.

This claim is rooted in either willful ignorance or blindness to the obvious. After 2,000 years, people continue to debate whether Jesus is the Son of God. But what has never been subject to doubt is that early Christians confessed that Jesus is God’s Son, as the Scriptures indicate: "Simon Peter answered and said, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’" (Matt. 16:16); "But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son" (Gal. 4:4).

5. The Council of Nicea (A.D. 325) invented the divinity of Jesus.

Contrary to Brown’s claim, that church council met to clarify the divinity of Jesus, not to create it. There are thousands of references to His divinity in Christian literature and archaeology before the Council at Nicea. They include the hundreds of claims in the New Testament and the witness of church leaders through the second and third centuries.

6. Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.

The novel claims there are "countless references" to their union in ancient history and that the topic "has been explored ad nauseam by modern historians." First, there is nothing in the New Testament or other first-century material about such a marriage. Second, there is no explicit mention of the alleged marriage in the Gnostic material of the second and third centuries. All we have in the Gnostic material is one reference to Mary as the "companion" of Jesus. That word, however, does not usually mean "spouse" or "wife."

7. Jesus and Mary had a child named Sarah.

The novel claims Mary was pregnant at the time of the death of Jesus, that her uncle Joseph of Arimathea helped her move to France where she gave birth to a girl she named Sarah. Mary and Sarah found refuge in the Jewish community in France. We are told that "countless scholars of that era chronicled Mary Magdalene’s days in France." This is historical junk first made popular by the 1982 potboiler Holy Blood, Holy Grail. There are no ancient documents supporting these claims, and no scholars of that era chronicled these alleged events.

8. A secret society named the Priory of Sion started in 1099 and has protected the bones of Mary Magdalene and documents about the bloodline of Jesus Christ.

This is one of the most significant blunders of The Da Vinci Code. The Priory of Sion was actually started in France on May 7, 1956, by a con artist named Pierre Plantard (1920-2000). The Priory was first a civic organization. In the 1960s Plantard created the mythology of a secret society led by figures such as Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci.

9. Ancient documents about the Priory were discovered in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris in 1975.

The Da Vinci Code refers to the alleged parchments as Les Dossiers Secrets. They are not ancient but forgeries done by Philippe de Chérisey (1925-1985), a co-conspirator with Plantard. They were not discovered by the French library in 1975 but were placed there by Plantard in 1967. Both de Chérisey and Plantard admitted the hoax before their deaths. In fact, Plantard was forced to admit his fraud before Judge Thierry Jean-Pierre in a French court case in September 1993.

10. There are historical lists of the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion.

When Plantard invented the Priory of Sion, he copied most of his list of Grand Masters from lists of alleged leaders of other groups, such as the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, a secret society founded in America in 1915. Plantard also changed his list of Grand Masters as he adopted different conspiracy theories about his Priory of Sion.

11. The Holy Grail is not the cup used at the Last Supper but the bones of Mary Magdalene.

The novel states that "the quest for the Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene … a journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine." The Holy Grail legends started about A.D. 1180 and continued through the 19th century. They never involved claims about the bones of Mary Magdalene. No Priory of Sion member has given in to the temptation to reveal the supposed location of the bones of Mary.

12. The Knights Templar guarded the bones of Mary Magdalene and four huge chests of ancient documents about the bloodline of Jesus Christ and the French kings who descended from Him.

The Knights Templar is a religious military order founded in the early 12th century. Hugues de Payens, a French Knight, led eight comrades in the campaign to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land. It has never been argued in the historical material about the Templars that they protected either Mary Magdalene or documents about French kings. These claims are the inventions of Pierre Plantard, who declared at one point that he was the descendant of Jesus and the proper heir to the French throne.

13. Leonardo da Vinci was once the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion.

The Priory started 437 years after the death of the great artist. Not one Leonardo da Vinci specialist in the entire world has supported the view that he once headed a pagan *** cult. James Beck of Columbia University calls this "total nonsense."

14. Leonardo da Vinci placed Mary Magdalene next to Jesus in his painting The Last Supper.

In Da Vinci’s time everyone believed that this person was John. Renaissance art specialists have always noted that John was painted in a rather effeminate manner. The painting was not meant to reveal the identity of a woman but the tension among the apostles after Jesus says to them, "‘One of you will betray Me’" (Matt. 26:21).

15. Early Jewish as well as Christian tradition involved *** ritualism in worship.

There is no hint in the Old Testament or in Jewish history that *** rites were part of temple worship. Jewish males did not engage in *** with priestesses in the temple. The word "priestess" is not even used in the Old Testament. In the novel, Jesus and Mary Magdalene are pictured as the ideal participants in a *** ritual. This claim has no basis in history, either in terms of early Christian tradition or even in reference to Gnostic documents.

[at8n1981]

nice info! keep 'em coming!

[MrBiddle]

mild OT:

kabasa nako sa MGA ANGHEL OG MGA YAWA. hehe my thoughts are I found Angels and Demons to be a perfectly riveting experience. A book with a heightened degree of suspense and intrigue and more importantly, spirituality. It will have you rooting for the need of God and might influence you in behaving towards Science as if it were a body of knowledge that can only go to far onward with frivolity and the marred reduction of the wonders of the Higher Power to mere mathematical equations. Langdon fights obstacles while solving puzzles, holding his breath in mid-air while Mickey Mouse mocks him, recounting ancient art and history opposite the strong-willed Vittoria Vetra, brave but a woman with scruples she and Langdon find chemistry and romance in ANGELS AND DEMONS. Watch out for humorous exchange and quips such as the tranquil "Piranha" breathing, Catholic nutrinos and Yoga master Houdini. Carmelegno Ventresca is a man with conviction and is distinguished, serene and pious but watch out for his character arc at the end of the journey. Opposite him is Maxmilian Kohler, the director determined to defend CERN, a man of arrogance and self-righteousness. Join Langdon as he encounters a deadly assassin, hides from gunfire inside a tomb, fights him underwater, climbs caves and creeps into castles, and prior to that the discovery of grotesque yet mesmerizing and hypnotic methods of murder and execution and one very breath taking sequence from above in a scene towards the end.
Dan Brown performs better sleight of hand in ANGELS AND DEMONS, believe me it IS a better twist than that of "The Teacher" in The Da Vinci Code... It is foreshadowed decisively so there are artificial contrivances. You would immediately be disappointed when you are made to think that the sleazy and proud character is the villain behind it but in the end lies a more disturbing twist to the puzzle, and collateral damage of revelations that are pay-offs of the story's central theme from the opposition to the idea that science is a miracle or to a certain portion of the book where a character wishes for "No more deaths."Â* Angels and Demons is blockbuster perfection indeed per one of the critiques printed about the novel. It will incline you towards determination to fulfill tasks of greater importance and urgence, to embrace if any a higher degree of spirituality and of course ideals of noble things to be done, be it from the twisted villain or from the old Cardinals... and don't forget a little bit of romance. Much more profoundly may authors like Ludlum or Clancy write, but Brown is one of those scribes who is able to weave entertaining yarn, fast and easy to comprehend, and entertaining at that despite some pomp or subpar prose that his critics may negate him for.
Angels and Demons. Try it.

[yami]

Dan Brown is intelligent.. Nka write siya ug book or story out of facts.
But there are few I found it funny. I don't really believe Da Vinci codes.
Then there's this one UP student who talked about then he said Priory of Sion really exist.

[at8n1981]

Dan Brown is intelligent.. Nka write siya ug book or story out of facts.
But there are few I found it funny. I don't really believe Da Vinci codes.
Then there's this one UP student who talked about then he said Priory of Sion really exist.

ONLY a few of us living in this world know the REAL story of the life of jesus...dat what I believe!

[yami]

I just saw the movie last nyt though I was only half finish sa book...
hmmmm...
there was this scene nga naa sila sa London riding a bus! and what drew my attention was the special appearance of these two people from the documentary of Da Vinci! hehehe
they were the guy with long blond hair and the woman with gothic appearance...
wala man gi focus ila face pero murag ni agi ra ang cam ato nila... hehehe

[kenny_tiu7]

20 Big Lies in the Da Vinci Code
By James A. Beverley

Source: http://www.charismamag.com/display.php?id=12860

Don't be fooled. Here are just a few ways Dan Brown's best-selling book twists and distorts the truth of the gospel.

In a little more than three years The Da Vinci Code has become the best-selling adult novel of all time. It has also become the subject of intense debate among Christians because of its radical claims that undermine basic Christianity.

Why all the fuss over a work of fiction? The answer lies on Page 1, where author Dan Brown asserts that "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."

In reality, the novel is a model of inaccuracy in almost every subject it addresses. Critics have noted its mistakes in mathematics, French geography and even the layout of the Louvre. More important, Brown's jarring claims about Jesus, the Bible, secret societies and ritual *** are based on shallow research, sloppy investigation and careless thought. However, given the novel's popularity and the staggering bravado in its tone, it is necessary for Christians to provide a critique of its central blunders.

Here are 20 of them.

1.The Bible was invented by Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.
The Da Vinci Code reports that "Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible," one that left out the Gnostic texts and included the four traditional Gospels. In fact, Constantine had nothing to do with the making of the Christian canon. He is not even mentioned in the standard Cambridge History of the Bible. The traditional Gospels were recognized by virtually all Christians 150 years before Constantine.

2. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels are the "earliest Christian records."
Not so. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947 and date from 250 B.C. to A.D. 100. However, these documents have virtually nothing to do with Christianity but with various Jewish groups, rituals and ideas before and during the time of Christ.

The Gnostic Gospels offer a twisted and heretical version of the Christian faith, but they didn't come into existence until about a century or more after the death of Christ.

The earliest Christian records are the writings of the New Testament.

3. The Gnostic Gospels present a positive view of the feminine.
The Gnostic texts are said to picture a human, sexualized Jesus who embraced the sacred feminine. Actually, the Jesus presented in the Gnostic material is often simply weird, and the underlying ideology tends to be radically anti-feminine. Consider this bizarre passage from the Gospel of Thomas: "Simon Peter said to them, 'Make Mary leave us, for females don't deserve life.' Jesus said, 'Look, I will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.'"

4. Early Christians did not believe Jesus was God's Son.
This is a bizarre claim, rooted in either willful ignorance or blindness to the obvious. After 2,000 years, people continue to debate whether Jesus is the Son of God. But what has never been subject to doubt is that early Christians confessed that Jesus is God's Son, as the following Scriptures indicate: "Simon Peter answered and said, 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God'" (Matt. 16:16); "But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son" (Gal. 4:4).

5. The Council of Nicea (A.D. 325) invented the divinity of Jesus.
Contrary to Brown's claim, the famous church council met to clarify the divinity of Jesus, not create it. There are thousands of references to the divinity of Jesus in Christian literature and archaeology before the Council at Nicea. This includes the hundreds of claims in the New Testament and the witness of early church leaders through the second and third centuries.

6. Jesus was really a pagan or a witch.
No standard reference works on witchcraft ever include Jesus as a witch or pagan. The novel attempts to argue that Jesus was a copycat figure of ancient pagan deities. This view depends on totally ignoring the Jewish context of the life and teaching of Jesus. If Jesus had been a pagan or a witch, this would have been noticed by the Jewish leaders who opposed Him.

7. Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
The novel claims that there are "countless references" to their union in ancient history and that the topic "has been explored ad nauseam by modern historians." First, there is nothing in the New Testament or other first century material about such a marriage. Second, there is no explicit mention of the alleged marriage in the Gnostic material of the second and third centuries. All we have in the Gnostic material is one reference to Mary as the "companion" of Jesus. That word, however, does not usually mean "spouse" or "wife."

8. Jesus and Mary had a child named Sarah.
The novel claims Mary was pregnant at the time of the death of Jesus. Joseph of Arimathea, her uncle, helped her move to France. There she gave birth to a girl she named Sarah. Mary and Sarah found refuge in the Jewish community in France. We are told that "countless scholars of that era chronicled Mary Magdalene's days in France." This is nothing but historical junk first made popular by the 1982 potboiler Holy Blood, Holy Grail. There are no ancient documents supporting any of these claims, and no scholars of that era chronicled these alleged events.

9. There was a smear campaign against Mary Magdalene in Catholic tradition.
To the contrary, Mary Magdalene receives positive attention in the Bible and in Catholic tradition. In fact, she is regarded as a saint, and her Feast Day is July 22. As a close disciple of Jesus, she was one of the first witnesses of His resurrection. The mistaken view that she was a prostitute did not arise until A.D. 591 when Pope Gregory I confused her with a prostitute mentioned in Luke 7:36-50.

10. A secret society named the Priory of Sion started in 1099 and has protected the bones of Mary Magdalene and documents about the bloodline of Jesus Christ.
This is one of the most significant blunders of The Da Vinci Code. The Priory of Sion was actually started in France on May 7, 1956, by a con artist named Pierre Plantard (1920-2000). The Priory was first a civic organization. In the 1960s Plantard created the mythology of a secret society led by figures such as Isaac Newton and Leonardo da Vinci.

11. Ancient documents about the Priory were discovered in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris in 1975.
The Da Vinci Code refers to these alleged parchments as Les Dossiers Secrets. These documents are not ancient but are actually forgeries done by Philippe de Chérisey (1925-1985), a co-conspirator with Plantard. They were not discovered by the French library in 1975 but were placed there by Plantard in 1967.

Both de Chérisey and Plantard admitted the hoax before their deaths. In fact, Plantard was forced to admit his fraud before Judge Thierry Jean-Pierre in a French court case in September 1993.

12. There are historical lists of the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion.
Actually, when Plantard invented the Priory of Sion he copied most of his list of Grand Masters from lists of alleged leaders of other groups, such as the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, a secret society founded in America in 1915. Plantard also changed his list of Grand Masters as he adopted different conspiracy theories about his Priory of Sion.

13. The Holy Grail is not the cup used at the Last Supper but the bones of Mary Magdalene.
The novel states that "the quest for the Holy Grail is literally the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine."

The Holy Grail legends started about A.D. 1180 and continued through the 19th century. They never involved claims about the bones of Mary Magdalene. Isn't it amazing that no Priory of Sion member has ever given in to the temptation to reveal the location of the bones of Mary Magdalene?

14. The Knights Templar guarded the bones of Mary Magdalene and four huge chests of ancient documents about the bloodline of Jesus Christ and the French kings who descended from Him.
The Knights Templar is a religious military order founded in the early 12th century. Hugues de Payens, a French Knight, led eight comrades in the campaign to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land.

It has never been argued in the historical material about the Templars that they protected either Mary Magdalene or documents about French kings. These claims are the inventions of Pierre Plantard, who declared at one point that he was the descendant of Jesus and the proper heir to the French throne.

15. Leonardo da Vinci was once the Grand Master of the Priory of Sion.
The Priory started 437 years after the death of the great artist. Not one Leonardo da Vinci specialist in the entire world has supported the view that he once headed a pagan *** cult. James Beck of Columbia University calls this "total nonsense." Leonard da Vinci scholars have convened special conferences in order to debunk the novel's false claims about the famous artist.

16. Leonardo da Vinci placed Mary Magdalene next to Jesus in his famous painting The Last Supper.
In da Vinci's time everyone believed that this person was John, the beloved disciple. Renaissance art specialists have always noted that John was painted in a rather effeminate manner. The painting was not meant to reveal the identity of a woman but the tension created among the apostles after Jesus says to them, "'One of you will betray Me'" (Matt. 26:21). Of course, even if da Vinci put a woman next to Jesus in his painting, this would not tell us anything about the real Last Supper more than 14 centuries earlier.

17. The Catholic Church killed 5 million women during the Witchcraft Inquisition.
The women targeted as witches were freethinkers, scholars, priestesses, gypsies, nature lovers, mystics and midwives.

The novel radically misinterprets the nature and scope of the Inquisition. First, both men and women were targeted as witches. Second, the female victims were generally older and were not from any specific class or profession. Third, the deaths totaled no more than 100,000, counting both males and females. Most important, the Inquisition was rooted in the real belief that certain men and women actually worshiped Satan and performed diabolical acts of evil.

18. French President
Francois Mitterand ordered 666 panes of glass in the pyramid at the front entrance to the Louvre.

The novel adopts a false rumor that circulated in French society two decades ago. Mitterand did not order 666 panes of glass to be in the pyramid. In fact, the public relations office at the Louvre informed me that the pyramid actually has 673 panes of glass.

19. Early Jewish as well as Christian tradition involved *** ritualism in worship.
There is not a single hint in the entire Old Testament or in Jewish history that *** rites were part of temple worship. Jewish males did not engage in *** with priestesses in the temple. The word "priestess" is not even used in the Old Testament.

In the novel Jesus and Mary Magdalene are pictured as the ideal participants in an early Christian *** ritual. This wild claim has no basis in history, either in terms of early Christian tradition or even in reference to Gnostic documents.

20. True worship involves *** ritualism.
The Da Vinci Code states that "historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God" and that "by communing with woman … man could achieve a climactic instant when his mind went totally blank and he could see God."

The Da Vinci Code will bring great harm to every innocent religious seeker who follows its endorsement of *** ritual as the path to God. Brown is surely bluffing in his rhetoric about *** in worship. It is impossible to imagine that he really believes his own novel's ideology.

Would he be willing to participate in the ancient ritual that The Da Vinci Code defends? Would he really recommend this ancient ritual to his wife, family and friends?

In both book and movie form The Da Vinci Code represents a threat as well as an opportunity for Christians. Its danger lies in its strident assertions of falsehoods that undermine basic teachings of the gospel.

Uninformed readers and moviegoers must be made aware of the historical blunders in Dan Brown's claims. At the same time, the novel and movie create an unprecedented opportunity for believers to witness about the reliability of the Bible and its central redemptive message—that the Son of God became flesh, died on the cross and rose again.