Exploring The Da Vinci Code Part 1 with Lee Strobel

Movies have a way of molding our thinking, same thing with books made into movies and that too will be the case with the forthcoming movie based on the same-named book, “The Da Vinci Code”. Is what’s presented true? Not just the facts, I’m talking about the ideas underlying the fiction that’s told as true. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today, a program that tells the Great Story, it’s all about Jesus. Get ready to learn what’s wrong with “The Da Vinci Code”. Get ready to hear about important resources that you can have to help change wrong thinking shaped by a work of fiction. We’ll be joined in a moment by a special friend, but first join me in worshipping the Lord on a program called, “Exploring The Da Vinci Code with Lee Strobel”.

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This is Haven Today and we are in Southern California in the home of Lee Strobel. And Lee, I want to welcome you back to the program.
LS: Thanks Charles, it’s been a while. It’s great to be back with you.
CM: It has been a while, but I think we’ve got a worthy reason to have you back on the air now. We’re going to be talking about “The Da Vinci Code” for the next couple of days, and not just a response to the The Da Vinci Code, the new movie starring Tom Hanks. Ron Howard bought up the rights to it. This is a book by Dan Brown that is presented as a novel, and it contains statements as facts, but it also has a lot of errors.
LS: Right.
CM: What do you as an apologist think about that?
LS: Well, Dan Brown really has created this unusual brew of truth and falsehood. There’s about, you know, a little bit of truth, but then a lot of falsehood and people may recognize some of the statements he makes as being true and think that therefore the rest of the book is true.
CM: It makes it all sound true.
LS: Exactly, when in reality so much of it is based on unhistorical assertions, it’s based on falsehood, it’s based on manufactured and fraudulent documents in some cases. So, we have a book that really, even though it purports to be a novel, does make claims that it is communicating truth and that is just not true.
CM: 40 million copies of the The Da Vinci Code have sold in hardback. Just a little while before we went on the air it has moved into paperback.
LS: Right. 5 million copies in the first printing.
CM: I have never seen a book do that. I’m still seeing it on airplanes. People are still buying it in hardback at airports and they’re still discussing it sitting next to each other on a plane. Can you think of anything else that’s ever caught the attention of people like that?
LS: This has really been a phenomenon. I sort of liken it to a cultural tsunami that is really sweeping over our country, and really, with this movie, all over the world. And fortunately, unlike the tsunami that struck Indonesia a while back, we have some advance warning here. And therefore we can get the word out, that we can alert Christians to be prepared to be able to defend the truth as 1 Peter 3:15 tells us, and then to warn spiritual seekers that what they are going to see in this movie and what they read in the book really does not have a basis in reality.
CM: Why do you think, Lee, that the book and now probably the movie are so successful?
LS: Well, first of all, I think people love a conspiracy theory. And you know, this book is one big conspiracy
CM: From start to finish!
LS: From start to finish and that intrigues people. Secondly, it really plays into feminist thinking, and it makes a lot of statements about women and how the Christian church has supposedly suppressed them and persecuted them. It was women that were supposed to have run the church and men sort of, in their sexist bias have taken it over and are running it in a very patriarchal way and so forth, so that appeals to people. And I think the other thing is that it presents a false gospel that makes no demands on people. I mean the real Gospel of Jesus Christ makes demands on us.
CM: Sure.
LS: That we receive Christ in repentance and faith and that we live with him as our Lord, that we follow him and we seek to please him. Whereas this book presents a false Jesus that really makes no demands and so it’s a very simple thing to adopt into your life, but it really has no spiritual substance.
CM: Well, let’s get started. Let me read you a quote
LS: Sure
CM: From Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code:
“The Bible is a product of man, my dear, not of God. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”
Lee Strobel, what do you think about that statement?
LS: That is just so full of falsehoods, you don’t even know where to start, I mean-
CM: You’re right.
LS: Yeah, just to unravel it, this idea that the Bible somehow has gone through so many translations that you can’t trust it, that’s absurd. That’s what a lot of Muslims believe unfortunately. The truth is that we don’t have a Bible that was written in the New Testament in Greek and then translated to Latin, and then translated to German and translated to English and all these errors crept in. You know we go back, in terms of producing the English Bible, right back to the Greek manuscripts, so we’re going back to the original language in which it was written in and so there was no, there was not this continual series of translations and so forth. And the fact that the book is written – according to Dan Brown – merely by men, really belies what we as Christians have come to believe
CM: Sure.
LS: based on the evidence that it really was a work of God that resulted in a Bible that is infallible and inerrant.
CM: Well, Dan Brown makes a couple of critical claims regarding the story of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and one thing that kind of caught my eye was his saying that the Bible was put together by Constantine in the 4th Century AD!
LS: Right, yeah. You know I talked to a scholar about this, an historian, and he said, ‘You know, this book is just a character assassination of Constantine’. Constantine of course was the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire. He, according to Dan Brown, was really a pagan who wasn’t converted until his deathbed and that wasn’t legitimate anyway.
CM: That’s not true.
LS: That is not true. Now it is true, now here’s again an example of Dan Brown having a little kernel of truth.
CM: A little bit of truth, yes
LS: and the kernel of truth is when he says that Constantine was not baptized until his deathbed. That is true. And now, he makes the claim that Constantine was really a pagan and that he was reluctantly baptized on his death bed. The truth is Constantine was a follower of Jesus Christ. He built so man cathedrals. He reimbursed the church for the costs it incurred during the persecutions. He called himself a bishop to those outside the church, he supported clergy, I mean there is no question that he was a follower of Jesus Christ. Now, he did have a theological snafu if you will, a little problem, and that is that he and some others in his day believed that you wanted to wait to the very last minute to be baptized before you died. Now, you know, we as Christians now that that isn’t theologically accurate today, but that’s what they believed in that day, that’s why he waited till his deathbed to be baptized. It had nothing to do with him being a follower of Jesus because he was a legitimate and authentic follower of Christ.
CM: So the Gospels that Dan Brown are saying are not legitimate, are not true, you find as a basis in fact are accepted and were well before the time of Constantine in the 4th Century, the 300’s AD.
LS: Absolutely. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have credentials that no other ancient documents have. First of all, they are rooted in eye-witness testimony. They have ties to the apostles themselves. Secondly, they are written in the first century. They are the only documents that we have that we know for a fact were written in the first century, within a short time period after the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Before legend could get in there and distort what was eventually written down. They contain embarrassing materials that certainly would have been edited out if the writers of these Gospels had felt the freedom to just create or make things up. So, and they were accepted by the church from the very beginning. They were always recognized by the church as being authentic, as being reliable. Now, in contrast to that, Dan Brown likes to talk about what are called the Gnostic Gospels.
CM: Right.
LS: These were written a long time later, in the 2nd and the 3rd centuries. They have no ties to the apostles themselves, they are not based on eye-witness accounts. They are corrupted with what is called a Greek philosophy called Gnosticism which flourished, in some places, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. And this was the importing of some foreign philosophies that people mixed up with some teachings of Jesus to create a really non-biblical version of the Jesus story. No authentic scholar who has really studied the matter would ever claim, you know credibly, that these Gnostic Gospels, these later documents, are equal or more reliable than the 4 Gospels we have in the New Testament.
CM: And he is pretty much saying that they should replace what we have in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, I think.
LS: He is saying that, and let me just read you something Charles.
CM: Sure, yes.
LS: You know, just to give you an example. There’s one of these Gnostic Gospels called the Gospel of Thomas, and let me just read you a little quote that it says and I’ll leave it to the listeners to decide whether this sounds like the authentic Jesus.
CM: OK.
LS: OK. It says, “Jesus said, ‘Blessings on the lion if a human eats it making the lion human. Foul is the human if a lion eats it making the lion human.’” I mean it doesn’t make any sense. Here’s another one,
CM: Yes, yes.
LS: “Jesus said, ‘Whoever has come to know that the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass of that person the world is not worthy.’”
CM: Wow.
LS: I mean this is gibberish. These shouldn’t even be called gospels. They’re often a random collection of sayings that don’t make sense and do not resonate with what we know from the most reliable documents about what Jesus really said and did.
CM: Amen. Well, let me read you another quote.
LS: Sure.
CM: Dan Brown, “Some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950’s. The Vatican, in keeping with their tradition of misinformation tried very hard to suppress the release of these scrolls.”
LS: Now this is amazing that Dan Brown can make such a historically ludicrous statement like that. The Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing to do with Christianity in terms of being gospels that were supposedly, you know, suppressed by Constantine or attempted to be suppressed. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written before the time of Jesus so they don’t mention Jesus. And what they do give us however is a new confidence that the Old Testament of the Bible, some of the old books like Isaiah and so forth, have been accurately translated through time
CM: Preserved, yes.
LS: Preserved because we have these early records of them found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so, you know to mix up the Dead Sea Scrolls and claim that those were suppressed gospels, there’s no scholar in the world who would believe that.
CM: Well you know the thing that gets me, is what I just read to you has a factual error. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the late 40’s they were not found in the 1950’s
LS: That’s right.
CM: As Dan Brown said.
LS: By a shepherd by the name of Mohammed Ali, by the way.
CM: That’s right. But the problem is it’s not just that he gets his facts wrong. There’s an agenda
LS: Yes
CM: there’s an undercurrent going on there. There’s a, may I use the word, paganism of his own, that’s trying to subvert the traditional, historic, orthodox Christian faith. That’s what disturbs me.
LS: Exactly. He has to pull the rug out from under history. He has to cause us to question history itself so that he can then rewrite history to revise it to suit his own purposes. Well, fortunately, historians have got certain tests that they have developed through the years to test whether or not ancient documents are reliable or not. And when you apply those tests to the Gospels that we have got in the New Testament, they withstand scrutiny. When you apply those tests to these other so-called Gnostic Gospels that were written later, they don’t withstand scrutiny. So any objective individual who tried to analyze the 4 Gospels of the Bible to determine whether or not they were historically reliable, I believe would come to the conclusion that yes, indeed they are.
CM: Lee Strobel is our special guest here on Haven Today, and we’re talking about The Da Vinci Code. And Lee, your new book that you have, it’s a small book, but it’s part of a larger kit. The book is called, “Exploring The Da Vinci Code” and if somebody will go to our website, haventoday.org, we’ll also list your new website
LS: Great.
CM: Which is really great. You’re – we’ll tell people about that a little bit later
LS: Sure.
CM: But let me read one more quote out of The Da Vinci Code, “Powerful men in the early Christian church conned the world by propagating lies that devalued the female,” now you made a reference to this a little while ago
LS: Right.
CM: but I think we need to tackle it a little more.
LS: Sure.
CM: Dan Brown says, “Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from Matriarchal paganism to Patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the Sacred Feminine” which is a big word,
LS: Right
CM: he uses that more than once in the book.
LS: He does, yeah.
CM: All right, Lee Strobel, fact not fiction here.
LS: You know what Dan Brown is doing here is he’s trying to resurrect a pagan belief in the Sacred Feminine which has to do with the belief that there was something divine about the childbearing properties that women have and so forth. And there was paganism wrapped up in that that somehow if men and women engaged in sexual activity that they could get closer to God through that. I mean these are pagan ideas that Dan Brown is trying to propagate. The only way that he can claim that this has anything to do with Christianity is by claiming Christianity is itself illegitimate and a fraud, and that it was women who were supposed to have run the church and that it was indeed men who jumped in and took control and have run it ever since. You know, when you look at it and you say, “What is God’s attitude toward women? Does the Christian God, does Christianity suppress women? Does Christianity – absolutely not! It elevates women. Look at the teachings of Jesus who had women around him as his followers, who you know, the first person to discover the tomb empty was a woman. You know, we see women being treated with such respect by Jesus in a day when women were not generally respected as they are today.
CM: And that doesn’t mean to say that the church hasn’t treated women poorly in certain time periods and certain ways –
LS: But when the church has done that it is running contrary to the modeling of Jesus and teachings of Jesus himself.
CM: And the scriptures.
LS: That’s right.
CM: That’s right.
LS: Absolutely.
CM: I guess it’s an understatement Lee for me to say that Dan Brown has a pretty low view of scripture.
LS: Well, yeah you’re absolutely right. I mean, he wants to mix in these, these non-biblical, unreliable, late documents that are fanciful and as I mentioned earlier just contain many times ridiculous teachings that bear no resemblance to the true Jesus. And he wants to blend all that together and wants to devalue the Gospels of the Bible because they make certain claims about who Jesus was, that he is the Son of God who proved it by returning from the dead. He doesn’t like that. He wants to use these Gnostic Gospels that have to do with self-understanding. The word Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, gnosis which means knowledge. And it is a salvation though self-illumination, through knowledge, the accumulation of information, insider information about Jesus and so forth. This is not biblical! Salvation comes in repentance and faith when we receive Jesus Christ as our forgiver and as our leader. That is what the most reliable documents we have tell us and those are the documents that make up the Gospels that we see in the New Testament of the Bible.
CM: Lee Strobel I think you feel pretty strongly about this, don’t you?
LS: I do! It makes me mad!
CM: We’ve talked basically about the Word and what Dan Brown does with the Bible, the scriptures. Would you come back again tomorrow and let’s talk about what he does with Jesus.
LS: Yeah, absolutely.
CM: The Son of God. Before we go, Lee Strobel, would you mind just leading us in prayer because we’ve got people listening that perhaps have read the book, are going to see the movie and they’re thinking hey, there’s some truth in there? Well, would you just pray that people would just see the real truth?
LS: Absolutely, I’d be glad to. In fact, just before we do that, to let you know, 1 out of every 3 Canadians who have the book now believe that Jesus has ancestors walking among us today, so you see that people are actually believing this stuff, so let’s pray.
CM: More on that tomorrow, right.
LS: Yes, yes. Father we do pray that your truth would go forth in all its power and the people who have read this book and will see this movie who are spiritually confused who are believing lies, who are believing things that are just not true, that Father you would super cede that, that your truth would go out and help convict people of their sin and bring them to faith in Jesus Christ where they can find forgiveness and grace and eternal life. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
CM: Amen. We are Haven Today and the program is called, “Exploring The Da Vinci Code with Lee Strobel”. Now as you just heard, Lee’s going to join us again tomorrow and I hope you can as well. Why don’t you tell a friend that they can hear today’s program on our website, haventoday.org. And now if you’ll go to haventoday.org you’ll find some important resources that we have by Lee Strobel. First we have a kit called, “Discussing The Da Vinci Code”. It includes a short book just completed by Lee and Gary Poole, a video shot on location in Europe at The Da Vinci Code settings, and also a leader’s guide for 4 sessions together. If you have a Bible study or are part of a group this kit is for you and can be yours as our thanks for your financial gift of $30 or more to Haven Today. If you just want a copy of the book that Lee has just finished and it’s literally hot off the press, we’re asking for a gift of $15. We also have 6-packs of his new book, perfect for group study for your gift of $30 or more to help us keep sharing the truth of the true story of Jesus Christ. It’s there at haventoday.org or you can call us at 1-800-65-HAVEN, that’s 1-800-65-HAVEN. One thing I need to say, please get in touch with us today. Our first shipment of these resources arrives at our warehouse early next week, but after that the publisher is already backordered. So to be prepared call or get on the internet today. Christians need to be thinking about the real truth in relation to The Da Vinci Code. One other thing, we’ve had a few days on the air about going to China and I just have to mention a couple from Palmer, Alaska who wrote us a couple of days back and sent $200. They have been blessed by 2 daughters from China and thought that they needed to make a gift in honor of their adopted little girls. The wife and mother says she hopes her daughters’ birth parents may hear the soul saving news of Jesus Christ by radio on Haven Today. God bless you and God bless everyone who’s made commitments to tell the Great Story in China. Speaking of Alaska, Haven Today is going to Alaska this September and we are so happy that so many people have signed up to go already. It’s going to be a 7 day cruise leaving on Holland America’s world class MS Rhyndam for a week of relaxation, but more than that, spiritual renewal. We’ll leave from Vancouver, BC. We’ll go all the way up into Alaska, we’ll be exploring Glacier Bay together. It’s a wonderful place to go on a trip and you only have to unpack once. My wife really likes that. Here’s a special phone number you can call for information, call 1-866-681-7327, that’s 1-866-681-7327. Or if it’s more convenient, you’re going – I hope! – to haventoday.org anyway, there’s a picture of an Alaskan cruise ship, just click on there and there will be the information for you. I’m Charles Morris. Thanks for being with me and Lee Strobel. Would you come back again tomorrow? We’ll be exploring The Da Vinci Code together in light of the true Gospel of Jesus Christ here on Haven Today.