Exploring The Da Vinci Code with Lee Strobel (Part 2)

Who is the real Jesus? Is he the Gnostic Jesus, mystical and enlightened man who lived beyond the cross as told by Dan Brown in the upcoming movie The Da Vinci Code, or is he the biblical Jesus, both human and divine, a savior who today can be known personally? I’m Charles Morris and welcome to part 2 of a Haven Today called, “Exploring The Da Vinci Code with Lee Strobel”. The next few minutes are very important, not just for your faith, but for the faith of many others who’ve been reading the bestselling book and many millions more who will see the upcoming movie by the same name. Later, I want to share some important resources we have for you to share with others, so get ready for an important time together. And first, as always, we will worship the true Jesus Christ together with the Martins singing, “For the Love”.

Song: For the Love
Performed by: The Martins
We’re back again on Haven Today with Lee Strobel. We’re sitting in his home in Southern California; I’m Charles Morris and Lee thank you for taking time to talk about The Da Vinci Code with us.
LS: Well, believe me this is so important Charles. I’m so glad you’re doing some radio shows on this because with so much false information going out through the book and now coming up with the movie, we’ve got to let Christians know we have nothing to fear because we have truth on our side.
CM: We certainly do. We have a new small book which you’ve but out called “Exploring The Da Vinci Code”. Also, it’s part of a kit that we’ll tell people about a little bit later, but you actually went and shot some footage
LS: Yeah
CM: in places where Dan Brown’s novel, “The Da Vinci Code” has a setting, right?
LS: Right. I wanted to personally investigate the credibility of these claims by Dan Brown, so I went to Paris. I went to London. I went to the sites he mentioned, I personally checked them out and investigated it. And in the DVD driven small group curriculum that you’ll be talking about later, all that footage is on there including the props from Ron Howard that he left behind that was actually incorporated.
CM: You walked into a cathedral north of London and there they were. They were still left behind.
LS: Exactly. He had tried to make the interior of this certain cathedral look like Westminster Abbey where he was denied admittance to film because the book is so ridiculous they didn’t want anything to do with it. So he created these phony statues and things like that to make it look like Westminster Abbey. And I went up to one and I said, “Wow, is this statue from the 15th century? It’s a beautiful marble sta(tue)– wait a minute.” I looked at it and I picked it up and it was Styrofoam. It was a prop.
CM: It’s not going to last that long, is it? Not as long as an 800 year old cathedral.
LS: That’s right. And not as long, you know, it’ll last about as long as Dan Brown’s falsehoods that have gone out and are being debunked right and left.
CM: I think we should say this, this is important. We did this on our last program. We may have been attacking Dan Brown a bit too much. It’s his ideas, it’s what he’s propagating that we’re opposing.
LS: Exactly. I think you know what Dan Brown has done is, he’s written a novel and a lot of people say, “Well, don’t get so excited.”
CM: It’s a novel.
LS: “It’s a novel. It’s fiction.” But you know, and if he had left it at that it wouldn’t be so bad. But what he does is, he goes in and he says, “You know what, there is truth here.” And he actually has a page at the beginning of the book that says, ‘FACT’. And he says certain things are factually true.
CM: And they’re not.
LS: And they are not. For instance he says that there is this organization called the Priory of Scion which was founded in the year 1099 that has protected the secrets of Jesus having been married to Mary Magdalene for all these centuries.
CM: So it wasn’t even around at the time of Jesus.
LS: The reality is that it was actually founded around 1956 by a guy named Pierre Plantard and a group of people in France to campaign for low income housing in France. And Pierre Plantard actually created fraudulent documents, he counterfeited documents to make it look like this was an ancient organization that Leonardo Da Vinci and others had been part of and that had protected the secret about Mary Magdalene. He planted those documents in the French National Library. And when they were discovered, it was like, “Oh my goodness! Here’s evidence historically that this organization has existed and that Jesus had been married to Mary Magdalene!”
CM: But the documents were tested and were found to be forgeries.
CM: Wow.
LS: And he admitted that before he died. He conceded that he made up the whole thing. So you know, we have a something here where Dan Brown claims it to be fact and yet when we check it out we find it isn’t true. Well, you know, we need to set the records right.
CM: We certainly do. And let’s do that right now.
LS: Sure
CM: you made reference to it. Let me just read from Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, “Jesus was a Jew and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried. If Jesus were not married at least one of the Bible’s Gospels would have mentioned it.” Now that’s a twist, isn’t it?
LS: It is a twist! It’s an argument from silence. And the reality is we have references in the Bible to Jesus’ relatives. We have references to Mary and Joseph; we have references to brothers and sisters.
CM: right.
LS: Jesus, when he was on the cross, what does he talk about? He talks about taking care of his
CM: His mother, yes.
LS: Mother, not yeah, exactly. There is no reference to Jesus being married because he wasn’t married. And you know, it was not uncommon, unlike Dan Brown’s claims for rabbis and spiritual leaders in the 1st century not to have been married.
CM: That’s right.
LS: John the Baptist is an example.
CM: That’s right. The desert fathers in the early centuries, they went off in the wilderness to pray and study, same thing, yes.
LS: So, exactly, exactly. So this argument from silence is ridiculous. Plus Paul at one point is arguing about whether or not they should be allowed to be married and he says, well you know, Peter was married doggone it, you know. And the apostles were married. And he would have certainly had Jesus been married said, well the Master was married! There’s the ultimate, you know, proof right there.
CM: Well, and what we’re getting at for someone who hasn’t read The Da Vinci Code, and I’m not recommending you go out and buy it. I recommend that you get Lee Strobel’s book “Exploring The Da Vinci Code”. The book by Dan Brown says that Jesus married Mary Magdalene,
LS: Right
CM: they had a child and that there are actually heirs of Jesus in this world in which we live today.
LS: Right.
CM: Now where in the world did that come from?
LS: Well, one of the claims, I mentioned Pierre Plantard who created these phony documents. If you read those phony documents, you know what you find out? Pierre Plantard is a descendent of Jesus.
CM: Well!
LS: So that’s how credible that is.
CM: So if you can forge a document you can claim your distant relative.
LS: Your royal relative, you’re exactly right. You know Charles there is no historical evidence that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. It’s not in the Bible, it’s not in other ancient documents and here’s the thing that’s so fascinating. What Dan Brown relies upon to build his case that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene are these so called “Gnostic Gospels” that were written in the 2nd and 3rd century. So it was a long time after.
CM: And we talked about that on our last program
LS: Exactly.
CM: People can go back and listen to that, yes.
LS: Right. They have no historical credibility. But, even though that’s true, those documents themselves do not even say that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. So he’s relying on unreliable documents that don’t even back up what he says. I’ll give you an example. The so called Gospel of Phillip which was written in the 3rd century, a long time after Jesus’ ministry in the 1st century. And it’s called the Gospel of Phillip even though it has no connection with Phillip of the 1st century.
CM: Right.
LS: And in that document, Dan Brown says, well, wait a minute, it refers to Mary Magdalene as being the “companion” of Jesus. In Aramaic, in which it was written, he says, that means spouse, therefore Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. Well here’s the problem.
CM: There’s a reason one language isn’t another language even though they’re close.
LS: Right. You know, this so called Gospel of Phillip wasn’t even written in Aramaic, it was written in the Coptic language and the word there for companion is actually borrowed from the Greek and what it means is a sisterly kind of relationship like brothers and sisters in Christ as we describe, or brothers and sisters who are spiritually connected and followers of God. So that doesn’t even claim they were married and then you remember, as we established yesterday, this isn’t even reliable in the first place!
CM: And he picks up also something that some people in the church still believe today. It’s still going around that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.
LS: Right.
CM: That’s a later story. That really was not around in the first few centuries.
LS: It is and we know that Mary Magdalene, Jesus cast demons out of her, we know of that. But in the 5th century, a pope by the name of Gregory gave a sermon in which he linked a prostitute described in the Gospels with Mary Magdalene. And says that was her, Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Now Dan Brown says that in the 1st century the men took the church from Mary Magdalene and they branded her as a prostitute to discredit her. Well not only isn’t that true, it was Gregory 5 centuries later who did this and he wasn’t being malevolent when he did it. He was trying to say look, if God can forgive a prostitute he can forgive you.
CM: That was the point of the message.
LS: Yes.
CM: yeah, I’m going to open a picture. I brought a little copy here.
LS: Yeah
CM: Of “The Last Supper” by Leonardo Da Vinci
LS: Right
CM: it’s a fresco and it hangs on a convent wall in Milan. Dan Brown tells us that beside Jesus there is Mary Magdalene.
LS: Right.
CM: He also points out the feminineness of what has been accepted as John. Do you think Leonardo Da Vinci actually intended what Dan Brown says he intended in this great work of art?
LS: No, absolutely not and I’ll give you a couple of reasons why not. There is good evidence that this is not Mary Magdalene sitting next to Jesus in “The Last Supper”. Number one, in other paintings that Leonardo Da Vinci painted John does look a little feminine. I mean, that’s the way he portrayed him. Number 2, if that were true, then where is John in the painting?
CM: Right.
LS: If you can count, all you count is
CM: You better have all the disciples in there, yes.
LS: Exactly. You’ve got the 12 disciples and Jesus, you would have 14, there’s actually 13 in the painting. And then the dagger through the heart of this is in an earlier draft of this Leonardo Da Vinci indicated that this is John. And so there is no historic credibility that Leonardo Da Vinci was sort of implanting in his paintings a secret code to let people know that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were an item.
CM: So as an apologist and someone who’s interviewed a lot of church historians as well as biblical scholars, you’re convinced that Mary Magdalene was not married to Jesus and that Jesus was never married.
LS: Absolutely. I think both of those are established beyond any reasonable doubt by the documents that we have that are historically reliable.
CM: all right, now I’m really riled up now, but let’s go to what is probably even more important. In the novel that Dan Brown wrote, The Da Vinci Code, the movie’s coming out, he says that Jesus Christ being divine, Jesus Christ the Son, big “S”, of God, the only begotten Son did not come into the church until a few hundred years after
LS: Right.
CM: Truth or fiction?
LS: Absolute fiction. And this is, Charles, I think one of the most deadly falsehoods contained in The Da Vinci Code because what it is saying is Jesus never claimed to be the Son of God, nobody believed he was the Son of God until in the 4th century when Emperor Constantine deified him, sort of upgraded his status to God for his own nefarious purposes.
CM: Super status.
LS: Exactly, this is absurd. You go back to the earliest Gospel, the Gospel of Mark that most scholars believe was the earliest written.
CM: Right the original, yes.
LS: And you see that Jesus is making the claim that he is the Son of God. You see people believing it in the first century documents we have preserved in the Bible. You have early creeds of the church that even predate the writings of the Apostle Paul that describe Jesus as being the image of the invisible God, that describe him as being in the very nature God. We also then later have church fathers like Ignacios and others in the year 105 AD and following that also refer to Jesus as being the Son of God. This is far earlier than the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD which Dan Brown says is when Constantine deified Jesus. So this is a terrible lie and this is harmful, very harmful to people because it goes to the root of the Christian faith. Did Jesus claim to be the Son of God? Absolutely, we have strong historical evidence that he did. Number 2, did he prove it by returning from the dead? Absolutely, we have incredibly strong evidence that he did. Dan Brown denies that and therefore by denying the deity of Jesus Christ he communicates a message that I believe is extremely harmful to spiritual seekers who are looking for truth. And Charles the insidious thing is, even though this book is a novel, people are believing it.
CM: Yes, yes.
LS: 1 out of every 3 Canadians that have read this book say that, “I believe there are descendents of Jesus walking among us today.” 53% of Americans who’ve read the book say that, “This book has been helpful in my spiritual growth and understanding.” This is frightening
CM: It is, it is.
LS: when we’ve got people relying on a book of fiction that contains distortions of history to come to conclusions about how they will live their life and what they’re going to believe about Jesus.
CM: A couple of years ago we first did some programs related to The Da Vinci Code. Next day after we’d aired our first programs a mother called us, the office. She said, “This is just one of those God things.” The day before her 20 something old son had come home and said, “Did you know Jesus was married? Did you know that there were these other gospels?” She said, “No. How do you know that is true?” “Oh, I’m just reading this book The Da Vinci Code.” Then she happened to tune in Haven Today and that’s what we were talking about the next day. This is a point of faith. This can become a crisis of faith for people who are not armed and they don’t know the true facts.
LS: I’ll give you a personal story along those lines. I had a woman who became a Christian. She had read my book, “The Case for Christ”
CM: Yes.
LS: And received Christ as her forgiver and leader and she called me up and said, “I have a Muslim boyfriend. Would you and your ministry associate Mark Middleburg meet with him and share the Gospel?” And so we said, “Of course!” So we met with him, we had a couple of great sessions with him, talked to him about the evidence for Jesus being the Son of God and so forth. And I thought, “Wow, we’re seeing some progress there.” And then she called all upset one day and said, “Something terrible has happened. He’s read The Da Vinci Code.” And his reaction is to say, “This confirmed all my worst suspicions about Christianity.” And it shut off his process of seeking the truth. So this is insidious. This is dangerous. These are people who are making eternal decisions based on a book of fiction.
CM: Wow. And now at this point it’s becoming a movie,
LS: Right.
CM: we’ve talked about that. And Tom Hanks is starring in this. You’ve got a lead actor.
LS: Right.
CM: Ron Howard bought up the rights. He’s directing he’s producing it. And so 40 million people have read the hard back version of the book, the paperback is out now, but many more million will go and see the movie.
LS: Worldwide Charles, that’s what’s frightening. This is going to open all around the world and we have a lot of young people who maybe won’t read the book, but they’ll go to see the movie.
CM: Yeah, that’s right. Yes. People don’t read much today.
LS: I mean film is the language of this post modern generation, exactly. So they’re going to be going to this movie and its going to expose more and more people to it. However, having said that, and having acknowledged I believe this is a challenge to Christianity, I believe it is a tremendous opportunity.
CM: Yes it is, yes.
LS: Because you can do what you’re doing which is educate people and say, you know what? People are going to be talking about Jesus. When this movie hits you’re going to have a hard time not getting into a spiritual conversation with your neighbor or friend.
CM: That’s right. That’s right.
LS: So let’s turn it for good. And let’s give them resources that can set the record straight. Let’s defend the historic truth about Christianity and let’s do some spiritual “jujitsu” here and use this momentum that was intended for ill and turn it around that God might use it for good to reach more people with the Gospel.
CM: Yes, amen. We’re going to tell people about the kit, about your new book, “Exploring The Da Vinci Code” but just simply put, how can someone discover the truth about Jesus?
LS: You know what? I think there’s, you know to me this is how I define faith: faith is a step we take in the same direction that the evidence points. Is faith involved in receiving Jesus Christ as our forgiver and leader? Absolutely.
CM: It has to be.
LS: It has to be, but it’s not an irrational faith.
CM: That’s right.
LS: it is a faith that is a step in the same direction that the evidence of history is pointing. And if we can apply the historic standards that historians use to measure the trustworthiness of ancient documents and we apply those to the New Testament, what we find is the New Testament of the Bible is historically trustworthy. Therefore, if we read that and we understand the claims of Jesus Christ we can take a step of faith in the same direction that’s pointing and receive Jesus as our forgiver and our leader. And our lives will be transformed and our eternities will be rewritten as a result.
CM: Lee Strobel, before we go there are probably some truth seekers listening to the program right now.
LS: I hope so.
CM: Would you just pray that God through the power of his Spirit would work in their minds as well as their hearts and draw them to him.
LS: Absolutely. Father I do pray that your truth would go out with all its convicting power and that those who are spiritual seekers who are looking for truth will have found it today and that in repentance and faith they will bend the knee to you and they will make today the day that they receive your Son Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross, apply that personally to their lives, that they would receive him as their forgiver and their leader, that they would do that in repentance and faith, and therefore come face to face with you and have confidence that for eternity they will be in Heaven with you forever. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
CM: Amen. Thank you Lee. We are Haven Today and this program’s called “Exploring The Da Vinci Code with Lee Strobel”. If you missed yesterday’s part 1 or just wish that you’d told a friend about both of these programs, they are available on our website, haventoday.org. When you go to haventoday.org you will find some important resources that we have with Lee Strobel. But please, you need to know these materials are scheduled to arrive at our warehouse early next week and the printer is already backordered for future shipments. So if these resources can help you, and I believe they can, go on the internet right now or call us right now so that your resources will not be backordered. 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 they shot on location in Europe at The Da Vinci Code settings, and a leader’s guide. If you have a Bible study or are part of a small group or even a church, this kit is definitely for you and can be yours as our thanks for your gift of $30 or more to Haven Today. If you just want a copy of Lee’s new book, we’re asking for your gift of $15 for “Exploring The Da Vinci Code”. And because so many groups may want this to first know and then to communicate to others, the true story of Jesus, we have 6-packs of the book for your gift of $30 or more. And remember, so your resource is not backordered, please go right now to haventoday.org or call us at 1-800-65-HAVEN. One other thing, if you are praying for Haven Today’s starting in China last Sunday night, thank you. And thank you as well if you have sent a financial gift to tell the Great Story in China. I came in the office today and there was a note from a Haven Today listener in greater Seattle on KGNW radio. This friend says she wants to partner financially every month for a year with a wonderful gift. She was signed up to go to China in the 1980’s and just before going there was that terrible strife in Tiananmen Square. She never got to go, she bought a car instead. And now she’s sold that fancy car and is sending us the money. She says, “I may not get to China, but God’s Word there is far more beautiful than any trip and much more satisfying than the silly car.” And then she drew a smiley face. Thank you in Bellevue, Washington. It’s still not too late for you to help as well. Call or go online and let us know that you too are going with us to China. I’m Charles Morris. Thanks for being with me and Lee Strobel, he’ll join us again briefly tomorrow when again we’re telling the Great Story, it’s all about Jesus here on Haven Today.