The Da Vinci Code. It's less than 24-hours before the opening of what will no doubt become the number one movie of the next few months and possibly the year. What is a Christian response to a non-Christian story? Don't miss church historian and pastor Dr. Jim Garlow with Charles Morris on the next HAVEN Today

May 18, 2006

The Da Vinci Codebreaker with Jim Garlow

Fiction or fact? That’s what a lot of people don’t care about when they go see a movie that opens this coming weekend, the Da Vinci Code. I’m Charles Morris and welcome to Haven Today. We’ll be joined in a few minutes by my good friend Jim Garlow. Dr. Garlow is the pastor of a church but he’s also a well known church historian and the author of a book called, “The Da Vinci Codebreaker”. Later on in this time we have with Jim we’ll talk about 6 things you should know before you go see the movie. Now let’s get started by worshipping the Lord together.

Song: Open the Eyes of My Heart
Performed by:

Dr. Jim Garlow is on Haven Today with us, in fact I’m here in his church and Jim, I always think of you as a church historian, which you are, but you’re also a pastor too here at Skyline Wesleyan Church in San Diego, so welcome to the program.
JG: Thank you. Honored to be on with you and glad to have you here at Skyline Church.
CM: Well, finally, I finally get to come. Jim, I wanted to talk to you about the Da Vinci Code. And since the last time that you and I spoke, probably 2 months ago, National Geographic got a hold of a document, the Gospel of Judas. They’ve authenticated it, as far as being dated, but of course the implication is this was written by Judas himself. I want to talk to you about both, but I’ve also had people, heard people say in the Christian community, “What does this have to do with me? Why is this important? Why are we talking so much about the Da Vinci Code and now the Gospel of Judas?” What do you say to somebody that says that?
JG: Our lives are so full of so many other things we really don’t have the time oftentimes to read a book like the Da Vinci Code, or try to dig in, what’s the Gospel of Judas all about. As secure as we may be in our own faith and riveted into the Gospel of Christ, the fact is somebody around us is about to be shaken in their faith, or any chance of them having a faith being destroyed by writings like the Da Vinci Code or the kind of things that’s being said about the Gospel of Judas. So consequently we owe it to those who are around us, who are either weak in their faith or who don’t know our Christ to understand these things because it is the obligation of the missionary to learn the language of the pagan, never the obligation of the pagan to learn the language of the missionary. And Da Vinci Code has become a universal language whether we like it or not, so we need to know that language, be understanding of the issues involved so we can articulate the Gospel.
CM: That’s a pretty good point. I guess it’s easy as a Christian to stay in your cocoon and not really think why we’re really even called to be Christians. We’re not called to just sit in a chair, come to church and have it right. We’re called to do something for others too.
JG: I really would be very happy not to read any of these books, because I don’t like reading a book that attacks my Jesus, that attacks the New Testament.
CM: Right.
JG: I don’t like reading it. I don’t like going to a movie that attacks the same, but the fact is in this particular case it is so pervasive. The Da Vinci Code has become this universal language and it opens doors to conversations where we can lead people into an understanding of who Christ was, how they can have confidence in the Bible and we pray that they walk on into faith, saving faith and knowledge of Christ. And unfortunately, we have to know something about those issues. We can’t just say, like I heard one Christian say, “Well, it’s just of the Devil. It’s from the pit of hell.” Well, it may well be, but in fact we’ve got to say more than that. That’s not following the admonition in the New Testament to be able to give an answer to the hope that lies within me.
CM: Well and that’s someone who’s actually read a book and they would think they have the answers, to hear that from a Christian is just going to feed their stereotype of a Christian, which isn’t very nice.
JG: Exactly. It puts them off and it reduces the chance of that person ever coming to know our Christ. That would be tragic.
CM: Here, here. There are similarities between the Da Vinci Code and the just released Gnostic gospel, the Gospel of Judas. There are dissimilarities too. You want to just kind of, as you first went through and saw the Gospel of Judas, how would you relate the two together?
JG: Well, the Da Vinci Code refers to what is called the Nagamadi Discoveries. The Nagamadi Discoveries are named after a city in Egypt, Nagamadi, Upper Egypt where a discovery took place in 1945.
CM: A library in the sand almost.
JG: Yes that’s right, 52, well depending on how you count 45 plus duplications, around 52 different books or tractates as they’re called of this Gnostic literature and it was translated into English in 1977. Now not far from there, but not the same location, the Gospel of Judas was found in roughly 1977 approximately. What they have in common, all these books from what’s called the Nagamadi Library and what the Gospel of Judas has in common is that they’re all a presupposed, a what’s called a Gnostic Cosmology. That’s a fancy way of saying they have a way of viewing the world from a distinctly not New Testament way. They see all the material world as evil, the spirit world as good. In the case of the Gospel of Judas, Judas and Jesus were really tight and Jesus sets Judas up to kind of set him up for this death because the physical body is innately evil, the spirit is good, so you want to escape the physical body as quickly as you can, and therefore Judas was really doing a great favor to Jesus.
CM: and why in the world would God in Heaven, who would be spirit, send his Son in flesh into the world and to die on a cross? I mean, none of that would make sense to a Gnostic.
JG: Exactly. They are very opposed to everything that Paul says when Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, “This is the Gospel: That Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected on the third day.” That implies that we have a physical body. And if we look at the Creation account, and when God looked at the creation he says, “That’s good, that’s good.” He looks at us and he says, “That’s very good.” In other words, God affirms creation. We believe that salvation is not only just individual lives, but salvation will eventually impact the entire globe. The earth and the heavens will be a new earth, a new heaven. Well to Gnostics, the people who lived in the 2nd and 3rd century, all the material world was evil and bad so you wanted to get out of your body and you had a divine spark in you, they said, that was God himself and he wanted to get out of this human body and thus it was all written with this kind of Gnostic understanding, very counter to the New Testament.
CM: And if you read the Gospel of Judas you can tell this is so far removed from what you would read in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It’s just a conversation. Let me ask you this Jim. We’re talking about Gnosticism, it really developed after Christ and these Gnostic gospels were written, but we really have a form of Neo-Gnosticism available today, don’t we? People are attracted to this; just go in a book store.
JG: it shocked me when I realized, I only realized a couple of years ago that when I used to preach sermons on 1 John chapter 1 where John says, “I’ve seen Jesus. I’ve heard him, I saw him with my eyes. I’ve touched him.” John’s writing against Gnosticism which said that Jesus didn’t really have a physical body he only appeared to have a physical body. If you believe that you do away with the virgin birth, the incarnation, the crucifixion, resurrection -
CM: Eating broiled fish right before your ascension
JS: Right, yes, everything. It’s all gone.
CM: Sure.
JG: And it never occurred to me all these years that I would ever see in my lifetime a resurgence of Gnosticism
CM: Of Gnosticism!
JG: It’s bizarre.
CM: But it’s here today, isn’t it?
JG: And along with that, somewhat closely related, is just classical Paganism, capital “P” Paganism which means worship, really in essence, of mother earth, of nature’s procreational forces. In fact that’s what, I don’t think that Leonardo Da Vinci had any code at all. Dan Brown who wrote the book had a code and that is his code to redefine God to get us to worship not the Creator, a transcendent being, but to worship the creation itself. Romans chapter 1:25, “Worship the creation not the Creator.”
CM: And part of that, isn’t it borrowing then from the pagan culture, pagan deities such as the worship of female deities and bringing things that were in other countries outside and surrounding Israel in the ancient Near East.
JG: Dan Brown is fascinated with what he calls the Sacred Feminine. It’s kind of hard to figure out sometimes what the Sacred Feminine is in that book, in the Da Vinci Code book, but it basically is the worship of multiplicity of deities but specifically of nature itself, nature’s own procreational abilities to sustain itself without any God as we would believe in Christianity. Now, why would people do that? It’s kind of interesting to me. It took me several years of this Da Vinci Code stuff to realize this. If you don’t believe in a transcendent God, a God beyond us, then you aren’t going to believe in his revelation. If you don’t have a revelation, we call it the Bible; if you don’t have the Bible then you don’t have an objective standard by which your life gets judged. If you don’t have an objective standard then you are never under that standard then there’s no such thing as sin. If you don’t have sin, you don’t need a savior. If you don’t need a savior there’s no Jesus who’s divine and human who died on the cross for you. It does away with everything.
CM: Right.
JG: It’s a very consistent system
CM: Yes it is, it is. Why don’t we talk about who is Jesus though? Who is the real Jesus? Is he a Gnostic Jesus or is he a biblical Jesus? Who is Jesus?
JG: I want to encourage your listeners. I hope they realize how relevant that question is. That question is more relevant than probably most of them, there’s probably some right now saying, “Gnostic Jesus? Why would I care about that stuff for anyway?” The Da Vinci Code book, I have written 2 books against it, but I don’t really care about the Da Vinci Code
CM: Yes.
JG: I care about the enduring issues that have come out of that book and many others right now.
CM: That people are buying into whether we realize it in the church or not.
JG: Yes, The Jesus Papers would be one, the Temperlags (not intelligible), there’s other books that people are reading right now that are carrying this theme on. Because long after the Da Vinci Code movie and book are forgotten, these enduring issues are now with us and that is who is Jesus. And there is a strong move, and this is an unfortunate thing many pastors don’t even realize that people in their church are influenced by this, there is a strong move to contend that our New Testament was kind of a late add-on invention. And what predated that were a group called the Ebunites, the Marsionites, the Gnostics, now those sound like just a bunch of words to some of the listeners, but the fact is, these are perceived by some scholars to be the original, true followers of Jesus and those of us that believe in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we tampered with the text, trumped Jesus up, made him look better than he really is, added a resurrection story to make Jesus look better than reality when it’s just the opposite.
CM: Opposite is true, yes.
JG: Paul says, in the 50’s AD, he’s writing in 1 Corinthians 15, he says, “This is the Gospel: that Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected the third day.” And what’s significant about that statement, 1 Corinthians 15 is that liberal and conservative scholars both agree that Paul is writing in the 50’s. Paul is writing as a contemporary of Jesus. He saw, he was around when Jesus was on this earth.
CM: Right.
JG: And he says, “I learned this from the people who were with him.” In other words, our most accurate record of what actually happened is from a person with great historicity and we know he lived and he wrote in the 50’s and within 2 decades he’s saying the people who are with him are saying this is what happened. That is why our listeners can have complete confidence in the New Testament, and these other Gnostic types of writings or these groups called the Ebunites, or the Marsionites with their respective writings, most of those have been lost. The Gnostic writings have been discovered.
CM: We just know they existed, right.
JG: They existed, right. But they are later inventions as opposed to what’s being taught in popular courses right now that Christianity doctored, corrupted the text, tampered with the text to make it like it was.
CM: You know I don’t understand this Jim because you can see if you read just early church fathers, Eurinaeus, about 180 AD, some of the early church fathers were actually writing before Gnostics started writing and came along and they were already doing things like a complete commentary on the book of Luke. I mean, there were things in existence at that time but that’s kind of left out, you don’t hear about that in the popular media or in the Gnostic books that are coming on the shelves today.
JG: It is puzzling to me why there is so much intellectual dishonesty about the dating of certain text.
CM: Yes.
JG: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we can have confidence were written before 70 AD because they center so much of their story in Jerusalem around the temple and there’s no reference to the destruction of the temple and the destroying of Jerusalem which occurred in 70 AD. If something so significant would had occurred, that would have somehow –
CM: It would have been mentioned.
JG: It would have been referenced at least in some way. Nowhere is it in there. And so here we have literature that is written close to the event. The rule of history is the closer the text is written to the actual event the more trustworthy it is.

CM: Right.
JG: And yet we have people who would discount something that is written before 70 AD, and yet they would accept and believe something that is written in 250 AD for example, the Gospel of Phillip, which is not written by Phillip at all, but makes bizarre claims regarding Jesus.
CM: That has no relationship to what we know from other documents that are earlier
JG: exactly
CM: Such as what are in the Bible.
JG: exactly.

Song: Faith of Our Fathers Living Still
Performed by:

CM: Jim Garlow, what are the 6 things that people need to know, that believers need to know before they see or before they talk to anybody about the Da Vinci Code?
JG: Well it’s not the art history errors that are in the book. I’m not an art historian. In fact Jack Wassermann from Temple University in Philadelphia, retired art historian, says everything that Dan Brown says about Leonardo Da Vinci is wrong, so there’s plenty of error in art and Leonardo Da Vinci’s life, but my concerns not that.
CM: But that’s not part of your six, right?
JG: No, it’s not part of my 6 at all. My 6, the first 2 are the least important but then they build as they go. The first one is Dan Brown’s portrayal of the church’s understanding of females. He said the church did a smear campaign against females. Not accurate at all. Number 2, Dan Brown’s portrayal of the church’s understanding of sexuality. He says the church demonized sexuality. Not true at all. And number 3, Dan Brown’s portrayal of Jesus as being not divine, like it was an invention in the 4th century, and his alleged marriage. And there isn’t a shred of evidence anywhere in the New Testament, early church fathers or even in the Gnostic writings that Jesus was married
CM: that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, OK.
JG: Yeah. The 4th thing is the definition of the church, Dan Brown’s definition of the church. He has a completely distorted understanding of the nature of the church, sees it as this winner in history that tried to smash everybody else and destroy their histories. The 5th thing is how the New Testament came together and Brown says it was done in the 4th century by Constantine in the Council of Nicaea in the year 325; no Constantine didn’t even deal with it in that council at all.
CM: Another lie.
JG: Exactly.
CM: OK
JG: And the last thing is Dan Brown’s definition of God. God scripturally portrayed is a transcendent being, a being above and beyond us with personality, but to Dan Brown, God is – really from paganism – God is within ourselves or within the created order really Mother Earth, the worship of Mother Earth in a sense.
CM: Right, right.
JG: That is what the definition of God is to Dan Brown. So any believer needs to understand those 6 things that will equip them before they go to the movie themselves and before they go with an unbeliever so afterwards they can converse and cover these 6 things and help them to an understanding of truth.

CM: Thanks Jim for being with us on a program called, “The Da Vinci Codebreaker”. That’s the title of Dr. James Garlow’s new book and with the movie coming out tomorrow I just want to urge you one more time to know what you’re talking about and know what you believe. A lot of people have read the book; millions and millions, probably close to 50 million copies of the book have been sold by now, 40 million in hard back. Millions more are going to go to this movie and I guarantee you it’s going to be the number 1 movie of not just this weekend but of the summer. And you need to know why we have the Bible, why we teach the Bible the way it is and why the Bible is true. And the resources we have here at Haven Today including “The Da Vinci Codebreaker” will help you with that. Now we’ve put Jim Garlow’s book up on our website with some information about it along with the Lee Strobel materials we have. You can just go to haventoday.org, that’s haventoday.org and you’ll see Jim’s books, one by Dr. Peter Jones, you’ll see Lee Strobel’s material and I just want you to be prepared as this movie opens. If you’d like a copy of Jim Garlow’s book or the Lee Strobel materials you can call us as well. Our telephone number is 1-800-65-HAVEN, that’s 1-800-654-2836. I’m going to give you our mailing address now as well and we have a new mailing address in the United States. And let me just remind you that we are listener supported. We get to tell the Great Story because of you, and the Great Story, as we say every day, is all about Jesus. Why Jesus Christ who’s presented in the Bible is true and accurate and trustworthy and also the giver of new life. We need your help to do that and if you feel more comfortable, here’s our mailing address where you can mail your gift to us. And if you do write to us send us a note and let us know that you listen and give us a prayer request too. Write to us and send your gift to:
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I’m Charles Morris. Thanks for being with me. Come back again tomorrow. We’ll be broadcasting from Hollywood the day that the Da Vinci Code opens as we lift Jesus Christ high, here on Haven Today.