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Unless you have been in a cave for the last year, then you have heard of the best-selling book, now made into a blockbuster movie, written by Dan Brown called the Da Vinci Code. Let me preface my remarks today by saying that I have not read the book or seen the movie, nor do I plan to, but from reading critiques and summary plots, I do have a good idea of the storyline and general agenda of the novel. The book/movie has been quite controversial because of some claims that it makes about Jesus Christ and the Bible.

Over the last few weeks I have polled in casual conversation many people about how much the Da Vinci Code has entered their workplace and discussion with other people about Christianity. It seems that it has come up frequently in their day to day conversations. When asked if they would be interested in a Bible Study that addressed the issues raised in the Da Vinci Code, everyone unequivocally said, "yes," and so here we are. I want to give you some helps to answer the spiritual questions that will inevitably arise when people see and read the Da Vinci Code and even more so when it is released on DVD later this year. What we are doing here today is scriptural and we read in our text:

We are commanded to "be prepared to make a defense" about spiritual things. Being prepared means having already looked into the matter before you need it. We must never forget that what is a step forward for many people would be a step backward for those who have truth. I cannot recommend to you to watch or read the Da Vinci Code because you know the truth and it would be a step in the wrong direction. But if someone in the world asks spiritual questions because of this book/movie and someone is able to answer those questions, it could be a step forward.

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If you read the fine print of many copies at the beginning of the novel you will find that it says, as it does on many fiction books, something like, "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and places of this book and real people and places are entirely coincidental." So let me begin with reminding you that the Da Vinci Code is in the fiction section for a reason: it is purely a figment of the author's imagination. The problem has arisen because people do not know the scripture well enough to tell the difference between fiction and truth. In our other text, we read that this day would arise:

They will turn away from truth and wander off into myths. We have seen that generation fulfilled in our day. A guy writes a fictional novel and all of a sudden they print "Bible study guides" to understanding the "Da Vinci Code" and the "real hidden truth" of the Bible. So just two points here as we get to the content of the book: it is a myth, and people would do well to live the obvious truth of the Bible first before searching for some "hidden code" in it. Our world would do well if people would devote as much interest and effort to following the 10 commandments as they do seeking some "hidden meaning" that some fictional and myth-filled novel supposedly teaches.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Da Vinci Code, here is the plot in brief form: (let me ruin it for those of you who haven't read it; you can put the $8 that you would have used to buy it into the missions fund!)

Here are some of the questions raised in the minds of the uninformed reader of the Da Vinci Code: “Are there other ancient documents about Jesus besides what we have in the New Testament? Are they more reliable than what we have in the Scriptures? Did the early apostolic church have a plot to suppress women? Was Jesus married? Was His wife Mary Magdalene? Did they have a child? Was she a prostitute? Was Leonardo Da Vinci part of a secret organization that knew about this? Do we know why the New Testament includes the books that it does? Was Jesus human or divine? What was the Holy Grail, really?"

We cannot be like Pilate and ask questions and not hang around for the answers, so you should know that pretty everything that Mr. Brown asserts is old news to any decent Bible scholar. These are lies that were confronted and debunked hundreds of years ago. In a sense, they are an old lie of false doctrine given a new dress and a new début.

And so there really are answers to all these questions. In fact, here they are. The answers are: “Yes. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Yes. Both. and Who gives a rip?” God bless you and see you later! But just in case you didn't catch all of that let's look at a more fuller answer to these questions.

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Taking the questions one by one, we begin with:

According to the Da Vinci Code, the pagan religions respected women more because they had goddesses of worship and Christianity did not. Actually, the opposite is true. The pagan religions treated women much like the carnal world today does: as sex objects, and women flocked to Christianity because they liked the way that they were treated as valuable members of the body of Christ and with respect. If anything, Christianity and the New Testament elevated women to a level of respect that they had never received before in history. Remember that the New Testament teaches us that:

Furthermore, in Rome, if a widow did not remarry within two years, she was considered a financial burden and could be penalized and even put in jail. But in the apostolic church, widows were taken care of and fed and honored.

Historian Robin Fox writes, "It is highly likely that women were a clear majority in the early church." In another place in history, we have the record of a church in Cirta being seized during a period of persecution in A.D. 303 and records tells that in this small church, only 16 male tunics were found and eighty-two female tunics were found along with forty-seven pairs of female slippers. They also found a couple of cans of hairspray and a few dozen blankets in case the service was too cold -- just kidding about that last part! But what I'm trying to point out is that both scripture and history reveal that any claim that the early church tried to suppress women is a lie from -- well -- Mr. Brown's fertile imagination.

The Da Vinci Code says that "all Jewish men were married, therefore Jesus must have been married." That is a lie -- all Jewish men were not married. John the Baptist was not married. Jeremiah was single all the days of his life. In Jesus' day, the Essenes were a religious sect that moved out of society and never married and kept a life of celibacy. The Dead Sea Scrolls were the library of one such sect that we discovered later. Plenty of Jewish people did not marry.

There are three easy proofs that Jesus did not marry nor have sexual relations with a woman:

1. No Biblical account or any history book within a hundred years of His life that even suggests that he was married or had such relations. Such stories were a later invention of men who were not there at the time. That in itself should be enough proof, but consider:

2. It didn't make sense for Jesus to be married. He had a mission in mind and anyone who has ever studied the life of Jesus Christ knows that He would have not had time to even spend with a wife -- such was the whirlwind pace of His ministry. He was with the disciples night and day, if He had been married, He would have had one ticked-off wife! Furthermore, He had no home, no career, no land, and no money to pay the dowry of a wife. And before His earthly ministry started He took care of Mary, His mother, something that would have fallen into the hands of His other brothers had He been married.

Furthermore, sexual relations outside of the sancity of marriage according to the Word of God is sin, and Jesus never sinned (Hebrews 4:15), therefore there was none of that.

3. Jesus is already engaged. He will get married, but not to an individual but to the entire church in a spiritual union. As God in flesh, Jesus paid the price for our sin so that we can become His bride, who will live under His care for forever. All of this is a Biblical fact clearly presented in the Word of God and anyone who asserts that Jesus was married to an individual simply does not know the truth!

As to the other questions, it follows that if Jesus never married, then Mary Magdalene was not His wife. If He never had intimate relations with a woman, then He fathered no natural children. But as any good lie always has a small bit of truth in it to make it believable, so it is true that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. That she was a prostitute is a myth invented by the Catholic church.

I can explain quickly, but you have to follow me for a moment. In scripture, there are two separate accounts of women pouring perfume from an alabaster box on Jesus as an act of worship. The first one occurred in the second year of Jesus in Galilee and was performed by an unnamed sinner woman. The second "perfuming" was by Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus in the third year of Jesus' ministry right before his death. In other scriptures, a third woman -- named Mary Magdalene to distinguish her from the other Mary's -- had seven devils cast out of her and became a follower of Christ. That is the scriptural record.

The problem is that many people -- including some Pentecostal preachers -- confuse the two "perfumings" and thus make "Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus" also the sinner woman of the first account. The Catholic Church confuses these two stories and goes one step further in confusing this Mary with Mary Magdalene and making them one person. To take the myth even worse, the Catholic church defined her "sin" as prostitution, thus all of this is Catholic myth. Scripturally all we know about Mary Magdalene was that she was from Magdala (that's what Magdalene means), she had seven devils cast out of her, and along with a bunch of other women, faithfully served Jesus Christ. Anything more is the invention of men.

He was both and the scriptures fully present both sides of Jesus. I shouldn't have to spend much time on this in this church because we preach about Jesus being God all the time. To say that the early apostolic church believed that Jesus was just an ordinary human being is quite absurd. For example Thomas said:

And Colossians 1:15 says that "He is the image of the invisible God" and I could go on and on. The Da Vinci Code says that no one believed Jesus was anything more than a man until 300 years after His death. That's certainly not true because every New Testament scripture that proves that Jesus is God was written with seventy years of His death by eye-witnesses to His life!

In the book/movie, the character Teabing says, about the council of Nicea in A.D. 325 where the beginnings of the Catholic church was founded, "until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal." Quite the opposite of that is true. In the council of Nicea in A.D. 325, it was proposed for the first time that Jesus might not be God the Father in His fullness and the first separation of the Godhead began to take place which would lead to the concept of the trinity in A.D. 381. Before the first council of Nicea, the majority of believers believed that Jesus was completely and totally God! Again, remember the Da Vinci Code is fiction!

Which leads us to our next question:

There are many other ancient documents about Jesus besides scripture. And the books that the Da Vinci Code cites as having the "real truth" are dated from in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries well after the last Apostle died . They are called "Gnostic" gospels and the Gnostics were a false belief that rose up that believed among many weird things that Jesus was God only and not an ounce of normal flesh. They believed that Jesus was supernatural in substance and not a normal human being. So not only do the Gnostic Gospels contradict scripture, but they also say the opposite that the Da Vinci Code says that they say! How can he do that? Because his book is fiction!

In the Gnostic Gospels, there are some wild tales that are told about Jesus. For example, in one of the Gnostic books that is cited by the Da Vinci Code, Jesus makes some pigeons out of clay, says some magical words, and the pigeons turn into real birds and fly away. If you have any scriptural savvy at all you should immediately see the following problems with such a story: Jesus did no miraculous works before He was thirty years of age because to fulfill the Law of Moses, His ministry could not begin until then. Jesus never used "magical words" and He also never did a miracle for no point.

Another Gnostic account, tells of the time that Jesus got into a fight with another boy, and cursed the boy and accidentally killed him. In yet another of these "reliable sources" that are cited by the Da Vinci Code as having the "real truth," when Jesus comes out of the tomb at the resurrection, He is real big like Paul Bunyan or the Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters. And after He comes out and reveals Himself to the crowd, the cross walks out -- I'm not making this up -- it comes out of the tomb and talks also! These are the "reliable sources" that were written long after the time of Christ and His apostles that are supposedly -- according to the fictional story created by Mr. Dan Brown -- to be more reliable than the scriptures. You've got to be kidding! Which leads us to our next question:

Yes, we do. The books of the New Testament were circulated around the early Apostolic church for centuries as scripture before the Catholic church was even created. The Catholic church "canonized" or declared as scripture books that were already accepted as such. It was news after the news. The Bible says that:

All of the books had to pass three criteria to be classified as scripture and a part of the God-breathed, New Testament:

1. Because the author of each book -- despite the human used to write it down -- was the Spirit of God, that meant that all of the books would not contradict each other but support each other completely. Therefore later books that were written that obviously contradicted scripture were excluded from the New Testament.

2. The writer had to an original Apostle, or connected to the Apostles and an eye-witness or get their material from an eye-witness to the life of Jesus Christ and the early church. This is why you and I cannot be inspired by the Holy Spirit to write scripture today, because we are not eye-witnesses of His life and the early events of the book of Acts.

3. The book had to be written within 70 years or so of the life and death of Jesus Christ and widely distributed among the churches. This was to ensure that other eye witnesses to the same events were still alive and could read the work and say "yes, that's exactly how it happened." The books of our New Testament were not only written by eye-witnesses, but were confirmed by thousands of other eye-witnesses who read them and agreed with them!

The false gospels cited by the Da Vinci Code as "truth" fail on all three criteria. They contradict Old and New Testament principles and thus could not be God breathed. They were written much too late to be anything from an eye witness or to withstand scrutiny from other eyewitnesses. And despite having false names such as "the Gospel of Mary" or "the Gospel of Peter" they were written by non-Apostolic authors centuries after the death of the people that they were named after. And they contain some wild passages that are obviously false.

For example, the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic book of which we have only fragments of, says this:

What!? The truth is that to believe that Constantine put the New Testament together because it fit his political agenda is a lie. More than a century before Constantine and his Council of Nicea, a man named Origin wrote, "The four gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are the only undisputed ones in the whole church of God throughout the whole world." He said that over a hundred years before the Catholic church officially "canonized" and recognized the New Testament. As one New Testament scholar, William Barclay, said, "It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them from doing so." They were already wide-spread throughout the apostolic church long before the Catholic church was dreamed of by men! As another scholar said, "None of the non-canonical gospels comes close to these criterion in date of composition, breadth of distribution, or proportion of acceptance." Talking about the so called Gnostic Gospels that are supposedly, according to the Da Vinci Code, more reliable -- none of them come close to comparing to the authenticity of the books of the New Testament!

If there was no conspiracy, then obviously the answer is "no." But let me say that there is no reputable art expert on the earth that believes that Da Vinci was using The Last Supper painting to secretly communicate what Brown's story says it does. To say that John is really a woman in disguise is really stretching it especially when you look at the other men in the painting and all of them -- including Jesus -- look effeminate. For that matter so does all of the other men that Da Vinci painted in other works. He painted men effeminate because he was effeminate and as most other painters of the day, he painted sissy men. He left Jesus' cup out of the picture because painters are poor commentators on scripture and often get things wrong. Most of you believed at one time that Paul fell off a horse on the road to Damascus, or that halos are a scriptural principle all because of paintings that you have seen. I challenge you to find me the horse of Paul in any story in the Bible and I challenge you to find me haloes in scripture! They are not there! So let me say as I have often said: Painters and movies make poor commentators of the Bible, and I guess I need to add to it now: Painters, movies, and fictional novels make very poor commentators of the Bible. We should believe truth not things invented by the fertile imaginations of modern-day people.

My answer is "who knows?" and "who cares?" "Grail" means "decorated cup," and supposedly -- depending on whose myth you believe, the "Holy Grail" was a decorated cup found by crusaders in the middle ages in Judea that was supposedly proved to be the cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper because it had miraculous powers. Supposedly, the cup put forth food and drink for the true believer and when wine was placed within it, the cup transformed the wine into the real blood of Jesus Christ. From this errant myth, came the false doctrine of transubstantiation, which the Catholic church believes today that in the "miracle of mass" when the priest blesses the cup, the wine turns to the blood of Jesus Christ. All of this -- of course -- is fanciful thinking.

The story of the "Holy Grail" comes from the King Arthur Legends, the stories that gave us the tales of Sir Lancelot and Excalibur and the Magician Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table. The key thing to remember here is that the King Arthur Legends are fiction! They are myths not history. The Catholic religion has exalted relics and antiques above truth and the Da Vinci Code pokes fun at that fact. If people would be as zealous at searching for the truth of Jesus Christ as they are at seeking out objects of myth and if they would spend as much money in evangelism as they do in buying relics and statues, the world would be a lot closer to God Almighty!

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In closing, let me summarize by saying that all of the claims of the Da Vinci Code are not only debunked by scripture and history, but by the very false gospels that they claim have the truth. It is a work of fiction and a thriller story meant to make money. Sadly, most people of our world know very little about the scripture and so a well-spun myth such as this book/movie causes confusion and questions in their life.

I would end by reminding you that all of the disciples and apostles willing suffered and most were martyred for the truth of Jesus Christ' deity. If they had not believed that Jesus was God as He had said, why would they have died for such a belief!? And also remember this: we know the Word of God is true because when you obey what it says, God shows up and does what He has said that He would do. My personal testimony proves the Da Vinci Code wrong and never forget that your personal testimony is still the most powerful witnessing tool that you have. If someone asks you "Is the Da Vinci Code true" tell them, "no, but the true story is amazing, let me tell you what God has done for me!" Now you are prepared to answer every man about your hope -- go and spread the Gospel!