CRACKS in The DaVinci Code

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CRACKS in The DaVinci Code
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CRACKS
The fictional conspiracy theory offered in
best-seller The DaVinci Code has now captured the
popular imagination. Sitting in a local coffee
shop you could easily hear the following
conversation, Wow, Jesus was married? I never
knew that! and What if its really true?
Intermixed with the curiosity seekers, may be
others quietly concerned about the impact of
these new revelations on the nature of faith,
hope, and the resurrection. In what appears to
be a popular work of historical fiction, Dan
Brown tells a fantastic tale of murder, mystery,
and of secret societies whose sole reason for
existence is to cover up a secretthe marriage of
Jesus of Nazareth to Mary Magdalene. As the
story goes, Mary and Jesus had a love child
named Sarah, who was smuggled out of Palestine to
become ancestress of a dynasty of French kings.
Now, if these outrageous assertions are trueand
they are notthen many of the foundational truths
of the Bible should be called into question. In
what follows, we will briefly consider how to go
about cracking The DaVinci Code by means of the
acrostic CRACKS.
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CRACKS
Conspiracies, Everybody lovesem Brown
says so at least three times in his own book. But
conspiracy theories are notoriously cracked.
You see its virtually impossible to keep
everything and everyone under wraps. For those
who wonder if it might be possiblegiven enough
powerwe can simply ask, Ever heard of
Watergate?
Im not a crook!!
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CRACKS
Reality versus Facts The deceit of The
DaVinci Code begins with the very first
wordFACT. In what follows, Brown primes the
pump for an apparently inexhaustible stream of
hoaxes, myths, and distortions. The most
important claimregarding the existence of
certain corroborating documents supposedly
discovered in a French museumhas long been
exposed as a hoax in various French books and a
BBC documentary. The secret Priory of Sion,
which was supposedly founded in Jerusalem in 1099
AD, was actually registered in France in 1956.
And the so-called Sangreal documents simply dont
exist in fact or in fiction. The reality is that
all of the facts listed are what he
acknowledges are "fabricated" facts (2).
Just the facts Mam!
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CRACKS
Apostles and Marriage Now, when we look
for verses that directly say that Jesus was never
married, there are none to be found. That is
because this idea never entered the minds of the
Apostles. However, when addressing the subject
of marriage for the Apostles themselves, the
supreme example of Jesus is not even mentioned (1
Corinthians 95)(1). One of the more infamous
notions of the book is that Leonardo DaVinci
encoded clues to this scandalous secret in his
art including the Last Supper where Mary
Magdalene supposedly occupies the place of the
Apostle John. But if this were really true,
where was the Apostle John among the twelve?
Wheres John?
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CRACKS
Canon ConfusionAnother erroneous idea is
that the church selected and edited certain books
for inclusion in the Bible and rejected and
destroyed others for political reasons. Thus the
Roman Emperor Constantine is accused of
assembling the Bible by rejecting and suppressing
the various apocryphal books. The fact is that
even the non-orthodox historian Eusebius reported
that the accepted books of the Bible, or the
canon, were known and in use in all the centers
of Christianity well before this time. Today we
have tens of thousands of manuscripts to give
indisputable witness to this fact. Though many
imagine that the church was the mother and judge
of the canon historically it was merely the
child and witness of the canon.
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CRACKS
Know HistoryThough this book in written
in the genre of historical fiction, it is
actually a mix of distorted details and phony
facts. For example, Brown characterized the
affirmation of the deity of Christ by the first
great Christian council of Nicea as a relatively
close vote. In fact, the vote was 300 to 2!
Brown also promotes some extremely perverted
interpretations of art and architecture, which
are universally rejected by art critics and
historians. He also distorts the lives of many
historical figures DaVinci, Botticelli, Isaac
Newton, Constantine, and the Templar Knights.
And to set the stage for his story, he claims
that the Merovingians founded Paris. Well, Paris
was actually was founded seven centuries earlier.
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CRACKS
Scripture The scriptural account of
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is
well supported by verifiable facts from secular
history (2). The internal evidence in the
scriptures that Jesus never married is beyond
dispute. In sharp contrast, the DaVinci Code is
based on long-exposed hoaxes and cultural myths.
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CRACKS
Conclusion The success of this
page-turning work of fiction has now provided Dan
Brown a platform from which to take swipes at the
Church and the Bible, only to endorse sacred
pagan sexual rituals, Gnosticism, and the
postmodern dogma that every faith in the world
is based on fabrication" (3). In the just
released movie (5-19-06), the by-line is seek
the truth. Hopefully in seeing these CRACKS some
will see through Dan Browns fabricated facts to
seek The Truth in Jesus Christ (John 146).
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The DaVinci Code Has Many CRACKS
Conspiracies, Everybody lovesem Reality vs
FactsApostles and Marriage Canon
ConfusionKnow HistoryScripture  
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The DaVinci Code Coming to a Theater near you!
Know the facts, Know the CRACKS
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CRACKS

• Glossary of terms and names
• Apocrypha a type of literature often written
  under a false name and about things that may or
  may not be true. We might call this literary
  identity theft.
• Constantine Constantine the Great (274-337AD),
  Roman emperor (306-37), the first Roman ruler to
  be converted to Christianity.
• Council of Nicea The first great council of the
  Christian church (324AD) held in Nicea in with
  the purpose to show unity about certain key
  doctrines. One of the more important results
  from this counsel was an agreement explaining how
  the already accepted doctrine of the deity of
  Christ was related to the humanity of Christ. In
  short, Christ was fully God and fully man. In
  contrast, Gnostics claimed he was essentially
  spiritual and only appeared to be human.
• Gnosticism A non-orthodox religious movement
  that peaked in the second century and which
  claimed that the physical world was inherently
  evil, and taught that one escaped the physical to
  the spiritual through secret knowledge, or
  Gnosis.
• Holy Blood, Holy Grail A book by Michael
  Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln who
  brought a lawsuit against Dan Brown for lifting
  the whole architecture for The DaVinci Code out
  of their book.

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CRACKS

• Glossary of terms and names
• Mary Magdalene One of the first followers of
  Jesus (Luke 82). She was never regarded as one
  of the Apostles in the Bible or by any other
  historical source.
• Merovingians A French royal family name used in
  The DaVinci Code that has nothing whatever to do
  with the premise of the book.
• Priory of Sion A supposedly ancient secret
  society that was actually registered in France in
  1956, for which historical claims were exposed as
  a hoax by French and BBC researchers.
• Sangreal documents Fictional documents described
  in The DaVinci Code that supposedly reveal that
  there was a bloodline (sang) for the royal (real)
  family of the Merovingians.
• Templar Knights A military-religious order that
  protected pilgrims in travels to the Holy Land
  and later became a banking institution.
• References
• 1. The DaVinci Code Fact or Fiction, by Hank
  Hanegraaff and Paul L. Maier.
• 2. Video, Who Is This Jesus? Examining the Truth
  about Jesus, D. James Kennedy, and Coral Ridge
  Ministries. From contemporary, secular history we
  can learn at least twenty five different facts
  about the life of Jesus that confirm the New
  Testament historical account of his life.
• 3. The DaVinci Code, by Dan Brown, Doubleday, NY,
  2003, p.341.