Dealing with Davinci

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West Side Church of Christ

So, You’ve Seen The Movie



What a phenomenon this whole Davinci Code thing has become! Sales of the book since it went into soft cover have reached well over the 60 million mark! With the movie being played in theatres across the world featuring big names like Ron Howard and Tom Hanks a conservative estimate might be that over 100 million people have either read the book or seen the movie.
The phenomenon doesn’t stop there, countless specials on A & E, CNN, History Channel and others as well as the 100 or more books written about it, the DVD’s produced concerning it and countless articles, editorials and church bulletin writings, it is safe to say that the estimate of people affected by the CODE is hard to number.

We are living at a time when most people in society can be asked ‘what they think of the Davinci code’ and a response will be given. For Christians it is important that we enter such discussions avoiding as best we can becoming too emotional and focus instead of having the conversation based on the facts.
  1. How many of us here have read the book?
  2. How many of us here have seen the movie?
  3. How many of us here plan to do either?
  4. How many of us have watched one of the specials on it?
  5. How many of us have known at least one person who has done any of the above?
  6. How many of us know someone who we can see will be influenced by it?
The need to engage in dialogue can be seen by the following conversation a preacher shared with me. His son called him up one day and said ‘Dad, I have to tell you something and I think you are going to get really angry with me.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘I read the Davinci Code.’ ‘So, did I!’

As we engage in this study, 2 questions still come to us and even ‘haunt’ us:
  1. Who do the crowds say that I am? Luke 9:18 (also Mark 8:27, Matthew 16:13)
  2. What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he? Matthew 22:42 (also Mark 12:35, Luke 20:41)
The questions are not 'if Jesus is liked?' but 'is he just a man, an extraordinary man, but just a man or is he something more'?

What do you do (feel) if everything you have believed to be true is not?
  1. Depressed?
  2. Disillusioned?
  3. Confused?
  4. Listless?
  5. Other?
Davinci code’s claim:
‘Leigh Teabing’s character: Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false’ (DVC p.255—please note that the page references will be from the paper back edition—not the original hard cover edition as referenced at the back of the study)

Important admission for many people of faith:
I want to believe in Jesus as presented in the gospels!
It is hard to be purely objective in this study as one who presently believes.
We’re not the only ones—4 types of people will read this book who are serious about the issue at hand: (Important to know who we are talking to)
  1. The one who does not want to believe the traditional Jesus but want to believe there was a conspiracy.
    These people are against everything almost that the religion of Christ represents. (Please note this is the theology & ecclesiology of the religion, not the teachings such as the golden rule. More like the need for atonement and church etc.) Find truth in the statement in the DVC:
    ‘Robert Langdon: every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith—acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove.’ (p.369)
  2. The one who has a real ‘beef’ with the church.
    These can be divided up into three categories:
    1. someone who has been hurt by the church in the past.
      The church has committed a personal crime against them. Abuse, overbearing, hurtful etc.
    2. Someone who is suspicious of the church because of all its crimes through history.
      The last century has seen the scandals involving the priests and televangelists. So many churches and power hungry preachers have stolen millions of dollars from people etc.
    3. Someone who sees too much hypocrisy in the church of today.
      They see groups who are just filled with hate when Jesus said to love. Churches who preach loudly against some sins but don’t show that much love towards sinners and seem to gloss over their own sins.
    Couple of things about these people:
    convinced that their experience or view of the church represents all Christian groups. They read a book like this and it says the things they want to hear!
  3. The Searcher!
    The one who is really looking for truth. The one who desperately wants something spiritual. This person might see a lot of good in Jesus but maybe doesn’t see a lot of good in the world or the church. He doesn’t know what to believe. Told a lot of stuff in our world, very confused. Maybe can’t equate the Jesus preached by the church and a world of disease, suffering, war and other such horrible things.
    Theresa of Avila: ‘O God, I don’t love you, I don’t even want to love you, but I want to want to love you.’
  4. Someone who wants to believe in the traditional Jesus and will never believe the opposite.
    He will not entertain the thought this isn’t true. Hebrews 11:1,6
A personal word:
I (Drew Chapados) decided one day that I better check the book out so when it finally came out in paper back I went a picked up my very own copy. I expected to hate the book with everything I had and I would simply tear it apart and put it down after about 15 pages or so. I would read the book with deep disdain but after about 2 pages I was hooked and couldn’t put it down. I read it in just a couple of days and I have to say that I deeply appreciate my experience with the book for the journey it has taken me on. I find the book to be an enjoyable mystery and I have found the claims it makes about Jesus to have made me richer for the study.

My prayer for anyone that we might encounter in this dialogue:
Luke 11:9—Seek and you will find (See also Matthew 7:7)
My prayer is that you will honestly seek and I could ask for nothing other.

What happens if everything you believed to be true was found false?
(Reminder this is as dangerous to the non-believer as it is to the believer)
  1. You still have truth!
    The love of truth is still yours and discovery of truth is more important than any other discovery—John 8:32.
  2. You still have a quest for solid truth!
    Something solid on which to build your house—Matthew 7:24-27 (See also Luke 6:47-49)
As we both go on a search for truth—the most appropriate advice for any who would be influenced by this book is to make sure they read this book as critically as they would read the Bible.
1 John 4:1—test the spirits.
Jesus repeatedly said ‘I tell you the truth’ (John 3:5, 5:19, 5:25, 6:26 and many more)

What the Davinci code says:
‘a shocking murder in the Louvres begins a wild chase where two characters, Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu (the man’s granddaughter) follows clues that the victim left for them to follow. As they move on, the pair discovers that they are searching for the Holy Grail. Eventually they have to find a Grail scholar named Leigh Teabing. He instructs them all on the real history of the Grail.
Lying at the very heart is the notion that Jesus was married to Magdalene and they had a daughter and after his crucifixion, Mary and their daughter, Sarah, go to Gaul (France) and establish the Merovingian line of French royalty. The secret is kept hidden and the line is still alive but under the protective powers of the Priory of Sion whose military wing were the Knights Templar. Members of this society have included Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and of course, Leonardo Davinci. The Grail is not a cup but the womb of Magdalene herself (the cup that held the blood of Christ).
Davinci knew this and left clues in many of his pieces of art. The church knew of this and for centuries has attempted to destroy this organization or at least make sure the truth never was revealed which would destroy the church.’

One quick question:
why has the secret been kept secret (in light of all the crimes of the church throughout history in the name of Jesus) and yet it is so easy to find out if you search it?
  1. Did Constantine ‘invent’ the fact that Jesus was divine?
  2. Did the council of Nicea suspiciously determine which books would be in the Bible?
  3. What about those ‘other’ gospels?
  4. Was Magdalene married to Jesus?
  5. Is there a secret war between the Catholic Church and the Priory of Sion?
  6. Did Davinci pass on the real ‘truth’ of history?
  7. Did Christianity effectively remove the worship of the true ‘feminine’ God?
Make no mistake about this:
the book is not an attempt to elevate the status of women in the church but to destroy the church and elevate the pagan worship of the sacred feminine!
This is the heart of the matter.

Let’s start with the main character:

Leonardo Davinci!
He is claimed by the DVc to be a grandmaster of the Priory of Sion!

3 great works of his are specifically mentioned:

The Last Supper!

Dvc—since everyone has a wine glass this should serve as a clue that the grail is not a cup at all but must be a person! (p.256)
--there is a V shape between the person on Jesus’ right and himself which just happens to be the feminine symbol called ‘chalice’ (p.258)
So, the Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine.
--the person on Jesus’ right must be a woman and voila-it is Mary Magdalene and Davinci has revealed the history that Magdalene & Christ were married and they had a child together. (p.263)
--Now, make Jesus & Magdalene simply elements and not people and notice what they make next to the ancient symbol V—Jesus would be simply an ‘I’ and the figure next to him would also be an ‘I’ and so you have I V I or put next to each other M!
Davinci was trying to tell us that they were either married or that the figure was Magdalene. (p.264,265)

The other side:

--All art historians agree that this figure to the right of Jesus is John the Beloved (John 13:21-27). If it is not, then John is curiously absent from the painting while everyone else including Judas is there.
--It was very common in the Renaissance period for John the beloved to be painted with feminine features (gentle etc.) Need to note that there are other feminine things that are not present in that figure.
--Davinci himself said that this painting was John!

The purpose of this painting was to show the shock of the betrayal—only Judas didn’t need to be told.


Madonna of the Rocks- Dvc—Mary the mother of Jesus sitting opposite the angel Uriel with both holding an infant. Instead of Jesus blessing John, John is blessing Jesus and Mary with eagle like claw is holding an invisible head above John’s head & Uriel is making a cutting gesture with his hand to the neck of the invisible head and yet all the while Jesus is submitting to John’s authority. (p.148,149)

The other side:

--the true painting has Mary’s hand suspended over Jesus and his right hand embracing John who is kneeling in reverence to Jesus. Why?
Not to bless Jesus but it was to coincide with the fact that John was the first to recognize the divinity of Jesus—Luke 1:39-45


Mona Lisa-

dvc—Robert Langdon’s character is teaching a group of inmates about the history of this painting. Mona Lisa is simply an anagram for Amon and L’isa, which he claims, is the two words for the god of masculine fertility and the female goddess Isis. Mona Lisa then is Davinci’s portrait of the divine union of male and female and another indication that God & Goddess are both to be worshipped. (p.129,130)

The other side:

--Leonardo Davinci was commissioned to paint a portrait for a woman named Madonna Lisa!
There are 2 problems with the DVC’s claims:
Da Vinci never named the painting and he hardly would have named it in English. The work was called:
Monna Lisa where Monna means ‘My Lady’ and the English Mona is a spelling mistake.


As we close out lesson 1, there was one thing that troubled me with the book making claims like this (from their point of view):
why was there no discussion on the resurrection of Jesus?

Dvc: Teabing’s character: 'nothing in Christianity is original.’ (p.252)
This really causes everyone to miss the greatest of all debates! (Romans 1:4)
How did Christianity begin by preaching a story that was totally unlike any other that had ever been heard?


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