Foreword by Hank Hanegraaff:
Dr. Maier dissects and dispels Dan Brown's 'facts' in a chapter entitled 'The Da Vinci Deception.' For instance, Brown asserts,"Why is The Passion excoriated and The Da Vinci Code extolled? Why are Gibson’s motives denounced and Brown’s dignified? Why is Christ’s passion referred to as a “repulsive, masochistic fantasy” and his supposed marriage to MaryMagdalene touted as a researched material fact? The answer may surprise you.
It is not just that in our increasingly secularist culture it has become politically correct to cast aspersions on Christ and the church he founded. It is because of a great reversal of values. Fiction—such as the notion that Christianity was concocted to subjugate women—is being cleverly peddled as fact, while fact—such as the deity of Christ—is being capriciously passed off as fiction.
Nearly all of Brown’s assertions in The Da Vinci Code are based on several statements he presents on page 1 under the heading of “FACT”— before the novel even begins..."
“The Bible . . . has evolved through count-less translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book” (231).If you want more, you'll have to buy the book.
To say that the Bible has “evolved” implies a progression of constant change, as in the
term evolution. This is totally misleading. The only “changes” to the Bible that have taken place across the centuries have been an ever-more-faithful rendering and translation of the original Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, without any additions to the text.
Part 2 will discuss this matter in further detail. “More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion” (231).
Brown’s statement implies that there was a general submission of gospels to some sort of earlychurch panel that reduced the field to the familiar four. This was not at all the case. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were foundation documents in what later came to be called the New Testament. Eusebius, the first church historian, tells how theywere the core of the canon from the start, and how their authoritywas determined on the basis of usage in such early Christian centers as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. He also clearly identifies some of the later spurious writings, including the Gnostic gospels, that the church rejected as soon as they surfaced. Today they are known as the “New Testament apocrypha.”
Brown must have had this group in mind with his “eighty,” which is an exaggerated figure in anycase. Speaking of exaggeration, Brown outdoes himself in the following:...
