Saturday, June 10, 2006

"The Da Vinci Code Uncovered" Series: The Truth About Jesus And Mary

This is my third talk in our 4 Sunday series called “The Da Vinci Code Uncovered”.

Let’s do a quick review...

I told you I liked the book and movie, but my problem is that Dan Brown tries to blur the line between truth and fiction when he begins the book stating, "FACT: All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secrets in this novel are accurate."

So far in this series I told you that Dan Brown locked into our obsessions with secrets when he wrote “The Da Vinci Code”.

Not only that, Dan Brown uses an “appeal to authority” technique in his book and in the movie. Instead of just writing a non-fiction book and saying, “Here’s what I discovered…” He creates a fictional book and a fictional historian to say everything he wants to say.

By doing this, he makes his fictional facts more instantly believable because he knows we accept what authorities tell us as true a lot of time without argument – even make-believe authorities!

Through this series we’re uncovering the real historical secrets about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and The Bible.

In this series, we’re uncovering 3 main truths: the truth about the Bible (is it trustworthy?) - which we looked at in the first 2 talks, the truth about Jesus (was he married, did he have kids, did he claim to be divine or was that made up later), and the truth about Mary Magdalene (who was she, the Holy Grail, etc.).

The first week we started looking at the truth about the Bible.

The “Facts” Fictional Historian Teabing Gives:

He says the 4 stories we have about Jesus aren’t the earliest ones. He said there were 80 gospels! He also said Constantine picked the ones he wanted and suppressed the rest. We learned that in reality there were only around 20 books that were really “gospels” – stories about Jesus. We saw that these books didn’t all exist at the same time. Some were written earlier and some were written hundreds of years later.

We also said that the easiest way to know which ones are true is the same way any historian can tell which documents about an event are closest to the truth: the ones closest to the event are the ones that are true.

We saw that the documents that Dan Brown quotes from and likes the best are the ones that are written 100s of years later. They are also against the God of the Old Testament, think matter (the body & sex) is evil, and are focused on secret truth.

No one ever tried to suppress these books! They’ve always been known and talked about. They just were never accepted by the church.

But in the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown tries to get us to believe that these documents are more reliable than the ones in the Bible or at least AS reliable!

Otherwise the whole premise of his book falls apart! Last Sunday, we saw the process that brought the Bible we have in our hands today was the normal and correct way ANY historical event is recorded.

1. First it is witnessed.
2. Then people tell each other what happened.
3. Eventually people write down what happened.

We saw that the stories about Jesus began to be written down just decades after he was alive.

This was still when the eyewitnesses were alive so they could say if these things were true or not. Also the gospel started in area where it was all supposed to have happened.

There’s no way it would’ve spread if it wasn’t true!

Dan Brown has Teabing say some pretty wacky things, but one of the craziest is when Teabing say that Jesus was made divine later by Constantine! We see that Jesus claimed to be God from the very beginning. That’s why he was persecuted.

We also saw that Constantine had NOTHING to do with choosing the books of the Bible and that they were already basically chosen before he came along.

We see they were chosen based on practical and spiritual reasons NOT for political reasons like Teabing tries to say. Then we saw that what books we have in the Bible were chosen in a pretty common sense way. To be cosidered God word, that had to pass these 3 tests (and a few others)….

1. Had to be written by eyewitnesses of Jesus’ resurrection or someone close to them
2. Had to be orthodox – not contradict Old Testament or what Apostles already taught
3. Had to be accepted in all the churches We saw that these rules protected any one church from too much influence.

The process also showed that they weren’t just choosing any book. They really wanted to make sure they had God’s word!

We saw that when you put the writings of the Bible against any other ancient document (that isn’t questioned) that it proves it’s as reliable and even more than they are!

Today were going to look at what Dan Brown has Teabing say about Mary
Magdalene & Jesus
.

Teabing says that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had children. "The marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record." (Page 245) He uses different things to prove this…

One thing he doesn’t use to prove it is any scriptures from our current Bible!

Why? The New Testament is silent about this and it doesn’t even indirectly refer to this.

What does Teabing use to prove that they were married?

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