“Secrets” to the Code

NBC Dateline is showing “Secrets to the Code” right now, and it’s a laugh-a-minute marathon as they attempt to give some credence to The Da Vinci Code’s thin attempts at authority by sensationalizing tenuous historical fabrications with effects-laden eye candy, while giving prime interview airtime to fringe historians with limp-wristed ideas on manuscript evidence and strong sympathies to Gnostic writings of little factual value.

Most amusing moments so far:

– “The forms of Jesus and “Mary Magdalene” in Da Vinci’s painting form a letter M! Clearly a sign that they were Married!!!”

– “The scriptures are silent on whether Jesus was married or not. And silence is <pregnant pause> PREGNANT!!!”

– “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.” OMG LOL NO FURTHER COMMENT KTHXBI.

The documentary has pretty much only its conclusion to commend it, when it goes back on its entire sensational premise by showing the same interviewees refuting it.

More from The Narrow, and my Da Vinci Code Roundup has everything else I have to say on this laughable farce of overhyped historical fiction. And you can forward that to Stone Phillips.

Comments

The Glorious Atheist says:

2005-04-20 at 17:17

The fact that this piece of fiction terrifies you and many other Christians so much is amusing as hell. Any honest historian will admit that much of our knowledge of events that happened 2000 years ago is anything but concrete and absolute. Point being, nobody really knows. But if you’re going to claim this fear mogering faith as your own, have some conviction in it. Just because someone calls you stupid or ugly, does it make it true? Easy on the knee jerk defensive posturing.
Paulo says:

2005-04-20 at 17:30

Terrified? You wish. I’m as amused at it as you are at us, and this as a quirk of ephemeral popular culture in the context of faith in these modern days. Just as I’m amused at tired, old phrases like “nobody really knows” and “pathetic, fear-mongering faith” which secularists trot out when they have no real data.

Secular historians may not be sure of exact events, but they do rely on the earliest and most reliable documents they can find to figure out what people believed, and what we’ve found so far: (1) Jesus existed, lived, and died, according to eyewitness accounts, and (2) he wasn’t married, according to eyewitness accounts.

Atheist, Christian, or otherwise as one may be, there are facts which exist regardless of the ramblings of conspiracy-obsessed historical revisionists. That’s what I’m concerned about, not the Da Vinci Code’s superficial effect on issues of faith.
Ernest King says:

2005-04-21 at 22:53

Ok,

All this talk and reporting about “The Da Vinci Code” is giving me a pain. No one is really talking about the truth behind the “Bible” and Jesus. Why is there not a “out-cry” for the Vatican to open its’ vaults for public inspection. What about other authors that have written on this same subject (The Bible Fraud by Tony Bushby) for example. As a Sociology I find it very interesting that “no one” really about the facts that the Bible is not the word of a god or any other supreme being. No one looks at the “real” and “true” history of how the Bible was put together and if the “so-called” history is true. We must remember that “history is written by the victor!”

I would challenge reporters to contact Tony Bushby and look into the connections with his book, “The Bible Fraud” and see if there is any truth into Dan Brown’s book, “The Da Vinci Code.”

QUIT SIDE-STEPPING REAL FACTS AND TRUTH!!!!!!!! If the writings in the Bible are lies, then let the truth be known!

E. King
Paulo says:

2005-04-28 at 17:35

The facts are known to any sensible historian, and the earliest and most reliable documents are clear. Revisionist writers like Dan Brown and Tony Bushby are either deluded or blantantly lying.

Jesus was not married to Mary Magdalene and did not have children by her. He was not an Essene or a Nazirite, nor was he associated with the any of the later Gnostic cults.

The biblical canon was not manipulated by Constantine or the monks, but was determined through what the early church held as accepted authority, an authority later formalized in various Councils.

There are no “secret” gospels locked in “secret” Roman vaults. Various archaeologists and historians have come across “lost” gospels in the past, such as the Nag Hammadi scrolls. Most are agreed in dismissing the authenticity of most of these documents as Gnostic forgeries and fictions with little actual historical value outside of cultural study of these later fringe groups.

Those who continue to foment “Da Vinci Code”-like theories do so because they know that their conspiracy-obsessed audience will continue to dish out cash to satisfy their own paranoid fantasies about an evil church and a divergent historical fiction.