SUBJECT:
QUESTION: What is your position on the Da Vinci Code?
ANSWER:
The Da Vinci Code book and movie are not only pure fiction,
they border on blasphemy against God. This document, taken
from the Internet, debunks the Da Vinci Code.
By Rufus
Bruno Pereira
Three core claims that The Da Vinci Code makes are:
That the Catholic Church brutally suppressed information
concerning Jesus’ marriage recorded in the Sangreal
Documents, which Jesus’ followers hid under the Jerusalem
Temple’s Holy of Holies
After Jesus’ crucifixion and death – from which he never
rose – Mary Magdalene now pregnant with Jesus’ daughter
Sarah, fled to France. Her descendants married into the
French royal bloodline of the Merovingians in the fifth
century
Leonardo Da Vinci, knowing this secret, depicted it in The
Last Supper where the figure seated to Jesus’ immediate
right, and painted to look effeminate is Mary Magdalene and
not John the Apostle.
On these premises, The Da Vinci Code begins with a
monk murdering The Louvre’s curator Jacques Sauniere to keep
the secret hidden. The story’s hero Robert Langdon summoned
to The Louvre concerning this murder, meets Sophie Neveu,
who discovers that she and her grandfather Jacques Sauniere
are Jesus Christ’s descendents.
The story’s characters, while investigating Sauniere’s
murder, discover through Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last
Supper, that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers.
(1) The myth of the Sangreal Documents
The story is false at its roots. There were no Sangreal
Documents hidden beneath the Jerusalem Temple’s Holy of
Holies for only the High Priest stepped into the Holy of
Holies annually during the Day of Atonement to engage in
sacrificial ritual for his and his peoples’ sins.
Jesus’ disciples being laity could never enter the Holy of
Holies, let alone get underneath it.
The 66 A.D. Jewish rebellion against Rome saw the Temple and
Jerusalem destroyed in 70 A.D. During the attack on the
Temple, a Roman soldier threw a torch that burnt the Temple
to the ground. The overall commander of the Roman legions,
Titus – Vespacian’s son – stepped into the Holy of Holies
inspecting it before its consumption by fire. How could the
Sangreal Documents not be found if Jesus’ followers placed
it there in four large trunks?
Caliph Omar I took Jerusalem in 635 A.D. In 691 A.D, the
Caliph Abdul Malik built the Dome of The Rock followed by
the Caliph al-Walid building the Al-Aqsa Mosque both within
the Temple premises. Couldn’t the Sangreal Documents be
found amidst such activity? The Da Vinci Code states
that the Knights Templars found the documents, while it
could have been found much earlier.
(2) French Bloodline?
This claim can be discredited by recognizing two falsehoods
in The Da Vinci Code:
(a) that Jesus fathered a child and,
(b) that the Merovingians founded Paris.
(a) Did Jesus father a child?
There is not a shred of evidence in our Gospels or the
gospels on which The Da Vinci Code relies.
In the Gospels, married women are always mentioned as “the
wife of....” reflecting the Gospels’ Jewish roots where
women were seen as property of their husbands. Mary
Magdalene, however, is associated with place of origin and
not wife of, for if she were married, she would have been
identified as “the wife of...” as opposed to place of
origin.
Furthermore, The Da Vinci Code’s claim that
Mary Magdalene was of the tribe of Benjamin where her
marriage to Jesus being of the house of David creating a
powerful political union is false. Mary is of Magdala in the
north beside the Sea of Galilee, while Benjaminite
territory was south.
(b) The Merovingians and Paris
The Da Vinci Code
claims that the descendents of Jesus married
into the Merovingian clan and that bloodline founded Paris.
But Paris is mentioned already as a village named “Lutetia”
in Julius Caesar’s 51 B.C. record. It was a fishing and
farming village surrounded by marshland.
(3) Leonardo Da Vinci And The Secret
We will first assess if Dan Brown knew Leonardo well enough
to justify his claim to know what Leonardo had in mind when
he painted The Last Supper.
Does Brown even know Leonardo?
That Leonardo was depicting secret codified messages in The
Last Supper according to The Da Vinci Code can be
proven false in several ways.
What About The Last Supper?
The novel wrongly calls Leonardo’s work a fresco when it is
a painting. That Leonardo did not intend the figure to be
Mary Magdalene on Jesus’ immediate right can be confirmed by
the fact that the painting is a one-point perspective that
had just become the art style and was the craze then.
In a one-point perspective all lines (other than horizontal
lines) from the viewer into the picture converges at a point
called the vanishing point. In Leonardo’s The Last Supper,
the lines converge at Jesus’ head showing him to be the
thematic focus.
The novel identifies John the Apostle as Mary Magdalene
seated beside Jesus claiming that the figure looks
effeminate. But drawing figures looking feminine was typical
of the style of renaissance art. Other Last Supper artists
did the same.
Dan Brown’s story claims that the reason why Leonardo’s work
has no chalice is due to the artist wanting to show that
Mary Magdalene’s womb and not the chalice was the real
chalice carrying Jesus’ bloodline. In actual fact, Leonardo
was trained at the Florentine School where all artists
trained there did not draw a chalice in their paintings of
The Last Supper due to their understanding that The Last
Supper in the Gospel According to John is not depicted as a
passover meal where the chalice was used.
This may also be the reason why the bread depicted is not
unleavened bread. Peter, according to the novel, holds a
knife and looks threateningly at Mary Magdalene (actually
John the Apostle) while in actual fact Leonardo depicts the
moment in John’s Gospel where Jesus announces his betrayal.
Peter had just cut bread in half (seen in the painting) only
to suddenly turn and look at John upon hearing Jesus’
announcement.
---End---
Our position is that Leonardo’s Last Supper means nothing
and could never be used to establish any biblical or
spiritual fact. We have no opinion as to what it depicts.
It has nothing to do with the Word of God.
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