New Literature

Historical context of the Da Vinci Code

The history of the real-world Opus Dei:

The real Opus Dei was founded in Spain in 1928 by a Catholic priest, St. Josemaría Escrivá, with the purpose of promoting lay holiness. It began to grow with the support of the local bishops there and was approved as a secular institute of pontifical right by the Holy See in 1950. Opus Dei's work has been blessed and encouraged by Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II. In 1982, John Paul II established it as a personal prelature of the Catholic Church after careful study of its role in the Church's mission. The culmination of the Church's support for Opus Dei and its message came with the 2002 canonization of its founder. Pope John Paul has called Opus Dei's founder "the saint of ordinary life."

Calling Opus Dei "a Catholic Church" makes no sense. Opus Dei provides supplemental spiritual formation rather than ordinary diocesan functions, except in a few isolated cases in which the Pope or a bishop has asked Opus Dei to take care of some task. Moreover, it is intrinsic to the concept "catholic" that there can be only one Catholic Church, the Catholic Church, and Opus Dei is a fully integrated part of it.

Congregation is also a term that cannot be applied to Opus Dei, since it refers to religious. The very raison d'etre of Opus Dei is to provide a way of holiness for people who are not called to life in a religious order. For the same reason, the depiction of the Opus Dei villain as a monk in robes and Opus Dei's centers as cloistered residence halls where people withdraw from the world to live a life of prayer is the exact opposite of reality.

The various permutations of "personal prelature" the author uses to describe Opus Dei are redolent of something like the papal equivalent of a personal army, i.e., an extra-legal operation not subject to the rest of the Church's established authorities. "Personal" does not mean that Opus Dei belongs personally to the Pope or Vatican officials but refers to the fact that the prelature's jurisdiction applies to persons rather than a particular territory.

Opus Dei places special emphasis on helping lay people seek holiness in their daily lives. It has no monks, nor any members anything like the novel's creepy albino character named Silas.

Likewise, teaching the faith, giving spiritual guidance, and being a Christian witness  are fundamental.aspects of the Christian faith, not just Opus Dei practices.

The idea that Opus Dei entered a corrupt bargain with Pope John Paul II-bailing out the Vatican Bank in exchange for status as a personal prelature-is offensive and has no basis in reality.

The letter explained what the real Opus Dei is all about: "The basic activity of the prelature of Opus Dei is giving spiritual guidance to help them live the Gospel in their daily lives. This past October [2002], Pope John Paul II canonized Opus Dei's founder, St. Josemaria Escriva, before several hundred thousand people, just a fraction of those who have benefited from Opus Dei's spiritual formation."

Mary Magdalene role in real Christianity:

Brown asserts that in the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church: According to these unaltered gospels, it was not Peter to whom Christ gave directions with which to establish the Christian Church. It was Mary Magdalene. . . Jesus was the original feminist. None of the early manuscripts of neither the Gospels nor any of the quotations of the Gospels in the writings of the early Church Fathers suggest that anything of the kind was said at any stage in the history of the Gospels.

 Magdalene the Feminist:

Some people say Mary Magdalene is popular today because she introduces a stronger feminine element in the spirituality of Christianity.

"As a feminist, I'm certainly delighted and intrigued by the idea of a gospel attributed to a woman," said King, who leads a Bible study at her Episcopalian church.

Some men, however, may have been threatened by Mary Magdalene. In the gospel of Mary, the male apostles are shown to be hostile to Mary when she tries to cheer them by revealing some of the teachings that Jesus imparted to her alone before his death. "Did he choose her over us?" an incredulous Peter asks.

Beginning in the fifth century, Catholic leaders began referring to Mary Magdalene as a prostitute, perhaps because they wanted to undermine the capacity of women to appeal to Mary Magdalene for legitimacy and leadership.

As for a marital relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, suggested by The Da Vinci Code, King dismisses the idea. "Looking at the history of early Christianity, there's no evidence at all that they were married."

Early debates:

Most Christians stick to the canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and are dismissive of non-canonical texts, like the gospel of Mary, which many view as an attack on the New Testament.

King says she's not arguing that texts like the gospel of Mary should be included in the New Testament. But, she says, there are things we can learn from it.

"To a historian, all this is authentic information about Christianity," she said. "This simply shows that views were under intense debate in the early church."

In A.D. 325, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, Constantine, gathered a group of bishops to promulgate a creed, which was to become the founding statement of Christian doctrine in the West.

If Constantine or anyone else had tried to change Scripture, Christians would have refused. The Christian Church had just come through an age of persecution in which Christians had been burned at the stake for refusing to deny their Lord and the Scriptures he gave them. To allow those writings to be mutilated would be unthinkable, and any attempt to change them would have resulted in an enormous controversy that would be mentioned in the writings of the period. It would have been a practical impossibility to change Scripture, because thousands of copies were in existence all across the Mediterranean world, from Europe to North Africa. There was no central registry of who had copies of the Bible, so there was no way to track them down and edit them. There were simply too many copies floating in circulation. But even if all of the copies then known to exist had been tracked down and altered, this would not have affected the copies of Scripture that by this time already had been lost. Many of the early manuscripts of Scripture that we now have been waiting lost, in the desert until their discovery by modern archaeology. But when we look at these copies, they teach the same doctrines as later copies and show no evidence of having been censored.

Moreover, the writings of the early Church Fathers from before the time of Constantine show the same teachings and quote the Gospels as saying the same things as in the canonical Gospels.

 The council of Nicaea in 325 A.D:

Christ's divinity is stressed repeatedly in the New Testament. For example, we are told that Jesus' opponents sought to kill him because he "called God his Father, making himself equal with God."

When quizzed about how he has special knowledge of Abraham, Jesus replies, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58), invoking and applying to himself the personal name of God-"I Am" (Ex. 3:14). His audience understood exactly what he was claiming about himself. "So they took up stones to throw at him; but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple.”

Thomas falls at Jesus' feet, exclaiming, "My Lord and my God!" And Paul tells us that Jesus chose to be born in humble, human form even though he could have remained in equal glory with the Father, for he was "in the form of God."

Brown is asserting this in order to deny the evidence that exists against his position. He cannot back this claim up, for there is no evidence for it whatsoever. No Scripture scholar-Christian or non-Christian-supports this position. There is a number of reasons for this, some of which we will see below, but one reason is that the writings of the Church Fathers (and even non-Christian historians) before the time of Constantine show that Christians regarded Jesus as God.

Consider the following quotations, all of which predate the Council of Nicaea:

Ignatius of Antioch: "For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary in accord with God's plan: of the seed of David, it is true, but also of the Holy Spirit."

Tatian the Syrian: "We are not playing the fool, you Greeks, nor do we talk nonsense, when we report that God was born in the form of a man."

Clement of Alexandria: "The Word, then, the Christ, is the cause both of our ancient beginning-for he was in God-and of our well-being. And now this same Word has appeared as man. He alone is both God and man, and the source of all our good things."

 Tertullian: "God alone is without sin. The only man who is without sin is Christ; for Christ is also God."

Origen: "Although he was God, he took flesh; and having been made man, he remained what he was: God."

The Gnostic gospels:

Gnosticism was a dualistic, esoteric mode of thinking that was widespread during the early Christian era, although its influence was not confined to Christianity. The Gnostic Gospels are works reflecting the Gnostic take on Christianity. Some have been known for centuries, but previously unknown works — in the Nag Hammadi scrolls — were discovered in Egypt in 1945.

Some modern scholars and religious writers have seized upon various passages from the Gnostic Gospels as indicative of a competing, woman-centered element of early Christianity, especially a passage from The Gospel of Mary in which Jesus kisses Mary and the apostles express envy of His love for her. Brown works this thinking into his novel, but, like many others, ignores a deeply anti-woman passage from another Gnostic gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus says, "For every woman who will make herself male will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."

Gnosticism was rejected by Christianity, but not because of gender issues. Its claims (two gods, a belief that the created world was evil) were simply inconsistent with the rule of faith, as it was called, handed down from the apostles.

The canonical Gospels all date from the middle to late first century. The Gnostic gospels cannot be placed any earlier than the mid-second century. It is ironic, as historian James Hitchcock has pointed out, that elements of a profession that have for years derided the Gospels as unreliable history have now seized on later documents as reliable guides to Jesus' intentions.