Reply #29: Not "real" at all... [View All]

1) The "Priory of Sion," it has been well-established, is a hoax fabricated by a French Nazi-sympathizer named Pierre Plantard in the years after WWII. The "Dossiers Secrets" were actually forgeries created by Plantard and placed by him in the Biblioteque Nationale in the late 1950s. (Plantard himself admitted to the hoax in a French court in 1993 -- for more on this whole story, check here.)

2) There was an order of Knights Templar, but they had nothing to do with medieval cathedral-building. They were suppressed by force, but not by the Pope -- rather, by King Phillip of France, who wanted to get his hands on the money they made from their banking system to finance his private wars. There is no notion, until launched by certain conspiracy theorists of the past thirty years, that they held any "secret" about Jesus -- merely that they held too much money for their own good.

3) While the debate over Jesus's divinity or lack thereof has continued among the general populace for two millenia, the notion that no Christian ever thought of Jesus as God until the Council of Nicea is about as ludicrous as they come -- as even the most cursory examination of Christian documents over the first centuries makes abundantly clear, the divinity of Christ was an unquestioned principle within the Church from the earliest days. (By the way, despite what DVC claims, there was never a vote at Nicea over whether or not Christ was divine -- the actual debate was over whether there was a time when God the Father existed and God the Son did not. Obscure? Pretty much so, unless you're deeply into theology. But a far cry from being a vote over "whether Jesus was divine or mortal" -- by the way, orthodox Christian theology has always held him to have been both.)

4) Likewise, similar documents show beyond a doubt that the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were generally accepted as the standards for Christian belief several hundred years before Nicea. They certainly were not "commissioned by Constantine" in the fourth century. Incidentally, the canon of the New Testament developed slowly by consensus, and was not fixed at Nicea.

5) Although being married and having a family would certainly not be a stumbling block to belief in Christ as being the incarnation of God (after all, if he was truly human as well as divine, he could be expected to live a truly human life in all details) in orthodox Christianity, the reason that Jesus has always been believed to have been single is that there's no evidence that he wasn't. And Brown's technique to claim otherwise (which, among other things, relies on the Aramaic meanings of a word in a gnostic text which was never in Aramaic in the first place) borders on the laughable. I would also add that nowhere in scripture is Mary of Magdala referred to as a prostitute -- that came about over five hundred years later, from a sermon by Pope Gregory the Great, who apparently mixed up two adjacent passages from the Gospel of Luke, and assumed that the unnamed "immoral woman" of one chapter was Mary of Magdala, who makes her first appearance in the next chapter. And, despite Brown's claim that the Church denigrated Mary in order to suppress her role in Jesus's life, the fact is that she is recognized as one of the major saints in the Orthodox and Catholic calendars (her feast day is July 22nd), and has been given the title of "apostle to the apostles" -- some denigration!

The fact is that virtually all of Brown's claims are not only easy to debunk, but laughably so. As I have pointed out before, all it would take is one class in Religious History 101 from the most secular of universities to show that the "facts" in DVC are, by and large, hokum. It relies, for its persuasiveness, on people who uncritically come to the conclusion of "it must be true, because I read it in a best-seller" or "...because I saw it in a major Hollywood movie." That's the sort of "thinking" I would expect from devotees of Fox News, not the denizens of DU. To use the movie's tagline, "seek the truth"...if you do, you'll find that DVC, both book and movie, contain precious little of it.