DAN BROWN, THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS, AND THE DA VINCI CODE -

One of the blockbuster books of the last couple years has been the "Da Vinci Code" by Dan Brown. Its basic premise is that the traditional church has had a conspiracy going on for the last 2000 years or so to hide certain "other gospels" from us. These are collectively known as the "Gnostic Gospels". Of course no serious scholarship really supports this spurious history (ie. that Constantine "fixed" the canon in 325 A. D. at Nicea). Canon (or the bible's books as we know them) was well in place as early as 125 A. D. as shown in some fragments of scripture. Besides, to pull off a monumental deception, destruction of the Gnostic Gospels (if they were in fact so widespread) would be impossible. The Gnostic Gospels are late fabrications that used the idea of "borrowed interest" from Scripture to give them some sort of validity but on the whole they read just like any other mythical text.

The other problems involve the actual artistic sense of what he says about Da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks, just looking at the painting you see none of the things he implies (angel making a slit throat motion, switching Christ and John, etc.) His ideas on the Last Supper suffer the same problem, since Leonardo painted it has been acknowledged that the person sitting next to him was John and not a young woman.

We run into his ideas on translation also, mysterious Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland's name is supposed to mean "Rose Line" (referring to the line of the Magdalene) but in actuality it means "Little Stream" in Scotch. The idea the Pentagram is an ancient symbol for feminism is another fabrication (although not as recent). It came about as a mistranslation of the meaning of the face card the "Pentacles" in the French.

We finally come to the Magdalene herself. It has been a RECENT idea that she arrived in the south of France after the death of Christ. But even the occult scholar Arthur Waite, said that such a thing is not at all supported by the history.

(But all this is a plot you know... it really is! But NOT by the organized church:
2Co 4:4 In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them. One of the main messages of the "Da Vinci Code" is that Christ was in fact NOT divine, or God that this was shown in the Gnostic Gospels and covered up by the established church. The Apostle John confronts the same issues in his first epistle when he says that anyone who denies that Christ has "come in the flesh" (that is God has become man in the incarnation) he is an Antichrist. All this was written WAY before Constantine (in the first century at the latest). If you remember my theory on the alien hybrid experiments, when Satan cannot directly refute the Gospel, he will go to any lengths to diminish Christ. So whether he is a product of alien DNA tinkering, or a powerhungry church heirarchy, the effect is the same, POOF! no gospel.)

Dan Brown got the book, got the movie and all the moola to go with it, too bad the truth is left lying in the dust...