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“Da Vinci Delusion
producers traveled to Paris and talked with 15 experts from
across America to seek the truth about Dan Brown’s popular
novel, The Da Vinci Code.” |
New TV Special To “Seek the Truth” About Da Vinci Code Claims
 Paul Maier is angry. “Put it this way,” he told
The Coral Ridge
Hour, “there is not one ranking scholar in the entire world who
supports what Dan Brown has done with history.”
Maier, a Harvard graduate, Fulbright scholar, author of 15 books,
and professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, is
incensed at the faulty history in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
“As a professor of ancient history, I can’t stand known, accepted
facts from the past lied about,” he said. “If my students did
something like that, I’d flunk them.”
Publishing History
Still, Dan Brown has his fans. Some 40 million copies of his
potboiler murder mystery have been sold worldwide, and a movie
version starring Tom Hanks has reached millions more.
Brown’s website prominently features this glowing endorsement from
the New York Daily News: “His research is impeccable.”That view is very much a minority position among historians.
“Everything in The Da Vinci Code is wrong, except Paris is in
France; London is in England and Leonardo da Vinci painted pictures.
All else is fabrication,” said Sandra Miesel, coauthor of The Da
Vinci Hoax, one of about 15 books published to answer Dan Brown’s megabestseller, which has been on
The New York Times bestselling
list for three years.
“Although The Da Vinci Code is a murder mystery novel, it claims to
be based on facts and those so-called facts attack the very heart of
Christianity,” said Dr. Kennedy.
Da Vinci Delusion
That is why Coral Ridge Ministries is produced The Da Vinci
Delusion, a documentary answer to Dan Brown’s blockbuster. The
program aired nationwide in May 2006, just days before The Da Vinci Code movie hit theaters
worldwide, and is now available on DVD. The special hears from experts such as Maier, Peter
Jones, Darrell Bock, Erwin Lutzer, Janet Parshall, Kerby Anderson,
Sandra Miesel, Gary Habermas, and Amy Welborn.
 “Although The Da
Vinci Code is a murder mystery novel, it claims to be
based on facts and those so-called facts attack the very
heart of Christianity.”
—Dr. D. James Kennedy |
Together, these scholars refute The Da Vinci Code’s fraudulent
historical claims, such as that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene,
and had a daughter with her. And that it was the “pagan” Roman
emperor Constantine who “upgraded Jesus’ status to deity almost four
centuries after Jesus’ death.”
Brown also tells readers that the Bible is not the Word of God, but
“a product of man.” The Da Vinci Code alleges that there were more
than 80 gospels considered for the New Testament but Constantine,
for his own political purposes, deleted these other accounts and
chose Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
 The details of this alternative history have supposedly been
suppressed over the past 2,000 years by the Roman Catholic Church
and only a select few know the real story. Among them, Leonardo da
Vinci, who encoded this hidden history into his Mona Lisa and
Last
Supper paintings.
Brown’s Believers
It all sounds far-fetched, but some are taken in. A 2005 National
Geographic poll found that one-third of Canadians who have read the
book believe his theories and think that descendants of Jesus are
alive today.
College students have latched onto Da Vinci Code theories as well.
Point of View host Kerby Anderson began to see this when more and
more college students started asking him, “Do you think Jesus was
married? Are we really sure that the Bible includes all the
Gospels?” The Da Vinci Code is “an interesting story, but it’s a
false story,” said Anderson, “and it plants seeds of doubt.”
Dr. Kennedy called the novel “an extraordinarily deceitful weaving
together of fact and fiction” that takes advantage of the historical
and biblical illiteracy of most readers. “With the average American
abysmally ignorant of history and, unfortunately, also ignorant of
theology, and knowing very little about the Bible, the vast majority
of Americans would not have the faintest idea what part of this book
is fact and what part of it is fiction. And that makes it
particularly dangerous.”
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