Burning books in the streets has never been seen as a mark of freedom. Hitler made it into an art form as he tried desperately to suppress the opposition to Nazi Germany and to rearrange peoples’ thoughts. His cold logic was that if the books don’t exist then people can’t read them and they will only know the truth we want them to know.

Of course you don’t have to burn books to make people ignore them. The far better way is to discredit what they say. Tell people that a book is a load of quaint nonsense and then we are all free to ignore it and get on with our lives. That is the strategy currently adopted by Dan Brown’s thriller The Da Vinci Code. A great page-turner of a novel, driven by a plot that twists faster than a tornado, it sucks up everything in its path including the truth, and tries to replace it with some truly wacky ‘New Age’ claims about the Christian faith.

The missing gospels

At the heart of the story two characters try to suggest that the Bible (or at least its final part, the New Testament) is a fiction maintained by the Catholic Church. They claim that ‘the Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great’ in the fourth century. As many as seventy gospel accounts of Jesus were written, and many of them disagreed strongly with the four we have in our Bibles today. ‘Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned.’ Had we been allowed to read them, apparently they would have told us that Jesus was actually just a man, who married Mary Magdalene and had children. His message would have been totally different as well, making Christianity a pagan fertility cult rather than a faith that brings us back to know our holy creator through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

It is important at this point to remember that ‘the Da Vinci Code’ is a work of fiction. However, because many of its locations and the Catholic institutions it describes are real, it is fertile ground for anorak types and conspiracy theorists. It is difficult to be sure where reality stops and fiction takes over. If it tells us that there are some powerful influences at work in the Catholic Church it tells us nothing new. Where it is really useful is that it re-ignites the debate about whether we can trust the Bible. I am glad to have the opportunity to explain why the Da Vinci Code story is really a load of tosh.

Can we trust the New Testament?

When was the New Testament written? If (as Dan Brown suggests) it was written some three centuries after Jesus and only finally edited in the fourth century, then we might want to treat it as some unreliable myth, at best a late take on history. For much of the last century liberal biblical scholars believed this, even going so far as to say that we could know next to nothing of the historical Jesus from the pages of the gospels. We might want to believe in the ‘Christ of faith’ as an ideal figure, but he wasn’t the man from Nazareth, merely what the early Church projected back onto the events of his life.

The problem was that the evidence has been against this line. Preachers were quoting from the completed gospels and Paul’s letters well within a century of Jesus. They treated the letters of Paul and the gospels as of equal authority with the Hebrew Old Testament. We have fragments of the gospels on papyrus that date from as early as the second century. The gospels we have were around within two generations of Jesus, could be checked against living memory, and were not some mythical invention of the Church.

Each of the four gospels in the Bible agree with each other and indeed Matthew and Luke use Mark as one of their sources. John is very different in style and content, yet his account agrees with Matthew, Mark and Luke. We know from documents that have been found that the early church had an approved list of which books were reliable and which were to be discarded, some 200 years before Constantine.

The famously liberal bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, (remembered for his outrageous book ‘Honest to God’ in the 1960s) thought it might be a good joke to see if the New Testament books could all be dated to within the first century. He didn’t believe it was likely because of his liberal views, but astonished himself. He published his findings in his book ‘Redating the New Testament’ where he demonstrated that there was firm evidence that the whole New Testament was complete before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD. That means that we have to take the Bible seriously as a work of history. We cannot write it off as a fourth century distortion or invention.

Of course all this has great implications. A New Testament that is historically reliable demands that we read it and come to terms with its claims. And there is a greater reason why we should do so. He is the person at the heart of the gospels, Jesus the Son of God. To say he is a work of fiction displays a supreme ignorance of the person who walks off the pages of the gospels. You can’t read what he said and did without realising that a fiction writer could not have invented him.

Mary Magdalene

The Da Vinci code attaches huge significance to the character of Mary Magdalene, one of the women who followed Jesus. Dan Brown’s theory is that Jesus was just a man, who married Mary Magdalene and had a family whose blood line comes down to us today.

For Da-Vinci-believers Mary Magdalene then becomes very important. Her womb becomes the Holy Grail, the chalice that held the bloodline of Jesus. She becomes as significant as Jesus, the ‘sacred feminine’ who apparently we are meant to worship. And of course, he says, the Church has been trying to suppress the truth about Mary Magdalene ever since Constantine. Once again, this really is tosh. The great preachers of the first and second century whose writings have come down to us do not speak about her. Mary is a bystander in Jesus’ life, a wonderful demonstration that his Church is as much for women as for men, but that is all she is. Any idea of the ‘sacred feminine’ is just not there in the Old Testament let alone in the New. It is a pagan idea that is mistakenly being dragged into Christianity by Dan Brown.

The reason is that many people would like to think of Christianity

in pagan terms. Or let me put it another way: people would like to worship God in a pagan way that suits them. That means the secret pagan rituals of the Priory of Sion depicted in the Da Vinci Code seem very attractive. They would fit well in an age when we worship the perfect human body, glorify sex and worship idols. Throughout its history Christianity has always had a problem with those who have wanted to dissolve the truth claims of Jesus into the surrounding pagan culture. When they have done so, the result has always been a weird mix of religious rituals, only some of which are Christian in origin.

Jesus, God and Man

At the heart of all this is a very human reason why people would like to reject the Jesus of the New Testament and believe in the pagan alternative described in the ‘Da Vinci Code’. We find it attractive to follow a religion that allows us to sin and only demands that we engage in some mystical acts of ritual. If that is what you want, become a pagan or a freemason. Real, historic Christianity is very different, much more demanding, and for a very good reason. That reason is Jesus.

The Christian Church has maintained from its beginning that Jesus is the Son of God. He has come from heaven, being the Son of God from all eternity. He made the radical claim to be the one who can call God ‘Father’ because he is God’s Son. He himself talked about the glory he had with God the Father before the world began. He did things that only God can do – miracles such as calming the storm and walking on water, which demonstrate his power over creation. He scandalised the Jews of his day by forgiving people’s sins, something that only God has the power to do. Jesus came into the world to reveal God to us. We can be sure that God is really there because he has made himself known to us through Jesus.

At the same time Jesus was clearly human. He was born to a human mother, laid in a manger, and he lived through all the joy and weakness of childhood. He was hungry and tired. Like us, his body could only be in one place at a time. He experienced the full range of human emotions – joy, laughter, despair, anger and intense grief. Yet in one way he was different to all of us. He never sinned, and the gospels make this clear as they explain his virgin conception, free from the inheritance of human sinfulness. So the picture from all four gospels is of someone who is both human and divine.

That means that we have to pay serious attention to Jesus. If we reject him we are rejecting a God who is real. Jesus also warned us of the day when we will have to give account for our lives before him. You would be a fool to ignore that. It also means that the central event of his life, his crucifixion and death, is vital to us. Jesus explained his death as paying the ransom price for many, by which he meant buying us out of the slavery of the guilt of our sin. He took its punishment in his death so that if we follow him and trust in his death we can have a new beginning and live the life of real freedom. He is the way we can get right with God and be sure of eternal life when we die. How can we be sure of that? Jesus rose from the dead to prove that all his claims are true. Christianity is not a pagan fertility cult, but a living faith centred on Jesus Christ, fully man and fully God.