The following sermon, "The Clueless Code," was delivered by Dr. Ralph Blair at City Church, New York on April 30, 2006.  Dr. Blair is founder and president of Evangelicals Concerned, Inc., a national network of gay and lesbian evangelical Christians and friends.

Dan Brown's bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, came out three years ago. I've made a few critical comments about it from time to time - in sermons and Bible studies. But now that it's "a major motion picture" - in Hollywood lingo - it's time for a closer examination.

As you may know, Westminster Abbey and the Louvre are two venues in the story. So director Ron Howard wanted to film on location at both places. When Westminster Abbey turned him down he signed up Lincoln Cathedral as a stand-in for the Abbey. Then he waited anxiously for word from the Louvre.

As a Newsweek cover story put it: "Losing Westminster Abbey hurt. Losing the Louvre would be devastating." Newsweek asked: "[B]e honest, wouldn't you be disappointed if you heard that 'The Da Vinci Code' movie had to fake the Louvre?" (Devin Gordon)

Many of Brown's 46 million readers have bought his fake Lord. But they wouldn't buy a fake Louvre! Faking a Christian site's no big deal: Westminster Abbey, Lincoln Cathedral, whatevah. But faking an art gallery? What self-respecting Da Vinci Code devotee would buy a fake Louvre? Over the past three years, many - if not most - of Brown's 46 million readers have bought his fake Lord. But they wouldn't buy a fake Louvre!

Well Jacques Chirac came to the rescue. He invited Ron Howard and the producer to come over to his office for coffee and insisted that they "alert him if their request to film at the Louvre hit any snags." So: no fake Louvre. I suppose Chirac wasn't asked to solve the problem of a fake Lord.

It's ironic that getting authentic Louvre shots mattered so much, for in spite of Brown's spin that his story deals in "FACT," in fact, it's littered with inaccuracies and errors historical, geographical, artistic, archeological, documentary, linguistic, theological. And then there's all the Christophobic nonsense! A Vatican archbishop rightly observes: "If such lies and errors had been directed at the Koran or the Holocaust, they would have justly provoked a world uprising." (Angelo Amato)

But when we object to all this fakery foisted as fact, we're told: "Lighten up, it's just a novel." Just a novel? Oh, no. Haven't you ever noticed how that little word "just" gets inserted as a camouflage, slipped in to distract from what's going on?

So here's a heads-up on a cover-up, but not the one the book imagines. If you've read it, plan to see the movie or want to keep up with what friends are talking about, you need to be up on a clueless author and his clueless devotees as they track down a clueless code. The ads tell us to "Be a Part of the Phenomenon." Sony says: "Seek the Truth." We shall.

We'll take a look at enough of the nonsense so you'll not be as clueless as people who tell me they've "learned so much" about Jesus, the Bible and church history from The Da Vinci Code. National surveys find that 53% of The Da Vinci Code readers say it's been helpful in their "spiritual growth and understanding." (George Barna) But what good is "spiritual growth and understanding" unless it's based in truth? Would they read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for understanding a worldwide Jewish conspiracy? Would they go to Osama bin Laden for understanding Western Culture's plot? Would they go to Pat Robertson for understanding "the gay agenda"?

Well, what's so really bad about The Da Vinci Code? As a murder mystery it's "a good read." But as "a good read," it draws readers into anti-Christian propaganda that the biblically illiterate and historically naive won't know any better but to believe. And as a distinguished professor of ancient history observes: For so much poison to be hidden in a good read is really "diabolical." (Paul L. Maier)

What's clueless in Brown's take on Christian history? Well, for starters, he spins this howler: The 4th-century Council of Nicaea invented Jesus' deity - and to the specifications of the Roman Emperor, Constantine. Brown's bantering Teabing, (played by Ian McKellen) explains to the readers' surrogate: "My dear, until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal" - a mere mortal, he means, nothing divine. Then he adds that Nicaea adopted this new dogma "by a relatively close vote."

The Council of Nicaea did not vote on whether Jesus was the Son of God. A non-vote event cannot have been "relatively close." The Council of Nicaea did not vote on whether Jesus was the Son of God. Thus, a non-vote event cannot have been "relatively close." All the delegates at Nicaea already embraced Jesus as divine, as Christians had been doing for far longer than there's been a United States. The discussions at Nicaea were not about whether Jesus was God's Son, but about how he was God's Son - in precise theological abstraction such as divine "substance." Discussions on such details continued for some six decades, but his basic deity was a belief that went back to the beginning.

In Paul's letters, dating from AD 49 through the mid-60s, he quotes even earlier creedal formulae on Jesus' deity. The earliest of these Christian creeds is succinct: Kurion Iasoun, "Jesus is Lord!" The Greek term for "Lord" is kurios. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the word kurios is used thousands of times to refer to God. So as a biblical scholar clarifies: The earliest Christians "were addressing not a Rabbi but a heavenly being." (C. K. Barrett) Another scholar puts it this way: "Within Jewish and Jewish-influenced circles ... the clear implication is that Jesus as Lord shares in the one God's lordship." (James D. G. Dunn)

This highest Christology is there in all the four biblical Gospels of the 1st century. John, echoing Genesis 1, writes: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." He adds: "And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us." Matthew, Mark and Luke agree: Jesus is the preexistent Son of God.

So, foisting the fallacy that Jesus' deity was fabricated hundreds of years after the biblical texts, is, itself, a fabrication. Claiming that the conniving Constantine and "his" Council suppressed accounts in order to privilege Matthew, Mark, Luke and John pretends there were seriously competing accounts to suppress. There were not. And claiming that "some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive" in the Dead Sea scrolls betrays ignorance of the Dead Sea scrolls for that's not what's in those scrolls.

The earliest Christians were Jews, so the oral tradition reflected in the biblical Gospels all have a distinctively Jewish texture. But the late, pseudo-gospels of Gnostics, pushed by Brown as having been pushed aside by church officials, have no such Jewish texture. As Gnostic, they're anti-Judaic - a dead giveaway that they don't go back to the faith of those first Palestinian Jews for Jesus.

It's ironic that The Da Vinci Code claims that these late Gnostic writings support the notion that Jesus was but a mere man. That was the opposite of Gnosticism. Indebted to the Greek form/matter scheme, Gnostic spirituality disdained the physical. Gnostics taught that we must escape the material world of the bad god for the ethereal world of the good god. They thus did not revere a god of flesh and blood - a god with body odor or bad breath.

Over against The Da Vinci Code's claim that Jesus was really only a man and the Gnostic claim that Jesus was really only an emanation, the biblical Gospels affirm that Jesus was God in flesh. Over against The Da Vinci Code's claim that Jesus was really only a man and the Gnostic claim that Jesus was really only an emanation, the biblical Gospels affirm that Jesus was God in flesh.

By AD 130 - two centuries before Nicaea - and due to constant use rather than any official vote, Christians read the four biblical Gospels, Paul's letters and the Hebrew Bible as their sacred texts.

Another false claim of The Da Vinci Code is that the Vatican is kept busy with the biggest cover-up in history: Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene and their having had a daughter named Sarah, thus beginning a royal French bloodline passing down to today. Brown insists: Their marriage is "a matter of historical record [with] countless references" in ancient history and he maintains that it "has been explored ad nauseam by modern historians." His hogwash is what's nauseous. There's not a shred of historical evidence for such an alleged marriage. There's nothing in even Brown's favored Gnostic material to give it any credence.

But here's where Leonardo enters the picture. It's alleged that he and other so-called "grand masters" of something called the "Priory of Sion" were custodians of the "secret" of Jesus' bloodline. Brown insists that this "Priory of Sion" is "FACT" and that it dates from the year 1099. But in fact, it's a fake. The "Priory of Sion" is a scam. In 1956, Pierre Plantard hatched this hoax by planting forged documents and then "discovered" them. He confessed to it all in a French court in 1993. He's since died. Murdered by The Code's Catholic creeps?

But in theological ignorance, Brown and his devotees assume that any sexual act on Jesus' part, especially if it resulted in offspring, would be fatal to the Christian faith. So they find a conspiracy to cover it up very believable. They conclude that church officials would stop at nothing - including murder - to keep it a secret. In the words of Brown's Teabing: "[A] child of Jesus would undermine the critical notions of Christ's divinity and therefore the Christian Church." Nonsense!

Again, the Christian faith has always affirmed that Jesus was both a real human being and the divine Son of God. He was not a "let's pretend" man any more than he was a "let's pretend" god. A New Testament scholar puts it plainly: Jesus' "marital relationship and His parenthood would not theoretically undercut His divinity but would have been reflections of His complete humanity. Had Jesus been married, there was no need to cover it up. The whole rationale for covering up any supposed relationship has no basis in theology." (Darrell L. Bock)

People who don't understand the doctrine of the Incarnation are shocked at the thought of Jesus having a sex drive, engaging in sexual intercourse and fathering a child. So in their ignorance, they buy into Brown's conspiracy theory.

Now there's no historical evidence that Jesus was ever married. Actually, there's indication he wasn't married. For example, Paul supported the right to marry by citing the examples of "other apostles and the Lord's brothers." Had Jesus been married, wouldn't Paul have used his case as an even more convincing precedent? And when the dying Jesus commended his mother to John's care, why - if he had a wife - did Jesus not commend her, as well, to his beloved disciple's care? Besides, not all Jewish men did marry. Essenes, the Egyptian Therapeutae, or healers, and prophets from Jeremiah to John the Baptist were celibate.

Perplexity over the possibility that Jesus fathered a child is ill-conceived. Again, it fails to understand the doctrine of the Incarnation - and "the facts of life." People suppose that, had Jesus fathered a child, the child would have to be some sort of god or goddess. But Jesus' mother wasn't a goddess. His ancestors weren't gods and goddesses. Why would his offspring be? People think that Jesus' offspring would have to be sinless. His mother wasn't sinless. His ancestors weren't sinless. Why would his offspring be sinless?

Jesus inherited his mother's DNA - not God's. It would be his DNA he'd pass on - not God's. God doesn't have DNA. Jesus' child would carry Jesus' DNA - not Jesus' deity.

Another Leonardo connection concerns his painting, The Last Supper. Allegedly, it encodes the secret. Brown buys the bizarre Holy Blood, Holy Grail notion - from 1982 - that the "Holy Grail" of medieval legend was not a cup at all, but Mary Magdalene herself. It's claimed: Why, that's not John at Jesus' right hand! That's Mary Magdalene!

But what do Leonardo's own study sketches show? They show that he labeled that figure at Jesus' right hand: "John." The young John is depicted without a full beard. To the clueless, he might appear to be a she. But what do the trained eyes of art historians see? They see the artist's Florentine School's convention of painting younger males as rather effeminate. So: To read Mary Magdalene into Leonardo's portrayal of John - and then to call that a clue - is clueless. Says a University of London art historian, who's also president of the Leonardo da Vinci Society: "[E]verything I know about how pictures were used to communicate indicates that the [Da Vinci Code] theory is absurd." (J. V. Field)

So: The Last Supper painting on that refectory wall in Milan contains no more secret a code than if the wall had been painted flat black.

It's purported that women would have been so much better off had only the Gnostic influence not been crushed by church officials. But in reality, it's the biblical material that's truly feminist and it's the Gnostic material that's anti-feminist. Another conspiracy Brown claims to uncover is the church's supposed repression of the "divine feminine." It's purported that women would have been so much better off had only the Gnostic influence not been crushed by church officials. But in reality, it's the biblical material that's truly feminist and it's the Gnostic material that's anti-feminist. Counter to the culture of his day, Jesus had disciples of both sexes. And also counter-culturally, it was the historical Mary Magdalene who was the first to recognize the Risen Christ and the first to give an eyewitness report to the men, even though the word of a woman was not valid as a legal testimony at that time. In contrast to these biblical examples of feminism, the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, for instance, has its "Jesus" saying to Peter that if Mary Magdalene makes herself into a man she can become "a living spirit" like Peter and the rest of the men. This Gnostic "Jesus" then adds: "Every female who makes herself into a male will enter the kingdom of heaven." So much for Gnosticism's "divine feminine"!

So - with all this nonsense, why is The Da Vinci Code such a bestseller? Why - besides gross ignorance - would The New York Daily News call Brown's research "impeccable" and The Chicago Tribune say the book contains "several doctorates' worth of fascinating history"?

Cultural amnesia and biblical illiteracy account for honest ignorance - even among churchgoers. And, sociologists note that when the truth is "either too simple or too remote," people who don't know any better, easily fall for the "deviant logic" of revisionist conspiracy theories. (Clifton Bryant). David Horowitz calls conspiracy theories "a kind of secular religion." The Archbishop of Canterbury reminded his Easter Sunday congregation that, these days: "Anything that looks like the official version is automatically suspect. Someone is trying to stop you finding out what really happened, because what really happened could upset or challenge the power of officialdom." He pointed out that, contrary to Brown's bias, the New Testament "was written by people who by writing what they did made themselves less powerful, not more." They were martyred for their testimony of Christ.

Of course, if you don't like Christian orthodoxy - whether or not you have a clue about Christian orthodoxy - you salivate over every popular push of an ancient heresy as the "exploding of the myth of a monolithic religion," to use Elaine Pagels' triumphalist hoopla. That way, you get to pick-and-choose a do-it-yourself "spirituality" that accommodates your very own prejudice, call it "Christian" if you like, and thumb your nose at the orthodoxy you set yourself up to label "heresy."

But we must dig deeper to find the most fundamental explanation for the wild popularity of The Da Vinci Code. As Peter put it: Jesus is God's cornerstone to those who believe, but to unbelievers, that cornerstone is a stone for stumbling and a rock to trip over." (I Peter 2:8) It's always been so. And Jesus warned his disciples it would be so.

This stumbling is evident in an opinion piece in The Village Voice. According to the essayist: "The Da Vinci Code is important as an expression of a desire for a spirituality that cannot be had within the confines of the institutionalized church." But why can't it? He goes on: "More simply yet, it is the popular expression of a desire for a kind of meaningfulness to life that is missing for most of us." Sadly, many churches are either deaf to need or offer stuff that's quite short of the Gospel. The Voice writer concludes in trendy "transgressive" postmodernist cliches. He states: "And certainly, [The Da Vinci Code] is the scandalous expression of a willingness to be disobedient to achieve the heretical end of a salvation outside the confines of the church. Through this novel we express our fundamental disgust with our institutionalized lives, and we suggest shocking things that we might previously have imagined were unsayable. ... [I]t is this assumption of our shared sense of spiritual fraud and the assumption that we're willing to think heretically in order to escape that fraud that makes Brown's deepest appeal to his readers." (Curtis White)

Of course, one cannot indulge a desire to "think heretically" unless one knows what's orthodox, and The Da Vinci Code gives no help here for it does not know what's orthodox. Brown's been accused of stealing from other writers but he can't be accused of stealing from the Bible!

Without grounding in the Gospel of Christ, "meaningfulness to life ... is [indeed] missing." The anger expressed in the Village Voice writer's jargon against the institutional church cannot hide the longing that, as the once-heretical Augustine expressed it to God: "You have made us for Yourself and we are restless until we find our rest in You." Yet the Religious Right and Left piddle around in pretended piety, politics, pop psychology and postmodernist political correctness, while people who need the glorious Gospel of Christ are left to find their own way down to hell.

The Da Vinci Code hero, played by Tom Hanks, affirms this statement of faith: "Every faith in the world is based on fabrication. That is the definition of faith - acceptance of that which we imagine to be true." The Da Vinci Code itself offers a faith "based on fabrication." And the clueless people buy into it "imagin[ing, or, at angry wit's end, wanting it] to be true."

What Paul proclaimed in the biggest urban center of his day, we must proclaim in this great city in our day: "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not counting our sins against us. ... Christ Jesus who died - more than that, who was raised to life - is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? ... No. In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." (II Cor 5:19; Rom 8:34f, 37ff)

Do we die daily for the Good News? We don't if, to us, it's merely a do-it-yourself "spirituality" to be shaped to our own sensibilities. Well, here we are in these pews on April 30, AD 2006. On April 30, AD 311, Emperor Augustus Galerius stopped killing Christians and issued an edict of toleration. Before that - and after that, and down to today while we sit here in safety - Christians die for affirming the glorious Good News that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. Is this what we would die for? Do we die daily for the truth of this Good News? We would and do, if we know it to be the powerful love of God for the salvation of the world. We would not and don't, if, to us, it's but another of this world's religions or merely a do-it-yourself "spirituality" to be shaped to our own sensibilities and sensitivities.

If orthodox Christianity is the fraud Dan Brown says it is, it's not worth our while, let alone our dying for. If that's the case, then in Paul's words, Christians are, of all people, most to be pitied. But: If Christianity is Christ in whom God truly was reconciling the world to Himself, not counting our sins against us, then He alone is worthy of all praise - in our living and in our dying. This is what Christians have believed from the beginning.

So, Paul urged: "Be reconciled to God." (II Cor 5:20) This is God's invitation to each one of us here, in this moment, this morning: Be reconciled to Me!

Sermon text (c)2006 by Dr. Ralph Blair.  Used by permission.