Does The Da Vinci Code reveal the truth about Jesus? Dan Brown, the author of the best-selling book, presents his characters as uncovering the truth about who Jesus really was. Many readers have found these claims shocking and disturbing. The truth, however, is far from what Dan Brown makes it out to be. Even non-Christian scholars (who can’t be accused of having a Christian bias) have pointed this out.
One such scholar is Bart Ehrman; he is a Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In his book, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, he points out numerous factual errors. And some of these errors are so egregious that Ehrman calls them “howlers” (p. xiii). The following is an excerpt from Ehrman’s book.
2. It’s not true that eighty Gospels “were considered for the New Testament” (p. 231). This makes it sound like there was a contest, entered by mail…
3. It’s absolutely not true that Jesus was not considered divine until the Council of Nicea, that before that he was considered merely as “a mortal prophet” (p. 233). The vast majority of Christians by the early fourth century acknowledged him as divine. (Some thought he was so divine that he wasn’t even human!)
4. Constantine did not commission a “new Bible” that omitted references to Jesus’ human traits (p. 234). For one thing, he didn’t commission a new Bible at all. For another thing, the books that did get included are chock-full of references to his human traits (he gets hungry, tired, angry; he gets upset; he bleeds, he dies…).
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Reference
Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine, 1st ed. (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), xiv.
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