‘Da Vinci’ issues

A line from Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” tells you why it’s easily the most disputed religious novel of all time: “Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.”

With 46 million copies in print, “Da Vinci” has long been a headache for Christian scholars and historians, who are worried about the influence on the faith from a single source they regard as wrongheaded.

Now the controversy seems headed for a crescendo with the release of the movie version May 17-19 around the world.

Believers have released an extraordinary flood of material – books, tracts, lectures and Internet sites – criticizing the story.

The conservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei, portrayed as villainous in the story, is among those asking Sony Corp. to issue a disclaimer with the film.

Ben Witherington III of the evangelical Asbury Theological Seminary is following up the criticisms of the novel in his book “The Gospel Code” with lectures in Singapore, Turkey and 30 U.S. cities. He’s given 55 broadcast interviews.

Among more liberal thinkers, Harold Attridge, dean of Yale University’s Divinity School, says Brown has “wildly misinterpreted” early Christianity.

The problem is that “Da Vinci” is billed as more than mere fiction. Brown’s opening page begins with the word “FACT” and asserts that all descriptions of documents “are accurate.”

During a 2003 publicity tour (he declines interviews now), Brown told National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition” that his characters and action are fictional but “the ancient history, the secret documents, the rituals, all of this is factual.”

Christian scholars beg to differ.

Among the key issues:

Jesus’ divinity

Brown’s version: Christians viewed Jesus as a mere mortal until A.D. 325, when the Emperor Constantine “turned Jesus into a deity” by getting the Council of Nicaea to endorse divine status by “a relatively close vote.”

His critics’ version: Larry Hurtado of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, whose “Lord Jesus Christ” examines first-century belief in Jesus’ divinity, says that “on chronology, issues, developments, and all the matters asserted, Brown strikes out; he doesn’t even get on base.”

He and others cite the worship of Jesus in epistles that Paul wrote in the 50s A.D. One passage teaches that Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” and became a man (Philippians 2:6).

Historians also say the bishops summoned to Nicaea by Constantine never questioned the long-held belief in Jesus’ divinity.

Rather, they debated technicalities of how he could be both divine and human and approved a new formulation by a lopsided vote, not a close one.

The New Testament

Brown: “More than 80 gospels were considered for the New Testament,” but Constantine chose only four. His new Bible “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.”

Critics: Historians say Christians reached consensus on the authority of the first century’s four Gospels and letters of Paul during the second century. But some of the 27 New Testament books weren’t universally accepted until after Constantine’s day.

Constantine himself had nothing to do with these decisions.

Some rejected writings are called gospels, though they lack the narrative histories that characterize the New Testament’s four. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were earlier and won wide consensus as memories and beliefs from Jesus’ apostles and their successors.

And the rejected books often portrayed an ethereal Jesus lacking the human qualities depicted in the New Testament Gospels, critics say – the exact opposite of Brown’s scenario.

On the question of mass burning of texts deemed heretical, Bart Ehrman, religion chairman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says there’s little evidence to support that claim.

Rejected books simply disappeared because people stopped using them, he says, and nobody bothered to make new copies in an age long before the printing press.

Jesus as married

Brown: Jesus must have wed because Jewish decorum would “virtually forbid” an unmarried man. His spouse was Mary Magdalene, and their daughter inaugurated a royal bloodline in France.

Critics: First-century Jewish historian Josephus said most Jews married, but Essene holy men did not. The Magdalene myth emerged only in medieval times.

Brown cites the Nag Hammadi “Gospel of Philip” as evidence of a marriage, but words are missing from a critical passage in the tattered manuscript: “Mary Magdalene (missing) her more than (missing) the disciples (missing) kiss her (missing) on her (missing).”

Did Jesus kiss Mary on the lips, or cheek or forehead? Whatever, Gnostics would have seen the relationship as platonic and spiritual, scholars say.

The whole “Da Vinci” hubbub, Witherington says, shows “we are a Jesus-haunted culture that’s biblically illiterate” and harbors general “disaffection from traditional answers.”

But he and others also see a chance to inform people about the beliefs of Christianity through the “Da Vinci” controversy.

Says Yale’s Attridge: “If people are intrigued by the historical questions, there are plenty of materials out there.”