How much da vinci code is true

According to the legend, Sarah bore children of her own, carrying on her father's bloodline. It flowed through generations, eventually reaching the French royal family, and from there, the rest of the world.

There is, of course, no birth certificate, or entry in some ancient ledger telling of Sarah's arrival or who her parents might have been. It is one of many renaissance depictions of Jesus and his Apostles sharing Passover on the night before his crucifixion. But Leonardo's version leaves out an important icon. Jesus' chalice, the legendary Holy Grail, is missing.

It's just another clue leading us to the truth about Mary Magdalene. The book says the painting literally spells it out. First, there's that "M" which could stand for "Magdalene" or "marriage.

And so, the book concludes, Da Vinci is trying to tell us that Mary Magdalene was the "holy vessel" who carried "the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ" by bearing his child. Starbird: And probably a girl child since the vessel, the shape, the cup is actually a feminine symbol.

Stone Phillips: The book depicts Leonardo Da Vinci as a subversive slipping hidden messages into his art. David Nolta, art historian: Uh-huh. Phillips: The artist's eccentricities projected an admittedly demonic aura. Nolta: He was a man of a considerable range of activities, certainly. You won't find the Priory of Sion mentioned in any conventional biography of Leonardo DaVinci, but the book says that for proof of his membership, all you have to do is look in the French National Library at a collection of papers called the Secret Documents or Dossiers Secret.

Richard Leigh was among the first to evaluate the documents which were, in fact, discovered in the library in the s. The documents include a directory of leaders, called grand masters, men whose mission, Leigh says, was to hide the secret of the bloodline, then pass it down through the ages. Leigh: Leonardo appears on the list of grand masters.

There's no question that he was also connected with the figures who immediately proceed and immediately follow him on the list. The list opens with obscure French noblemen, but goes on to read like the contents table of an introductory course to Western civilization. Leigh: Obviously when we first saw the names, names like Leonardo, Botticelli, Newton, we were skeptical. On the other hand if you wanted to concoct a list of illustrious figures, why include so many non-entities?

And why not bring in more? Why not have Goethe on the list for example? Why not have Shakespeare? A generation ago, Leigh poured over these enigmatic papers, matching them point by point to documented French history and local legends -- including the story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and a girl named Sarah.

It all points, he says, towards a cataclysmic possibility. Leigh: That there were progeny or at least one child from this union and that a bloodline continued. Could these cryptic documents reveal some ancient knowledge and could they hold the key to finding the heirs of Jesus living among us today? In the book, they are startling truths that have been protected and passed down through the ages by the members of an elite secret society called the Priory of Sion.

But does the Priory of Sion exist? A similar story was first told in in a non fiction book called "Holy Blood, Holy Grail. To separate fact from fiction in both books, you have to understand the true story at the heart of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," one that began more than a years ago, in a tiny village in the south of France called Rennes le Chateau. It all centers around a man named Sauniere. But soon after he began renovating a church, all of that changed. He became rich, which left many in town wondering how he came by his fortune and what secrets it might hold Local legend has it Sauniere found some mysterious documents hidden deep in the church's altar.

Lincoln: The priest, in repairing his church, supposedly found some parchments. These parchments contained secret messages. Secret messages, it was said, that led the priest to a buried treasure. But when the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" analyzed the parchments, they came up with a different theory: Sauniere had stumbled onto not gold and jewels, but evidence of a secret society that had been guarding the descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalene for centuries.

The clues, they say, are there in the parchments. To find out more about the Priory, the authors headed to the French National Library, and soon, made another discovery, a list of Priory leaders, or grand masters. Leigh: We checked all of these, even those that seemed irrelevant to the main story, and they all checked out. But that wasn't all. The same files contained papers filled with elaborate family trees, genealogies and codes that seemed to directly tie a line of French kings and queens to the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Leigh: If we read the clues they provided correctly they claim, one, Jesus was married. At some point subsequent to the crucifixion Jesus' wife or widow, as the case, might be escaped either pregnant or with child to the South of France. Around AD this blood line supposedly intermarries with the royal line of the Francs. Could this radical -- even sacrilegious -- story be the real secret the priest stumbled onto all those years ago?

And did he use that knowledge to extort money from someone, the Church perhaps, to keep silent? The authors followed the documents further and it wasn't long before those family trees led them to the doorstep of an eccentric Frenchman named Pierre Plantard.

Plantard was the soft-spoken son of a butler and a cook, who'd lived an unremarkable life as a low ranking government paper-pusher.

But when the authors interviewed Plantard, a grander story emerged. Plantard said that the Priory of Sion was real and that he was a member. Leigh: When we first established contact with members of Priory, Plantard was their official spokesman.

Lincoln:Plantard: At this moment Priory of Sion still exists. Lincoln: Monsieur Plantard, you have supported the Priory of Sion. Plantard: We have supported Sion and Sion has supported us. Lincoln: We? Who are we? Plantard: We. I am speaking of the Merovingian line. He must be a master of the past so as to portray accurately ideas, attitudes, tendencies, and themes and weave his story—accurate in all its details—into the thematic materials.

Historians and novelists often differ in their points of view about the historical novel and its purpose. However, both agree that the writer of historical fiction must not distort past reality; the writer must not manipulate historical facts to make the novel more interesting or exciting Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.

By this definition, The Da Vinci Code would need to develop its plot with historical integrity. Literary scholars see the difference; the average reader may not.

The Knights Templar are also included as protectors of the secret but were all but wiped out by the church. Facebook Twitter. The Priory of Sion also has a basis in fact, but not in the sense that Brown portrays it. The title has been used three different times. It was first a monastic order founded in Jerusalem in that was absorbed into the Jesuits in The second and third Priory of Sion were each under the leadership of Pierre Plantard — , an anti-Semitic Frenchman who went to jail in for fraud.

In , Plantard formed a group called the Priory of Sion to help those in need of low-cost housing. The group dissolved in He and his associates called themselves the Priory of Sion and deposited these documents in libraries all over France, including the National Library.

In , however, Plantard admitted under oath to a French judge that he had fabricated all the documents relating to the Priory of Sion. The judge issued him a severe warning and dismissed him as a harmless crank www. They were founded in as a military religious order, but they did not become wealthy, as alleged in the novel, by discovering the secret of the Holy Grail.

And there is no evidence that they were annihilated for having knowledge of it. These facts are important to readers of The Da Vinci Code. This is one of the most compelling aspects of the novel. They underscore the fact that we cannot save ourselves, so God did something to save us. That is why these four books are gospels —Good News. The gnostic "gospels," on the other hand, do not tell the story of God becoming man and giving His life to save sinners.

Instead, they present a different Jesus, one who speaks in mysterious riddles and vague philosophical sayings. This is because the Gnostics, far from being more pluralistic and accepting than the early Christians, were terrible elitists who believed that only people who were mentally capable of achieving hidden mystic knowledge would find salvation.

The door was not open to all; others were despised as inferior and unworthy. The Gnostics essentially left you on your own to find salvation. The God who created you, they said, was incompetent and made a terrible blunder when He did it. If you can't seem to wrap your head around secret knowledge, there is no hope for you. That is not good news. It is not a gospel. Why has The Da Vinci Code struck such a chord with so many people? Why would somebody choose to reject the real good news of Christian belief—the divinity of Christ and His victory over the grave in our behalf?

It's hard to tell. Maybe it has something to do with the scandals in the Christian world over the last couple of decades that have rocked the faith of so many people in things they used to count on.

That's possible, but I somehow doubt that is all that's going on. If we accept the Bible as true, it is an admission that the Creator has some claims on our lives. The misunderstanding is that somehow, these claims will enslave us and rob us of the liberty we crave. Nothing could be further from the truth. When you come face to face with Jesus Christ, you will discover that the Bible is reliable and the words of Jesus present both hope and truth.

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. What is freedom? For Dan Brown and others, freedom appears to be a release from the claims of the biblical Christ. But in the end, this leaves you with a serious problem that forces you into unimaginable bondage: you have to sort out your sin problem all by yourself.

You become a slave to the material world, fighting to escape it with all your might. That's not freedom. As Jesus stated, "Whoever commits sin is a slave to sin. And a slave does not abide in the house forever, but a son abides forever. Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed. And He offers us this opportunity through what Jesus accomplished at the cross. Has there been a historical conspiracy to hide the truth? The Bible describes it well:. But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.

The Da Vinci Code is a deliberate attempt to keep the truth of the Gospel — the Good News of what Jesus has done for you — out of your hands. There is a cover-up taking place, and The Da Vinci Code, ironically, is part of it.

It's a deliberate attempt to keep the truth of the Gospel - the Good News of what Jesus has done for you—out of your hands. The so-called "light" of The Da Vinci Code, in reality, is a shroud of darkness being thrown over the hope that God wants you to have. So why does Dan Brown feel the need to present an alternate version of Christianity? Why not simply reject the Christian faith all together?

Many years ago, the New Testament Scriptures predicted that in the last days, just before Jesus returns, there would be those "having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! There is no question about it: a Jesus who did not die for us and was not divine is an attempt to have a form of Christianity that denies the power behind it. It has been stripped of all hope. This is the real problem with Dan Brown's Jesus.

Without the resurrection of God's Son, the grave will be the end for all of us:. For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!

Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. Single-spaced, small font. It's a lot of material. Nowhere, nowhere is there any hint that Jesus had a child. Bock maintains that the church has failed in its duty to teach Christians about the history of their faith, and this is why so many have faltered in the face of Brown's fiction.

And when someone purports to say, 'I've done careful research,' we take the author at face value and the idea becomes, 'Oh, that must be true. Bock readily concedes that Brown's book is a compelling and captivating read. But it's his hope that by engaging the substance of the book he'll persuade people to look beyond "The Da Vinci Code. Because I think through the conversation and the dialogue, the opportunity does exist not only to talk about the real Jesus but to reflect the real Jesus, because when He went to be crucified, He never lost his love for the world.

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