Presents...	Separating Fact from Fiction
	A series of four presentations by Pete Yazzolino

Presentation # 1

We're here to talk about Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code published in April of 2003 and one of the most widely read books of our time.

It's a fictional thriller, which has become a best seller in 150 countries and is available in more than 45 languages, and has sold more than 40 million copies in this country alone.

It captured the number one sales ranking at Amazon.com and has been at or near the top of the NY Times best-seller list for between 50 to 60 weeks. And it is yet to come out in paperback.

It inspired a one-hour ABC News Special and has been the subject of several other specials on Discovery, History and other channels.

It has started a mini industry in European travel to the locations mentioned in the book.

It is the basis of a new board game where you try to crack your opponent's code before they crack yours.

Filming completed last month on a movie made from the book directed by Ron Howard and staring Tom Hanks, which will appear in a theatre near you May of next year.

It has sparked debates and numerous anti Da Vinci books that crack, de-code, de-bunk, break, unlock or somehow explain or refute the claims of the book. Hundreds of thousands of Internet pages are linked to the book's title. And BLOGs love it.

It resulted in a trial in Leonardo's hometown of Vinci, Italy to correct mistakes and inaccuracies in the book.

As we speak a trial is being prepared by two historians against Brown's publishers for stealing the ideas from their book. It's set for February next year. About the time the hype starts for the movie's release.

It has raised almost as many questions as it has sold copies: Did Constantine collate the Bible? Was the Holy Grail a person and not a cup? Did Leonardo Da Vinci use his art to communicate secret knowledge about the Holy Grail? Did the male dominated Church invent Christianity to control the empire, oppress women and repress goddess worship?

This book is more than a page-turning murder mystery. It is a conspiracy theory that leaves many readers wondering whether every thing they have believed about Christ and the Bible is wrong.

For non-believers it confirms their unbelief. It turns off honest seekers, and it has confused and disillusioned even many Christians.

So why worry about it? It is after all fiction. So why the concern about what it says? Lighten up. Doesn't Dan Brown say in the book on page 234 that "the vast majority of educated Christians know the history of their faith…" That may be the most inaccurate statement in the book.

Twice in the book Dan Brown tells us that everyone loves a conspiracy. The sale of this book in the last two and a half years has proved it.

The thing that is troublesome about the book is that even though it is a fiction novel it begins with a statement of fact on page one. And it discusses mysteries and controversies that many of us had never heard of before and challenges Christian beliefs that many of us had never questioned.

We have been further confused because the author has stated he is so confident in the reliability of his claims that were he to write a nonfiction piece on the same theme he would not change a thing. That statement on page one hangs there in our minds as we read and the result is that fiction becomes fact to too many readers.

I'm not trying to refute the book--it's a work of fiction, after all and I'm not a literary critic. I enjoyed the book but I didn't get upset about the statements either. Like many of you I did wonder where he was getting his information. But I thought, oh well I don't believe it anyway why bother checking it out? In fact when I led the first group discussion of the book I was not prepared to discuss the questions we will deal with in these four sessions. I thought the interest would be in the codes and the clues and whether it was possible for our hero to wake up in Paris at half past twelve on Saturday morning, go to the Louvre, drive around town, go to the train station, make a withdrawal at a safe deposit box, visit a friend in the country outside Paris, fly to London, visit a church a college library, Westminster Abby then somehow get to Scotland and be back to Paris by early Sunday morning. All without eating, sleeping or relieving himself.

I'm not defending the Christian faith either. There are many that are much more qualified to do that than I am. And I know that the fact that the book is false does not, of course, prove that Christianity is true.

I am interested in being the person who you can go to and say, "hey, is that true?" What is fact and what is fiction?

Ask yourself this question. Would the book be as successful simply as a good murder mystery without Brown's broadsides against Christianity?

I'm not going to be able to answer all the questions you have in the four sessions but I'll try to hit the ones that are the most important to you. Maybe if we know more about our faith and the history of Christianity we can enjoy the book and laugh at the fictional story line.

Would you have believed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Matrix trilogy and the Harry Potter stories if there had been a statement at the beginning of the books that it was fact?

I'd like to make a short presentation each week then open it up for question and answers. It would be helpful for me to have the questions written out on the response cards provided to you in each location. Today we'll just do the best we can with questions from the floor.

There are so many half truths and outright false statements it's hard to know where to begin but if we take it a little at a time eventually it will all fall into place. The first area deals with Constantine and the questions about the development of the Bible.

Q and A 12:30 to 12:50 or: 55

1. Priory of Sion (slide)--a European secret society founded in 1099… Pure fiction. The real Priory of Sion lasted until 1617. The new Priory of Sion was actually founded in 1956 and made up by its' founder Pierre Plantard. Plantard served in jail for 6 months for fraud and embezzlement in 1953. The false history salted into the Paris library was repeatedly exposed in France and on the BBC in 1996.
   
   If you want to read some real unbelievable writings to prove that Pierre's son was a descendent of the Merovingian dynasty just log on to the Priory of Sion Hoax. Pierre died in the year 2000 and had still not admitted to the fraud.
    
2. Opus Dei (Slide) it is a real organization.
    
3. Fact statement (slide) all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. You be the judge. Both Dan Brown and his wife are art historians so you would expect better but a lot of it is fiction. We will discuss artwork in session 3.
    
4. The Bible is a product of man, my dear…(slide) The insinuation here is that the Bible is not reliable. To say that the Bible has evolved implies a progression of constant change, as in the term evolution. This is totally misleading. The only changes to the Bible that have taken place across the centuries have been through a more faithful rendering and translation of the original Hebrew of the OT and the Greek of the NT without any additions to the text.
   
   There are fragments of the NT dating to the first and second centuries AD within 30 to 50 years of the original writing. There are more than 5600 Greek manuscripts mostly prior to the printing press and some 800 of those predate AD 1000. The reliability is confirmed by eyewitness accounts.
    
5. "…Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from…We will take up this slide in session 4 on the divine feminine
    
6. "The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine…(slide) OT had been compiled even before Jesus' time. NT compilation began by end of first century (90 to 100) 200 years before Constantine. First canon by mid 3rd century.
    
7. "More than eighty gospels…(slide) this statement infers that there was a committee or person who choose what was or was not to be in the Bible. In fact, it was through the usage in churches in places like Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome that determined what was or was not the word of God.
   
   The 27 books of the NT were accepted as authoritative long before 325 AD (council of Nicea) and were confirmed in 393 and 397 after Constantine's death in 337.
   
   There are many books referred to as the Christian Pseudepigrapha (written under a false name) or Christian Apocrypha (hidden books or books not for general audiences) that were not included in the canon. I can list 42 and not all were gospels. Some experts say there may have been as many as 35. Not eighty.
    
8. "Constantine upgraded Jesus' status almost four centuries after Jesus' death…(slide) 3 centuries not 4. Jesus was considered divine within the first century. Christians were dying in the persecutions long before Constantine because they believed Jesus was God and would not bend their knee to Caesar.
   
   The C of N did not debate over whether Jesus was divine of only mortal, but whether he was coeternal with the father. Not a close vote either. It was 218 to 2. Debate was the one iota of difference. The Greek words for same and similar.
   
   Constantine did finance 50 Bibles for his libraries as well as the Council of Nicea. Eusebius carried out the Bible order. (Wrote the History of the Church)
   
   Inference here is that Jesus was pictured earthier in the Gnostic gospels that were rejected than in M, M, L, and J. Actually the reverse as M, M, L, and J portray Jesus in a very human light.
   
   Gospels not burned but the writings of Arian, which were commentaries on the gospels, were burned. You can read the Gnostic gospels on line on in Bart Ehrmans book Lost Scriptures.
    
9. "…Some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate…(slide) DSS hidden prior to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Found in 11 caves 1947-56. No Christian documents at all. 800 plus documents. 1/4 are copies in Greek of OT, the rest are commentaries and secular writings. No mention of Jesus or Christianity. OT match very well with writings 1000 year later.
   
   The Nag Hammadi find was a group of codexes bound with leather covers not scrolls. Written in the 2nd or 3rd centuries and copied about 250 to 350 AD. We know of these books from criticism, which appeared as early as the 2nd century. These works were not written by the names attached to them and were rejected very early on. No one knows who wrote them. We'll talk more about Gnostic gospels next week
    
10. "…in addition to telling the true Grail story…(slide) they do not tell of a Grail story either. Next week we will cover the Gnostic gospels of Mary, Philip, and Thomas
     
11. "…is that almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false…. (slide) Wow! What a statement. My father did not teach me about the Holy Grail. I read it in stories of King Arthur and he didn't teach me about Christ either. I've spent the last 40 years studying the Bible and teaching adult Sunday school to find out myself.
     
12. History is always written by the winners (slide). Quite a statement to be made by a British Royal Historian Knighted by the Queen. Here he was referring to the lack of confirmation of the authenticity of the Bible.
     
13. "…Christian and pagans began warring…(slide) Pagan and Christian conflict was not the primary threat to the empire (Christians were only 10% of population) the real problem was within Christianity. Arianism was causing unrest so C invited 1800 bishops to attend the C of N.
    
    Not 325 AD. in any case. Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 and granted freedom of worship to Christians in the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. Constantine disagreed with persecution even while a worshiper of the sun god. Christianity was made the state religion of the Roman Empire in 381 after the death of Constantine in 337 AD.
     
14. "Constantine.."was a lifelong pagan who…(slide) Not a lifelong pagan although a Christian he was still an absolute monarch ruling an empire still largely pagan. Dies several days after his baptism wearing white robes. Had desired to be baptized in the Jordan as was Jesus but could not. Convinced baptism washed away all previous sins and could not be repeated postponed until near death. Not uncommon at the time particularly for those in power.

Open for Q & A

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