So the blockbuster arrives and it does so with more of a whimper than a bang.
It seems hard to find a decent review of this much anticipated film (this one from The Times seems fairly typical). But this site isn’t about film reviews.
What’s all the fuss about?
It is quite hard to pin it down really. The best-seller which spawned the movie is based on a large number of well-documented errors or hoaxes, and despite its misleading frontpiece has very little to do with ‘fact’. There are plenty of sites which deal with the reliability of the New Testament record, and the factual errors in the book – for example The Da Vinci Code Fraud (still slightly incomplete) or Are the Biblical Documents Reliable? (only dealing with this one aspect of the issues raised).
As a non-Christian commented of the film to a friend recently, “Why would that challenge your faith?” And I really hope it doesn’t. In fact, the book/film provide Christians with an excellent opportunity to get talking to people about the true Jesus and His free gift of salvation. So it is an opportunity more than a challenge.
The Heart of Man
What is striking about all the interest in the Da Vinci Code is the way it demonstrates a truth about the heart of man. As sinful human beings, we are always very keen to latch onto anything which brings the Lord Jesus Christ down to our level. Any half-baked idea, regardless of the paucity of evidence, is eagerly seized as truth. We saw exactly the same thing recently with the Gospel of Judas (have a look here and in the follow-up articles for a helpful discussion of that, and or alternatively at this helpful article from BeThinking).
It is this tendency – to explain away Jesus, so that we don’t have to deal with the real claims He makes on our lives – which means we ditch the well-documented, historically reliable evidence presented in the New Testament documents, and prefer to swallow a lie.