Sermon Tone Analysis

! Introduction: 

Titus 1:9 says that the overseers in the church are not only to /exhort/ in sound doctrine, but they are to “/refute/ those who contradict.”

Tonight is one of those nights, once again, where we felt it necessary to pause from our verse by verse teaching through the word of God to refute some of the popular false teachings that that have been put forth in thee enormously popular book called: The Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Code was written by Dan Brown, a former English teacher, and was released in March of 2003.

This book is adversely influencing the way millions of people think about...

 

--Jesus

--the Bible

--the Gospel

--and the Church.

Today (figures below are from April 2006) just three years since its publication, the book has…

 

●    sold approximately 40 million copies

●    become one of the most widely read books of all time

●    earned Dan Brown more than $355 million

 

TIME Magazine named Dan Brown one the World’s 100 Most Influential People in 2005.

The Da Vinci Code is not only influencing people here in the U.S. but it is having an impact around the world.

To date, the book has been translated into 44 different languages!

The views of Dan Brown, are going to have an even greater impact in just a few weeks.

Columbia Pictures has made the book into a movie, directed by Ron Howard that will star Tom Hanks in the lead role.

The worldwide movie release date:  May 19, 2006

 

To say that a tidal wave of fresh skepticism regarding the Christian faith is about to be unleashed by the movie would be the understatement of the year.

I believe that this movie is going to have an /enormous/, long term, /negative/ impact on the credibility of the Christian faith.

The book (and we are led to believe the same will be true about the movie) launches repeated attacks against Christian beliefs, even going so far as to say:

 

“…almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.”

(p.

235)

 

Although the views of Dan Brown are put forth in a /fictional/ book, they are said to be based upon historical /facts/.

Dan Brown has said…

“One of the many qualities that makes The Da Vinci Code unique is the factual nature of the story.

All the history, artwork, ancient documents, and secret rituals in the novel are accurate--as are the hidden codes revealed in some of Da Vinci's most famous paintings.”

Over and over in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown erroneously asserts that the historical information he shares with his reader is supported by:

 

●  “religious historians” (p.

36)

●  “well-documented history” (pp.

88, 113)

●  “art historians” (p.

134)

●  “all academics” (p.

158)

●  “well-documented evidence” (p.

217)

●  /and/ “scores of historians” (p.

253)

 

So, what can we (as Christians) do?

1.

It goes without saying, that we need to be /praying/ for the people who will go and see the movie.

2.

We need to /prepare/ ourselves to answer the questions that people will have.

To help you be prepared for the movie, this morning I want to examine some quotes right from the book and respond to them.

First, I will tell you a little bit about the plot.

Overview of The Da Vinci Code

 

The Da Vinci Code is a modern day, murder mystery.

The book begins with the mysterious murder of a museum curator at the Louvre in Paris, the famous museum that houses the Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo Da Vinci.

Near the body of the dead curator, police find a mysterious writing (a cipher).

While working to solve the cryptic message, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology, and Sophie Neveu, a cryptologist, [one who studies cryptic codes] discover a trail of clues hidden in the paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci

 

Solving the riddle leads these two individuals, Robert and Sophie on a pursuit all over France and England in search of the Holy Grail, (that mythological cup that some believe caught Jesus’ blood during his crucifixion).

Their search for the Holy Grail ends with the discovery that the Holy Grail is not a cup but rather a person, Mary Magdalene, whom the book says was...

 

--the wife of Jesus

--the mother of their child Sarah

--and the person whom Jesus chose to lead the church after His death

 

According to The Da Vinci Code, these and many other truths about Christianity have been suppressed by the Catholic Church for the past two thousand years but secretly handed down through the centuries by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion.

This secret society, Brown says, included such well know persons as...

 

--Isaac Newton

(1642 - 1747, mathematician, physicist, scientific intellect, discoverer of the universal laws of gravitation)

 

--Leonardo da Vinci,

   (1452 - 1519, painter, architect, engineer, mathematician and philosopher)

 

...who, according to Brown, hid clues about these matters in his painting of “The Last Supper.”

Many scholarly articles, books, and even TV programs have come out exposing the fact that the “secret files” about this Priory of Sion found at a French library upon which Brown builds his case, were actually a hoax.

There is no evidence that Leonardo da Vinci was a member of a secret society, or that such a society even existed back in that day.

One of the challenges in putting together an hour long study on this book was deciding which errors to address.

The book is jam packed with historical error, deception, and a variety of falsehoods.

There are easily 50 or more passages in the book that contain errors of one sort or another.

Obviously we will only have time to look at a handful or two of these.

I’ve broken down some of the errors in the book into five categories.

You’ll be able to remember them, with the acronym C.O.D.E.S.

 

First we’ll see that Dan Brown errs when he speaks of the...

 

            1.

Corruption of the Scriptures

            2.

Origin of the Deity of Christ

            3.

Development of Sunday Worship

            4.

Establishment of the Canon of Scripture

            5.

Singleness of our Lord

 

Let’s first consider how the book errs when it speaks of...

1.

The Corruption of the Scriptures

 

Brown asserts in his book...

 

“…The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds.

Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions.

History has never had a definitive version of the book.”

(p.

231)

 

Obviously we would agree with the first part of this statement.

“…The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds.”

The Bible itself tells us in...

 

2 Peter 1:21

“...holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.”

NKJV

 

God superintended the writings of more than 40 different authors whom He inspired to make sure that what He wanted written was actually written.

We also know that the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic manuscripts of the Bible have been translated into numerous translations.

The Wycliffe Bible Translation members and their coworkers alone have translated the New Testament into 578 languages thus far.

But for Dan Brown to continue the popular myth that the Bible we have today is unreliable because it has “evolved” through numerous “additions, and revisions” betrays the fact that Brown is ignorant of the facts surrounding the transmission of the Biblical text or has purposefully thrown the facts aside to advance his own agenda.

There are two pools of evidence that prove conclusively that the text of the Bible has not undergone corruption or change down through the centuries.

A.

The Manuscript Evidence

 

Manuscript?

What is a manuscript?

A manuscript is a hand-written copy of an ancient document that predates the invention of the printing press in 1455.

Today there survive 24,633, partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament alone, not to mention the tens of thousands of Old Testament manuscripts that survive today dating back to as early as the third century B.C.

These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the New Testament that we have in our possession today is the same New Testament that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago.

There also exists today tens of thousands of manuscript copies of the Old Testament proving that the Old Testament was transmitted accurately down through the centuries.

There was an amazing discovery in 1947.

In Israel a shepherd boy tending his father’s sheep in Qumran, north and to the west of the Dead Sea in Israel, made an amazing discovery while looking for a lost sheep.

There in Qumran, in a hillside cave that had laid untouched for nearly two thousand years, he discovered an ancient collection of hand written copies of the Old Testament.