ah, finally i've come to the last part of the interesting things tt i've been reading frm Secrets of the Code. i'm sorry if the last few entries bored you to death. all these 3 entries aren't actually meant for the casual blog-reader. i intended to share these w/ those who really and eagerly want to seek the truth behind the Da Vinci Code (DVC).

Chp 9 - Temples of Symbols, Cathedrals of Codes - The Secret Language of Arcitectural Symbolism


The "Symbology" of DVC
An Interview with Diane Apostolos-Cappadona
In the previous chapter, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona discussed Brown's references to Leonardo. Here she turns her attention to Brown's use of symbolism. Although, she points out below, she never heard the word symbologist (Robert Langdon's alleged field of expertise at Harvard) until she read Dan Brown's work, she is about as close as one can get to being a real-life professional symbologist.


What is the importance of symbols in Christianity - and in religion in general?

Symbols are a form of communication. However, this is a form of communication that is multileveled, or multilayered, and in that there is no equal, one-for-one exchange. This is what makes them both fascinating and difficult, or confusing. Symbols operate on a variety of levels: they do such "simple things" as teach the ideas or the history of a faith or tradition, teach the stories of religious or societal traditions, teach religious doctrine, and explain how one is to gesture and posture and stand during liturgical services. They tell you about communicating with members of your community, and how to identify yourself within that community. There is the further understanding that symbols - and this principle is at work for all world religions, not specifically Christianity - are a way of communicating an embodied identity of knowledge and an embodied identity of who this community is. So symbolism and symbols are an integral part of the socialisation process.

Do the meanings of symbols tend to change over time?

Yes, the meanings of symbols can change because of shifts in theology, doctrine, art styles, politics, and economic situations. For example, enormous changes in symbolism occurred during the Reformation, which was a complex umbrella of economic, political, and social transformations, as well as a religious revolution. This is the problem with symbols, and simultaneously the fascination; it's never as simple as a red light means stop and a green light means go.

What's a Christian symbol that's changed over time?

The fish has had multiple connections and meanings, from the Last Supper to the risen Christ. The fish was found in original depictions of the Last Supper. The fish has many meanings in early Christianity; then, it basically disappeared from the Christian consciousness ... only to return in the late 20th century when the ichthyus was retrieved, or rediscovered, as a symbol. It, not the cross, was the first symbol of Christian identity. The cross didn't become an identifying and visual symbol until the 4th or 5th centuries. The fish, from the Greek ichthys, as it is transliterated into English, is related to an anagram of the earliest prayer of the Christian tradition. Taking the first letter of each word from the prayer "Jesus Christ, Son of God and Saviour," the Greek letters spell ICHTHYS - that is, the fish. There were several connections in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures between the fish and the Messiah. For example, there was the verbal connection to the "fishers of men", and further connections with relation to water, fish, fishing, and boats in early Christianity.

What symbols historically have been connected to Mary Magdalene?

The most important one is the unguent jar, which relates to her being the anointer and connects her symbolically, if not metaphorically, to the other women anointers in the scripture, including the women who anointed the feet and the head of Jesus before the crucifixion. The female anointer who cared for - that is, washed, anointed, and dressed - the body of the deceased was a common practice in Mediterranean cultures. These anointers were always women. It was taboo for men to wash and anoint the dead. Women were considered "unclean", so for them to wash and anoint the deas was not inappropriate; this may be a negative reading for women. However, you could relate this activity to a Jungian reading - that every man has 3 women in his life: his mother, his wife, and his daughter. Each woman initiates him into a different part of his life - and one of the functions of the daughter, ultimately, was to purify and anoint her parents' bodies after death. Then again, there are all of those wonderful legends about Magdalene's unguent jar over the centuries. My favourite story related to the unguent jar is from the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of the Saviour (Chapter 5). Mary of Magdala buys a jar of unguents to anoint the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Her purchase turns out to be the jar that was put on the shelf after the birth of this child named Jesus, and which contained within the nard his umbilical cord. So that the anointing of his body becomes profoundly symbolic: making him whole again and reconnecting him to his mother at the end of his life.

What about the pentacle, which is used as an important symbol in DVC?

The pentacle has 5 sides. The symbolic meaning is related to numbering, numerology, and the significance of the number 5. In Christianity, 5 is the number of the wounds of the crucifed Jesus (his 2 hands, his 2 feet and his pierced side). 5 relates fundamentally to the concept of "the human" - 2 arms, 2 legs, and a head. Numbers have meanings. There are mystical numbers, normally odd numbers, and therefore indivisible. 7, for example, is the number of fulfillment; there are 7 days in the creation story. 3 is a mystical number and so forth: 3, 5 and 7.

What about the idea put forth in DVC that the Holy Grail is actually Mary Magdalene?

That's a very Jungian reading of Mary Magdalene - women as receivers and containers, women as vessels. But historically this is a connection that is older than Jung. You find this symbolism in classical mythologies. There are a variety of metaphors here. The mysterious connection in terms of sexual intercourse is the one that matters most. Women receive the male during sexual intercourse. They thereby conceive a child and hold that child in their sacred vessel, and then expel the child from their sacred vessel. I suppose one can make an argument for Mary Magdalene as the San Graal if one is a Jungian. However, I have my own way of reading symbols, so for me it doesn't work. I think Mary Magdalene has sacramental importance, but that's not her primary importance. Who she is a mystery, and that's what makes her great to write about. I think in the year 3000 people will argue just as much about who she is or who she was as they do right now. By that I don't mean arguing about a prostitute or a woman of means or a poor woman or a sexual woman; I mean how she is in Christianity perhaps the one mirror of all aspects of humanity. The one thing she isn't is a mother or wife, as far as we know.

What is the significance of Jesus appearing first to Mary Magdalene after the resurrection?

Well, I don't think it was because they were lovers or, for that matter, possibly married as Dan Brown suggests. Rather, I think it was because she signified the witness - the one for whom seeing is enough to believe. This is as a parallel to Thomas, who had to touch the wounds and physically feel the body of Jesus - that is, the empirical evidence - before he would believe that Jesus had been resurrected. I think there are ways of reading scripture that argue for Jesus being very feminist. One way is that it is the women who continue to believe in him, who are faithful to him unto his death and provide the rituals of his death, his dying, his mourning, his burial; and it is the women who still come and who are not afraid. To me, the principle is faith, that never loses hope, the people for whom to see is enough to understand. To me it is empowering of women and of the feminine. Intuition is more important to me than reason. The Mary Magdalenes of this world trust their intuition, the Thomases do not.

Book II - The Da Vinci Code Revealed
Part I - 24 Hours, 2 Cities, and the Future of Western Civilisation
Chp 10 - Apocrypha and Revelations


FACT: The Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organisation. In 1975 Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci ... All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.

 - Dan Brown, DVC


The above statement from Dan Brown has wielded an enormous power of suggestion over readers. DVC, after all, is a novel. In other words, it is a work of fiction. Every detail is not supposed to be factual and accurate in fiction. Indeed, fiction is supposed to be the province of the authorial imagination. Everyone who buys the book knows this. And yet, somehow, the combination of the extremely well-sculpted and detailed realism of many passages, the big events and issues from history that every reader feels he or she should know more about but doesn't, and the compelling logic of conspiracy theory (i.e., the reason you don't know something is that powerful forces have intentionally kept you in the dark about it), have all worked together to cause readers to take this particular work of fiction very seriously - as seriously as if it were a work of ... nonfiction.

The reader's fascination with trying to separate fact and fiction has turned deciphering DVC into its own Holy Grail hunt. To add value to the hunt, Secrets of the Code made up a list of typical reader questions about DVC and turned the list over to investigative journalist David Shugarts, a writer with an extremely keen eye for detail, who was fascinated by DVC, but troubled here and there by annoying plot details that didn't seem quite right to him. Shugarts combined the search for answers to readers' questions with his own questions, and set off like a bloodhound to track down answers.

Let us make the caveat at the outset: we know that DVC is a work of fiction. We fully appreciate the creative mind of Dan Brown that has woven so many interesting facts and historical concepts into the murder mystery-action thriller-potboiler genre. But given the author's opening claim about the factual nature of the material, and given how seriously the debate generated by the novel has been taken by some, we thought it would be fun to share with our readers the many plot holes and flaws that Shugarts has uncovered. It is also interesting to see some of the intriguing details in the text he discovered that are accurate or thought provoking, but which the casual reader might have missed on first encounter. For more of Shugarts's findings beyond what is presented here, visit our website at www.secretsofthecode.com.


The Plot Holes and Intriguing Details of DVC
By David A. Shugarts


due to the many plot holes David Shugarts has uncovered (pages 379-424), i've decided not to include them in my blog entry but if anyone is interested in them, you may look for Poon Marian and maybe she'll lend the book to you.

Part II - Reviews and Commentaries on DVC
Chp 11 - Commentary, Criticism, and Observations


Code Hot, Critics Hotter
 - New York Daily News Headline, September 4, 2003


On the website explorefaith.org John Tintera wrote, "Despite being somewhat simplistic, if not outright false, I think the religious content of DVC offers a timely wake up call to the Christian church. In doing so, it invites Christians to take a fresh look at our origins and our history, both the good and the bad, which is something we don't do often enough."

Soon, however, even as the reading public continue to lap up the adventures of Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, critics who don't usually write book reviews started to comment. Religious groups that took deep offence at what they believed was Dan Brown's desire to attack or defame Catholicism or Christianity began to be heard from. They wrote long commentaries on websites and in religious publications, responding to every idea in the book that they believed to be erroneous. In some cases, they were right about their facts, and Dan Brown was wrong - on matters like when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered or some of the details of what happened at the Council of Nicea. But in many ways, the religious critics were proving Dan Brown's point: they were so frightened by the novel's popularity and the possibility that it might supercede church dogma in winning hearts and minds to an alternative view of Christianity, they felt they had to engage in polemics with a writer of popular fiction.

The notion of Brown doing meticulous research also began to come under attack a few months after the publication of the book. Some saw DVC as highly derivative of books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation - books Brown cited by name in the text of DVC and credited on his website as important to his research. As several pieces of commentary in this chapter point out, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which has been circulating widely since its publication more than 20 years ago, is generally considered to be an occultic view of myth, legend, and outright hoax, mixed in with some very intriguing historical details.

Then another thriller writer came to the fore, Lewis Perdue, who had written an earlier book called The Da Vinci Legacy in 1983, and another called Daughter of God. These books featured plot elements and characters that Perdue asserted were remarkably close to DVC. Among the similarities: a deep, dark secret from early Christian history involving a Gnostic female messiah named Sophia, dead art curators, Swiss banks, Leonardo da Vinci, Mary Magdalene, discussions of goddess cults, and much more. A drama may play out in the courts over these similarities. But in the meantime, it looks like another battle is looming in Hollywood where Ron Howard is working on a film of DVC for Sony Pictures, while the creator of Survivor, Mark Burnett, has optioned the Perdue novels.

In the rest of this chapter, we offer a variety of commentaries on DVC, critical essays, and interesting observations. We welcome our readers to join in the dialogue and post their own views on our website, www.secretsofthecode.com.


Religious Fiction
By David Klinghoffer
David Klinghoffer's new book is The Discovery of God: Abraham and the Birth of Monotheism (Doubleday). This article originally appeared in the National Review, December 8, 2003. It is reprinted by permission of National Review, 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016.


The best thing about DVC is that the conspiracy is just an awfully neat one. What makes for an outstanding conspiracy? It doesn't have to be real, as this one is surely not, despite Brown's inclusion of a preface boldly headlined "FACT". One requirement is a complex array of lore. Brown has that: he provides many fascinating historical and quasi-historical tidbits - like the symbolic significance of the figure of a rose, the mathematical phenomenon called the Fibonacci sequence, the ancient Hebrew coding sequence called atbash, and much more, with an emphasis on the cryptic meanings of the paintings and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, all artfully woven into the plot.

Above all, a worthwhile conspiracy needs to explain something that previously you didn't know needed explaining, something also that links to a truth, or at least a pseudotruth, of deep significance. Again, pseudodepth will do fine - we're talking about entertainment, after all. DVC has this.

But this book is certainly not for everyone, for the following reason. In this sort of thriller, there has to be something urgently important at stake should the conspiracy be revealed. What's at stake in DVC is nothing less than traditional Christianity itself. The Holy Grail, we are told, is not a holy cup but rather holy blood, the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth: the founder of Christianity had a daughter, Sarah, by Mary Magdalene. If true, this theory would overturn some of the central beliefs of Christians.

As a believing Jew, I certainly can't be accused of special pleading on behalf of Christian dogma. This should give me credibility when I say that this "holy blood" theory - of Jesus having descendants - is too nutty to merit serious consideration; any suggestion that such a fact could have been kept secret for 2 millennia is absurd. Brown does acknowledge that there is some merit - some truth and beauty - in Christianity; but such merit as he sees is very far from the faith of actual Christian believers. Any Christian who is offended by fiction that directly contradicts his faith should cetainly avoid this book.

If I were a Christian, though, I think I would find it a little disturbing that some fellow Christians do in fact view this novel as a threat to their faith. Some Catholic magazines have published refutations of DVC; that they believe this is necessary indicates that many Catholics, and many in the general reading public, are taking this book far more seriously than they ought to. This also suggests that the problems in Catholic religious education are every bit as severe as Catholic conservatives have been alleging for some time now. If the professional educators were doing their job, any believing Catholic past elementary-school age would know that Brown's book is a total falsehood.

What about the book's influence in the broader culture? Here, I am calmed by the reflection that there's something profoundly religious about conspiracies in the first place, even fictitious ones. Think about this next time when you are at the beach in chilly weather. Though the sky is cloudy and a cold wind is up, you'll see people sitting on blankets in the sand just staring out to sea. Why? Because when you look at the ocean you get the intuition that just under the surface resides a vast hidden world of exotic, usually unseen creatures. The realisation that there's all that life underneath - in some ways a mirror of our own world on dry land but in others dramatically different - is simply thrilling. It's what keeps people's eyes glued to the ocean even when there is ostensibly nothing going on out there.

This, too, is what makes a comspiracy thrilling, the revelation of concealed complexity all around. Likewise, it's what attracts many of us to thinking about spiritual matters - the gut-level perception, powerful if unproven, of an existence beyong the one of our mundane daily lives. DVC may be silly, but in its fashion, it's also thrilling. If its popularity means people are thinking about invisible realities, that's good news.

here's part 2 of the highlights i read frm Secrets of the Code. ya, it's been a tough week continuing to read the book cos my faith has been severely tested and terribly assaulted. you could say i'm almost backsliding. it's been the worst part of my Christian walk since i was touched by the Holy Spirit in 1997.


in the midst of all the struggles, i told myself to hang on till the end of the book. i'm glad i didn't stop reading when i came across passages tt seriously undermine the roots of my faith. i almost made a rash decision to reject wat i've been believing all these 9 yrs. altho elements of doubt still linger in my mind, i'm feeling better aft reading some articles tt refute Dan Brown's claims.


alright, enough of my words. these are some parts tt i find interesting while reading the book during the past few days. my advice is to not make the decision of rejecting Christ as soon as i almost did when i read those undermining parts.


i hereby quote frm and share the sentiments w/ the author Dan Burstein:
The fact that material is presented here doesn't mean I think the arguments presented are true. It only means I think you should hear the arguments and make up your mind.

Those who do explore the Gnostic gospels discover a form of Christianity quite alien to the religion with which they are familiar. We found ourselves studying strange esoteric tracts with titles such as Hypostasis of the Archons and The Thought of Norea. It felt as if we were in an episode of Star Trek - and in a way we were. The Gnostics truly were "psychonauts" who boldly explored the final frontiers of inner space, seraching for the origins and meaning of life. These people were mystics and creative free-thinkers. It was obvious to us why they were so hated by the bishops of the Literalist Church hierarchy.

To Literalists, the Gnostics were dangerous heretics. In volumes of anti-Gnostic works - on unintentional testimony to the power and influence of Gnosticism within early Christianity - they painted them as Christians who had "gone native". They claimed they had become contaminated by the Paganism that surrounded them and had abandoned the purity of the true faith. The Gnostics, on the other hand, saw themselves as the authentic Christian tradition and the orthodox bishops as an "imitation church". They claimed to know the secret Inner Mysteries of Christianity, which the Literalists did not possess.

As we explored the beliefs and practices of the Gnostics we became convinced that the Literalists had at least been right about one thing: the Gnostics were little different from Pagans. Like the philosophers of the Pagan Mysteries, they believed in reincarnation, honoured the goddess Sophia, and were immersed in the mystical Greek philosophy of Plato, Gnostics means "Knowers", a name they acquired because, like the initiates of the Pagan Mysteries, they believed that their secret teachings had the power to impact Gnosis: direct experiential "Knowledge of God". Just as the goal of a Pagan initiate was to become a god, so for the Gnostics the goal of the Christianity initiate was to beocme a Christ.

What particularly struck us was that the Gnostics were not concerned with the historical Jesus. They viewed the Jesus story in the same way that the Pagan philosophers viewed the myths of Osiris-Dionysus - as an allegory that encoded secret mystical teachings. This insight crystallised for us a remarkable possibility. Perhaps the explanation for the similarities between Pagan myths and the biography of Jesus had been staring us in the face the whole time, but we had been so caught up with traditional ways of thinking that we had been unable to see it ...


Diverging Views on Mythic Beginnings: Was Genesis History with a Moral, or a Myth with Meaning?
By Stephan A. Hoeller
Excerpt from Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Traditons of Inner Knowing by Stephan A. Hoeller. Copyright © 2002 by Stephan A. Hoeller. Reprinted by permission of Quest Books/The Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Ill.


Most Westerners assume that Western culture has only one creation myth: the one in the first 3 chapters of Genesis. Few seem to be aware that there is an alternative: the creation myth of the Gnostics. This myth may strike us as novel and startling, yet it offers views of the creation and of our lives that are well worth considering.

The non-Gnostic, or orthodox, view in early Christendom regarded most of the Bible, particularly Genesis, as history with a moral. Adam and Eve were historical personages whose tragic transgression resulted in the Fall, and from their Fall later human beings were to learn portentous moral lessons. One consequence of this reading of Genesis was the ambivalent and worse than ambivalent status of women, who were regarded as Eve's co-conspirators in disobedience in Paradise.

The Gnostic Christians, whose legacy of sacred literature we find in the splendid Nag Hammadi library, read Genesis not as history with a moral but as a myth with a meaning. They regarded Adam and Eve not as historical figures but as representatives of 2 intrapsychic principles present within every human being. Adam was the dramatic embodiment of psyche, or "soul": the mind/emotion complex where thinking and feeling originate. Eve stood for pneuma, or "spirit", representing the higher, transcendental consciousness.

There are 2 biblical accounts regarding the creation of the first woman. One tells us that Eve was created out of Adam's rib (Gen. 2:21); the other, that God created the first human pair, male and female, in his own image (Gen. 1:26-27). The second account suggests that the Creator God  himself has a dyadic nature, combining male and female characteristics. The Gnostics generally endorsed this version and developed various interpretations of it. This version accords equality to the woman, while Adam's rib version makes her subordinate to the man.

For the ancient Gnostics, the conventional image of Eve was not credible. That image presented her as the one who was led astray by the evil serpent and who, with her feminine seductive charm, persuaded Adam to disobey God. In their view, Eve was not a gullible dunce turned persuasive temptress; rather, she was a wise woman, a true daughter of Sophia, the celestial Wisdom. In this capacity, she was the one who awakened the sleeping Adam.

In another scripture, On the Origin of the World, Eve is presented as the daughter, and especially the messenger, of the divine Sophia. It is in the capacity of messenger that she comes as an instructor to Adam and raises him up from his sleep of unconsciousness. In most Gnostic scriptures, Eve appears as Adam's superior. The conclusion drawn from these texts is obviously different from that of church fathers such as Tertullian: man is indebted to woman for bringing him to life and to consciousness. One cannot help but wonder how the Western attitude toward women might have developed had the Gnostic view of Eve been the widely accepted view.

Chp 5 - Consolidation or Cover-up? - The Establishment of the One True Faith


One of the major players in this cover-up operation was a character called Eusebius who, at the beginning of the 4th century, compiled from legends, fabrications, and his own imagination the only early history of Christianity that still exists today ... All those with a different perspective ... were branded heretics and eradicated. In this way falsehoods compiled in the 4th century have come down to us as established facts ...

 - Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy


The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Didn't Get a Chance to Know
An Interview with Bart D. Ehrman
Bart D. Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Caolina at Chapel Hill. An authority on the early church and the life of Jesus, his most recent book is Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew.


A major notion of DVC is that a major alternate tradition to the Catholic Church - a side of the argument over the meaning of Jesus' life - has been lost to us for 2000 years. How do you look at this question?

There were actually a lot of different sides to the alternate tradition in Christianity, but perhaps the best examples can be found by looking at 3 of the variant forms of early Christianity: the Ebionites, the Marcionites, and the Gnostics. They are all sects within Christianity, but they are very different from each other.

The Ebionites were these Jewish Christians who emphasised the importance of being Jewish as well as Christian. The Marcionites were anti-Jewish, and believed that all things Jewish actually belong to the god of the Old Testament, who was not the true God. The Gnostics held to the belief that there were a number of different gods.

All of these groups claimed to go back to Jesus, which means they probably originated soon after Jesus' death and resurrection, or within a few decades at least. For example, the Ebionites claim that their teachings were derived from James the Just, who was the brother of Jesus, and who better to know what Jesus taught than his own brother? And they may have been right, actually - they may have been propounding beliefs that James taught. Their faith did not spread widely, however, perhaps in part because their belief that people who were Gentiles had to become Jewish to be Christian meant that men had to become circumcised, which means they probably didn't win too many converts.

The Ebionites emphasised the Jewishness of Christianity. How about the Marcionites?

The Marcionites were followers of the mid-2nd-century Greek philosopher and teacher Marcion, who had spent about 5 years in Rome working out his theological system. He believed the apostle Paul had the true insight into Christianity beacuse Paul differentiated between the law and the gospel. Marcion pushed that view to an extreme, maintaining that if there is a separation between law and gospel they must be given to humankind from 2 different gods - the god who gave the law is the god of the Old Testament, whereas the god who saved people from the law is the god of Jesus. Similarly, the wrathful god of the Old Testament is the god who created this world, and chose Israel, and gave them his law, whereas the god of Jesus is the one who saves people from this god by dying for their sins.

How about the Gnostics?

All sorts of groups, very different from each other, are classified today by scholars as Gnostics. They were so different from each other that some scholars like the historian Elaine Pagels wonder whether we should even call them Gnostic anymore. Gnostics as a rule believed that this material world we live in is a cosmic catastrophe and that somehow sparks of the divine have become entrapped in this material world and need to escape, and they can escape when they acquire true knowledge of their situation. And the Gnostic system provides them with the knowledge they need for escape, so salvation comes by getting the true knowldege necessary for salvation.

Where the Gnostics come from intellectually is difficult to determine. They appear to represent a kind of amalgam of a variety of different religions, including Judaism and Christianity and Greek philosophy, especially Platonic philosophy, and they appear to have taken elements of these various religions and philosophies and combined them together into a major religious system. We know that there was a full-blown Gnostic system in the 2nd century, probably early- to mid-2nd century, which is right around the time of Marcion. It's hard to know if Gnosticism began in Alexandria or if it began in Palestine, or where exactly, but we have evidence of Gnostics in Syria and Egypt. Eventually they make their way to Rome.

So what finished the Gnostics and these other sects? Did they just die out?

Although there were a variety of historical and cultural reasons, most of these groups probably died out because they were attacked - successfully attacked, on theological grounds - and they weren't nearly as effective in their own propaganda campaigns. They failed to recruit new converts even while the orthodox groups created a strong structure, used letter campaigns and other means to propagate their views, and their rhetoric convinced people.

But what really secured the victory was that the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. Naturally, he converted to the kind of Christianity that was dominant at that time. Once Constantine converts to an orthodox form of Christianity, and once the state has power, and the state is Christian, then the state starts asserting its influence over Christianity. So by the end of the 4th century, there's actually legislation against heretics. So the empire that used to be completely anti-Christianity becomes Christianity, and not just becomes Christianity, but also tries to dictate what shape Christianity ought to be.

The ramifications of this change of events are enormous, of course. It changed the entire way the Western world understands itself, and how people understand something. Think of the concept of guilt alone: if some other groups had won, things might have been completely different.

So did the debates stop once the church had unified itself at the Council of Nicea?

The debates didn't end, but shifted. By the time you get to the Council of Nicea, you just don't have large groups of Gnostics anymore, or Marcionites, or Ebionites. They're old history now. But it didn't stop the debates. They just became more refined, and more heated. As an example, the Council of Nicea was about a form of Christianity called Arianism, which by 2nd- or 3rd-century standards was completely orthodox. By the time you get to the 4th century, however, and the theologians have refined their beliefs, Arianism becomes a major heresy. These Arians believed Jesus must have been subservient to the Father; after all, he prays to the Father and does the Father's will. Therefore, he's a subordinate deity. But the Arians were defeated by the Christians who maintained that Christ is not a subordinate deity, but that he's been divine from eternity past, that he's always existed in relationship to God. And so Christ isn't a divine being who comes into existence - he's always been divine, and of the same substance as God the Father himself.

The shifts in theology weren't as important as another shift that took place when Constantine became a Christian. Now he, an authoritarian political leader, could decide what kind of Christianity was acceptable and what kind wasn't. Suddenly everything related to the Church became a political issue as well as a religious one. Some people think that Constantine converted to Christianity precisely because he thought that the Christian church might be able to help unify the empire because unlike paganism, which worshipped lots of different gods in lots of different ways, Christianity insisted on one god, one way. That is why Constantine may have called the Council of Nicea - if the church was going to play the role of unifying the empire, the church itself must be unified. That is the when, why, and how it became a political issue.


Heretics, Women, Magicians, and Mystics: The Fight to Become the One True Faith


Heresies, loosely speaking, are those views that disagree with the official doctrinal version. One man's fervent belief is another man's heresy, and so it was for Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Eusebius, 3 of the early ecclesiasts who helped to define what was Christian and to eliminate what was not. Which made it a short leap of faith, through a millennium, to the abyss of the Malleus Maleficarum - the book, as Dan Brown puts it, that "indoctrinated the world to 'the dangers of free-thinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture, and destroy them".


Tertullian

Tertullian, like, Irenaeus, was one of the early church fathers who attacked the Gnostics and is singled out by some (see the excerpts from Freke and Gandy that start this chapter) as one of the chief perpetrators of the church's attempt to cover up the existence of a robust counter-tradition. The Gnostics were in many ways the most troubling, for Gnosticism incorporated some distinctly pre-Christian (not to mention pagan) ideas and its very name referred to the concept of secret knowledge.

Women carried an even greater burden of sin. "The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in the age," Tertullian insisted. "The guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil's gateway." But he still isn't through. "And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives."

As a Christian, he believed that we would know God only through practising strict discipline and austerity. The force threatening to subvert that impulse in man was woman, who, Tertullian wrote, brought sin into the world. "Do you not know," Tertullian asks rhetorically, "that you are each an Eve?"

Heretics, he believed, were put on earth to test man's Faith. These heresies came about for 2 reasons. The first was the temptation offered by philosophers, like Plato, who simply want to engage in endless questions rather than simply accept the Word.


Breaking The Da Vinci Code: So the Divine and Infallible Word Emerged Out of a 4th-Century Power-Play? Get Real.
By Collin Hansen
Copyright © by Christianity Today. Used by permission of Christian History magazine. This and other resources available at www.christianhistory.com.


Dan Brown's DVC has achieved coveted bestsellerdom, inspiring an ABC News special along the way, along with debates about the legitimacy of Western and Christian history.

While the ABC News feature focused on Brown's fascination with an alleged marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, DVC contains many more (equally dubious) claims about Christianity's historic origins and theological development. The central claim Brown's novel makes about Christianity is that "almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false." Why? Because of a single meeting of bishops in 325, at the city of Nicea in modern-day Turkey. There, argues Brown, church leaders who wanted to consolidate their power base (he calls this, anachronistically, "the Vatican" or "the Roman Catholic church") created a divine Christ and an infallible Scripture - both of them novelties that had never before existed among Christians.

Brown is right that in the course of Christian history, few events loom larger than the Council of Nicea in 325. When the newly converted Roman emperor Constantine called bishops from around the world to present-day Turkey, the church had reached a theological crossroad. Led by an Alexandrian theologian named Arius, one school of thought argued that Jesus had undoubtedly been a remarkable leader, but he was not God in flesh. In DVC, Brown apparently adopts Arius as his representative for all pre-Nicene Christianity. Referring to the Council of Nicea, Brown claims that "until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet - a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless".

In reality, early Christians overwhelmingly worshipped Jesus Christ as their risen Saviour and Lord. For example, Christians adopted the Greek word kyrios, meaning "divine", and applied to Jesus from the earliest days of the church.

The Council of Nicea did not entirely end the controversy over Arius's teachings, nor did the gathering impose a foreign doctrine of Christ's divinity on the church. The participating bishops merely affirmed the historic and standard Christian beliefs, erecting a united front against future efforts to dilute Christ's gift of salvation.

With the Bible playing a central role in Christianity, the question of Scripture's historic validity bears tremendous implications. Brown claims that Constantine commissioned and bankrolled a staff to manipulate existing texts and thereby divinise the human Christ. Yet for a number of reasons, Brown's speculations fall flat. Brown correctly points out that "the Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven". Indeed, the Bible's composition and consolidation may appear a bit too human for the comfort of some Christians. But Brown overlooks the fact that the human process of canonisation had progressed for centuries before Nicea, resulting in a nearly complete canon of Scripture before Nicea or even Constantine's legalistaion of Christianity in 313.

Ironically, the process of collecting and consolidating Scripture was launched when a rival sect produced its own quasi-biblical canon. Around 140 a Gnostic leader named Marcion began spreading a theory that the New and Old Testaments didn't share the same God. Marcion argued that the Old Testament's God represented law and wrath while the New Testament's God, represented by Christ, exemplified love. As a result Marcion rejected the Old Testament and the most overtly Jewish New Testament writings, including Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Hebrews. He manipulated other books to downplay their Jewish tendencies. Though in 144 the church in Rome declared his views heretical, Marcion's teaching sparked a new cult. Challenged by Marcion's threat, church leaders began to consider earnestly their own views on a definitive list of Scriptural books including both the Old and New Testaments.

By the time of Nicea, church leaders debated the legitimacy of only a few books that we accept today, chief among them Hebrews and Revelation, because their authorship remained in doubt. In fact, authorship was the most important consideration for those who worked to solidify the canon. Early church leaders considered letters and eyewitness accounts authoritative and binding only if they were written by an apostle or close disciple of an apostle. This way they could be assured of the documents' reliability. As pastors and preachers, they also observed which books did in fact build up the church - a good sign, they felt, that such books of today's Bible have allowed Christianity to spread, flourish, and endure worldwide.

borrowed a book from Marian.


Secrets of the Code
The Unauthorised Guide
to the Mysteries behind The Da Vinci Code (DVC)
edited by Dan Burstein


been reading it since last friday. of course i haven't finished it yet. only almost halfway thru. this book has raised some questions in my mind - questions of doubt.


i pray tt thru the process of exploring the truth via this book and attending the DVC seminar: Sorting Fact from Fiction at St. Andrew's Cathedral on March 25, my doubts will be clarified and my faith strengthened cos during these few days of reading this book, i can feel tt i've already drifted away frm God quite abit.

wa.
i think i've lost the love and inspiration to blog nowadays.
well i shall try something different today.


was reading TIME magazine when i came across these cool statements.
i'm not quite a movie-watcher nor a cinema-goer.
but i like these analogies made by those movie peeps.



Moviegoing is an almost religious act: a Mass experience. You walk into a cathedral, feel your spirit soar with hundreds of other communicants and watch the transubstantiation of images into feelings. The audience becomes a community, the movie the Communion.

 - Richard Corliss



A 65-ft.-wide screen [about 20 m] and 500 people reacting to the movie - there is nothing like that experience.

 - Michael Mann



With enough strangers in the room, you become part of this collective human soul - which is a much more powerful way to watch a movie than seeing it alone at home.

 - M. Night Shyamalan



Moviegoing is like watching a football game. Who in the world would go out in 20-below weather and sit there and watch a football game where you can barely see the players? Football games are on TV, and it doesn't affect stadium attendance at all. It's the same with movies. People who really love movies and like to go out on a Saturday night will go to the movie theater.

 - George Lucas

i'm writing this entry in response to a friend's entry.
this is wat she wrote:



Three of my church members were eating sweets on the bus.
I admit, i ate one too.
then suddenly i realised that we are not suppose to eat on public transport.
So, maybe half-heartedly, i told them not to eat on the bus le,
cos public transport cannot eat.
They tot i was joking, and just continued to eat.
Then, after a while, i sort of showed my displeasure, or like saying:
" eh... dun eat leh.. breaking the law leh. "
but they went on. cos my face still had a smile on it. haha.
so, i said " obey ur authorities leh"...which is wronglah..
so i got corrected " its submit to your authorities" .

this is the part.
My sister, sitting beside me, said she don't like ppl using the bible to pressurize ppl.
its like forming guilt in them, and this could make them stumble.
the problem is then, wad should i do?
don't do anything?
or don't keep insisting, showing I disaprove?
she brought out a certain point that by me insisting,
it could give ppl the wrong idea that by not obeying the law,
they would not be going to heaven. and this could make them backslide.

another point is:
this is a trivial matter and you shouldn't be so particular about it.
its like eating food tat has been offered to the idols.

now my side:
why did i say that in the first place?
well, being a christian is about Faith.
God gave me this faith and grace, so that i can be right with him.
now, being right with him, do i continue to disobey him?
no. In romans, it said, "submit to your authorities..."
meaning the government given by God,
it should be a good government and doing things for our good.
now, in this context, the laws are given by our government for a gd no. of reasons.

why shouldn't ppl eat on the bus?
well, simple, cos it'll dirty the bus.

why shouldn't ppl jay walk when there is a traffic light?
cos accidents will happen.

by disobeying this laws, aren't u defying the government?
which in turn is defying God?

now, the question on Guilt.
yes guilt is a powerful emotion.
but where in the first place does this guilt come from?
ur conscience?
there must be a stand between right and wrong, for you to feel guilt.
You are aware that u are in the wrong with something and therefore feel guilty.
So, is it a bad feeling?
well, its how u look at it.
Feeling guilty, wad do u do next?
do u give up and not want to continue doing right cos its too difficult?
or do u ask God for help..
understanding that it is by Faith that we are saved and not by law.
(cos if obeying the law saves us, den we are all going to hell)

now. guilt can lead to ppl backsliding.
does that mean i don't say my stand and just let them continue?

I feel that even if this is a trivial matter, its still a matter of right and wrong.
if we can't obey simple laws like this, how can we ever think of obeying God's word?
we are imperfect ppl, but we are ppl with christ living in us.
obeying God's word is not impossible to us anymore.

i was thinking of examples in Christ.
Did he ever break a law?
even the roman laws?
no, he didn't break any gd laws set by the authorities.
tts why they couldn't find any fault with him.
the only stand he took against them was to follow the gospel.
Like the Sabbath day, no one should be working but he did healing.
In this case, this law, is it following the gospel?

now, the problem that im thinking about is,
should i insist and show my displeasure when christians do not follow the gospel?
I know, i must understand where the ppl are coming from.
in this case, they are my church friends,
and we study the same thing, believing in the same thing.
so should i be tolerant of them?
or be intolerant when they do this kind of things???



i had actually wanted to respond via her tagboard.
but i realise i've got slightly more to say.


for me i'll still eat in the bus if i can't help it.
like last saturday i bought an ice cream at lavender.
i tot my bus wouldn't arrive so soon.
but it did.
not wanting to wait for another bus, i went against the rule.

i brought my ice cream up the bus.
i knew the driver saw it so i apologised n walked in.
he kindly allowed me to board the bus.
the best way to repay him was to make sure i didn't dirty the bus.
n i did.
i finished my ice cream; every part of it went into my stomach.


i noe wat i did ain't the right thing to do.
even for a non-Christian, it's wrong to eat in the bus.
actually, it's not abt right or wrong here.
cos tt is defined by the laws set by the govt in S'pore.
such things are abt whether it's beneficial or not.
whether it's good or bad.

i learnt this frm the principal of my alma mater.
Mr Lee Hak Boon aims to abolish all rules in the school.
he came up w/ 3 questions.
We should only do things that answer "Yes" to all 3 of them.
"Is it good for myself?
Is it good for the school?
(or country in this case)
Is it good for others?"


so judging frm the above, i had obviously did the bad thing.
the 3 questions weren't answered perfectly.
yes, it was good for myself.
cos i got to enjoy an ice cream during the bus ride.
but no, it wasn't good for the country.
cos i would've dirtied the bus if i weren't careful.
and no, it wasn't good for others.
cos they might do the same in the future.


here's my response to my friend's questions:
i would do the same thing if i weren't eating then.
i would, similarly, gently tell them, "eh don't eat la, later driver scold."
if i were eating too, i'd say, "eh i think we shd stop eating la."
then i would be the first one to stop eating.
if the rest don't follow suit, there's nth more i can do.
at least i'd have done my best by encouraging others to do the right thing.


so to my friend:
you did the right thing.
don't worry too much abt it.
i think it's okay to insist a little.
if they still wouldn't listen, then you shd let them be.

it's like trying to save a soul or convert a friend.
you share w/ him/her a few times abt Christ.
perhaps many times.
but he/she seems to be unmoved.
the best thing to do is of cos to persevere on.

but for me, i would not carry on.
if he/she refuses firmly tt i share the Gospel w/ him/her.
i've already done my best.
all i can do is to pray for him/her.
unless he/she's still interested in the Gospel.

my point is you've done ur part as a Christian.
i'll say God will do the rest.
i believe your friends will come to see the big picture.
probably it's only at tt time when they didn't see it.
i hope they get to read ur blog.
then as fellow churchmates, i'm sure they'll agree w/ u.

as for the guilt part, i suggest an explanation/elaboration.
you can try telling them they needn't feel guilty.
cos if guilt's the problem, i'm sure most of us will feel it.
i dare say many ppl have eaten in the bus before.
it's just tt we're trying to stop tt.


in conclusion, i guess we shd all just follow the Holy Spirit.
if you've done something right, i believe you'll feel at peace.
but if you haven't, then something in your heart will bother you.

it's like in my case in school today.
i skipped maths lecture.
i even skipped it w/ a friend.
it's so wrong!
i'm a Christian n yet i did the wrong thing.

so may we all always choose to do the right thing.