[my notes for leading a discussion group after a sermon on the book and movie]
How many have read the book? Plan to read the book? Plan to see the movie? Definitely not see the movie?
Do you have to read the book or see the movie to have a discussion with someone about it? If not, how can you engage in a conversation?
□ Understand principal issues raised by the book and be able to discuss – ask, “What did you find most interesting or stimulating or unusual?” then respond to that.
Try to answer any questions, but rather than get overwhelmed by the sheer number of claims and assertions in the book about secret societies and Mary Magdalene, really can focus on one primary question:
How do we know what we know?
□ Experience?
□ Scripture?
□ Emotions?
“With the benefit of more than sixteen hundred years of hindsight, some experts now see those Gnostic ‘heretics’ denounced by early church officialdom as having been on a more humanist, more philosophical, more feminist, and more ‘Christian’ spiritual path than those who ultimately triumphed.” (‘The Church Triumphant’ by Dan Burstein, author of Secrets of the Code, in Secrets of the Da Vinci Code, U.S. News and World Report Special Edition, p. 48.)
□ What (if anything) is wrong with that statement?
Historic Christianity is just that – historic, rooted in history, in real things that really happened. Paul sums it up in a very sobering and simple way, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (1 Corinthians 5:17 – read the whole chapter to get the impact). John was equally emphatic about distinguishing true from false spirits based on the historicity of the incarnation (1 John 4:2,3; 2 John 7). Christianity would be the easiest religion in the world to disprove. It depends on specific historical facts.
Even Jesus indicated such an emphasis: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.” Not just follow my teachings, but look to a specific historical event (foreshadowed 1500 years earlier by another specific historical event.)
Gospels, NT letters written within 75 years of the events, most much earlier – 20 years.
□ Jesus had ascended, apostles and immediate followers dying, being martyred – realized needed to write all this down and pass along.
□ Close enough to original events – current efforts to document experiences of WWII veterans and Holocaust survivors. Last week the final Titanic survivor who remembered the experience died. Here was a person who could give at least some eye-witness information (she was 5) from an event that happened in 1912 – 94 years ago.
□ Documents like that (written within a generation or so of the events) are easily refuted – “I was there and that is not what happened.” Or “My uncle Ephraim was there and told me the story a hundred times but not like that.” Every story in the gospels (healings, teachings, miracles, meals with others) was vulnerable to that kind of scrutiny. Or even negative testimony – “I lived in Capernaum in those days and I didn’t see any of that stuff.”
□ Other ideas and other documents began to emerge later, alterations, additions, misunderstandings, incomplete information, embellishments. Just like the Da Vinci Code – more attractive, more exciting, more intriguing, or more salacious, more self-exalting – more fun to believe.
□ Gradual development of the canon – Ignatius, Irenaus, Justin,…
□ History of the Alamo as an example
□ Who would you trust to describe George Washington? One of his contemporaries or someone 100 years later trying to put his own political agenda into Washington’s mouth? Basically what the Gnostic Gospels were.
Copyright 2006 by Michael Wiebe