WHAT'S ALL THE FUSS ABOUT?

By Bernard Katz

The Catholic Church is on the offensive, sending its apologists into the fray against the movie The Da Vinci Code. One such apologist is Dr. Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission and founder of Movieguide.org. Here's his summary of the Church's counter-attack:

"It would be wonderful to believe Christians can argue the facts to Dan Brown's hate-filled, fictitious attack on Jesus Christ, Christianity, the Bible, Christians, and history. The truth is, however, that many people have not read a Bible or understood their faith sufficiently to counter the story's intricacies.

Does the average person know what Gnostic Gospels are? Are people familiar with the Catholic group Opus Dei? What is the answer when Christians are asked whether Jesus married Mary Magdalene? Did they have children? Has the church hidden important facts from the faithful? These are just some of the complex issues discussed in The Da Vinci Code. Although it is fiction, it contains enough references to history to make Christians question their beliefs.

The slanderous distortions and falsehoods are as dangerous as they are numerous. The movie threatens to strike another massive blow to people's understanding and knowledge of God, Christianity, and history.

Although the movie waters down the novel's anti-Christian attacks and virulent paganism, it promotes the book and contains enough falsehoods and scurrilous conjecture to distort the truth about Jesus Christ and increase prejudice against Christians."

What an ignoramus he is! Doesn't he know that both The Da Vinci Code and the Christian Bible are both fictions? That the Church adopted many of the myths of the pagans? That the Christian Scriptures are doctored up with misquotations, have quotes that never were in the Jewish Bible, misinterpretations, and false prophecies?

That the writers of the N.T. were as loose with the facts and cavalier with the truth as those who founded Christianity? That the most important founders of Christianity were hopelessly at odds with each other—with Jesus, Paul, and Peter disagreeing with each other?

That the life of Jesus is not recoverable because it is full of contradictions and fables? In his book What Is the Bible? Professor Rolland Wolf gives us the truth, saying: "The final religion of the Bible is a tragic affair, a religion of radical anti-climax, as found in the latest books of the New Testament. The communion was made into a matter of transubstantiation. In the book of Hebrews, Jesus was transformed into a great high priest, with all the accompanying paraphernalia. In the book of Revelation, Jesus was made into a militarist hero, as the king and conqueror of the world, with his tongue elongated into a two-edged sword with which to cut off the heads of his enemies. This religion wallows in the sadism connected with its concepts of the judgment day and terrors of hell, with its lake of fire."

That the whole Protestant Reformation and its resultant churches and sects were and are composed of people who think that Roman Catholicism is a fraud and a fiction?

That many of the early Christians were Gnostics and that some of their theology is part of the N.T. as witnessed by, say, John 8:44?

That primitive Christianity was unlike its current practitioners in that it rejected wealth and was therefore anti-capitalist—for it actually started out as a communist community?

That its prophecy of the world soon coming to an end was one of the world's greatest con jobs?

Was Thomas Jefferson wrong when, in 1823, he wrote in a letter to his friend John Adams: "And the day will come, when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter?"

Is there a difference between The Da Vinci Code and the New Testament? Not at all—for both are fictions!