Talk:The Da Vinci Hoax

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Skepticism

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[Untitled]

I should start by saying that I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code. I didn't necessarily believe it to be historically correct on all accounts, but it was written as a fun airplane thriller. The problem is that a lot of people do believe it... and that has caused some concern in established cirles of the Catholic Church and other christian groups.

The authors of this book, and the accompanying DVD (after viewing which I am writing this note) is hosted by a Jesuit Priest no less and who conducts interviews with said authors and all are clearly members of this concerned Catholic sector. While they do raise perfectly valid points as to the inaccuracies of Dan Brown's book, they attack it in a manner that is not level, but coming from a biased Catholic standpoint.

As an example of this, in the DVD interviews Olsen takes a lot of time talking about the age of the Gospel of Philip, placing it in the late second to early third century A.D. and thus cannot have been written by Philip himself. In this he is correct, according to scholarly thought. What he does not say is that the Canonical Gospels (Matthew, Luke and John at least) were written at the end of the first century or the beginning of the second, meaning that three of the four writers (Mark is considered to be written between A.D. 60 - 80) would have had to have celebrated their 100th birthdays while writing these papers. Not Biblically impossible, but three out of four at the beginning of the first millenium A.D? Unlikely. More reading on this can be sourced from [1].

And then there is the statement by Miesel that the Gnostic Gospels are heretical. Maybe they are in her mind, some at least are contemporary to the Canonical Gospels (Gospel of Thomas, for example) and have just as much right to be considered historically valuable as those that made it in to the Bible. To debase them as wrong and heretical because they are not Canonical writings proves that Miesel is taking a religeous and not an historical stance when it comes to debating Brown's original (or maybe not so, as they are happy to point out) book.

Our Jesuit Priest turns to the camera himself for the closing statement, well, a sermon actually, which warns that we should not let ourselves be misguided by the Da Vinci Code, but should instead look to the New Testament for the truth... While this is a point of view, it is not one that should be expressed on what was suggested to be a scholarly antithesis to a popular novel.

All in all, the Da Vinci Hoax (DVD) is not a fair and honest rebuttal of statements that Dan Brown claimed as truth within his book, but a biased religeous "I'm right and your wrong" statement which should, in my opinion, be given as much credibility as Brown's book.