Nowhere, nowhere is there any hint that Jesus had a child."īock maintains that the church has failed in its duty to teach Christians about the history of their faith, and this is why so many have faltered in the face of Brown's fiction. It's hundreds of pages in each of those volumes. "I have a collection in my office of 36 volumes that stretches about five to six feet wide.
"Again, no evidence of such a thing, and we're talking about masses of literature here," Bock said. What about Dan Brown's claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene conceived a child?
"The best you can do is get the inference out of two texts, both of which are late Gospels - the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene second, third century texts - and all they claim is, is that Jesus loved this woman more than he loved the 12." There's not an explicit text anywhere," Bock said. "There's not a single text anywhere that I'm aware of that says that Jesus was married to anybody. I asked Bock what the evidence was to support the claim that Jesus married Mary Magdalene. But while Brown says his book is fictional, he has claimed that all historical references and documents within "The Da Vinci Code" are accurate and based upon existing evidence. These hidden messages disclose an unorthodox view of Jesus - that he was not divine, that he and Mary Magdalene secretly married and conceived a child. Certain clues emerge through the works of Leonardo Da Vinci. "The Da Vinci Code" is the fictional story of a conspiracy - perpetrated by the Catholic Church and ongoing for 2,000 years - to hide the truth about Jesus. His task? To challenge the historical claims that Brown makes in his book.
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You better engage them."īock, who has written his own best-selling book, "Breaking the Da Vinci Code," has been on a road trip for a series of public events, ranging from meeting diplomats at the United Nations in New York to debating a Jewish rabbi. of people who believe that? You can't say, 'Oh, sorry, you shouldn't believe it'. Now what's the church's responsibility to that group. Take everybody in those cities, they all believe it. "That's the combined populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. "Between 20 and 33 percent of the population say they believe the book or feel they benefited from the book," Bock said.
Having read the book, and seen the public's reaction, he felt compelled to leave his ivory tower in Texas. Until recently, Darrell Bock was an obscure evangelical scholar teaching the history of the New Testament at a seminary in Dallas. Tonight, "Nightline" brings you neither a boycott nor an attack, but rather one academic's attempt to address key parts of Brown's book. The High Court in London rejected their claims, and Brown was exonerated, even though he did concede that he had drawn upon a wealth of written material in building his narrative. The theological attacks were followed last month by a legal challenge from two authors in Britain who claim that Brown plagiarized his construction of the book's plot.
Many churches and denominations have urged Christians to boycott the book on the grounds that it is blasphemous and insulting toward the very foundations of the Christian faith. In 2005, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, then a senior figure within the Vatican's office of doctrinal orthodoxy, attacked Brown's novel for being rich in "anti-Catholic" prejudice. Initially, there was an adverse response from certain sectors of the church. "The Da Vinci Code" has rarely been out of the headlines since it was published a little more than three years ago. And a little controversy hasn't harmed the book's profile, either.