The Da Vinci Con: Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Con: |
1. Story of The Da Vinci
Code: Murder Mystery
2. Story of The Da Vinci Code: Historical Secret 5. Mary Magdalene in the Bible 6a. Opus Dei 7. Questions of Jesus’s True Identity 9. Christian Sources: Biblical Texts 11. St. Ignatius of Antioch – AD 110 12. "Alternate" Gospels: Gospel of Peter (c. AD 130) 13. St. Justin, Martyr – AD 151 14. St. Irenaeus of Lyon – AD189 15. "Alternate" Christianities 17. The ‘Muratorian’ Canon – c. AD 200 18. Constantine 19. Council of Nicaea - AD 325 20. St. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (c. AD 330) 22. Codex Sinaiticus 24. Philosophical Issues: Diversity of Christianities 25. Philosophical Issues: Subjectivism of Belief 26. Theological Issue: Was Jesus married?
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Story of The Da Vinci Code: The Secret of the Holy Grail (presented as historical fact)The central beliefs of Christians – that Jesus Christ is divine, the Only Son of God and that the Bible is the inspired Word of God which records the truth about who he is and what he taught – these beliefs of Christians are false, essentially fabrications of the fourth century pagan Roman emperor Constantine. The real truth about Jesus is that he was mortal, exclusively human prophet, and rightful heir to David as King of Israel, who taught respect for the Sacred Feminine in both spiritual matters (God is both Father and Mother) and in human matters (women are equal to men). Not only was Jesus only a man, he was married to Mary Magdalene and together they had a daughter, Sarah. After Jesus’ crucifixion, Mary fled to Gaul (what is today southern France). As bearing in herself Jesus’ royal blood, Mary is herself the Holy Grail (a corruption of an old French term that actually means "royal blood"). The Holy Grail is not the cup that contained Jesus’ blood at the Last Supper, or his blood from the crucifixion, but at once, Mary Magdalene who contained his blood in bearing his child, and the royal bloodline descended from that child. The belief that Jesus is divine, the Only Son of God, that he died as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of humanity, that he miraculously rose from dead after three days, and that all of this is accurately reported in the Bible – these beliefs were invented by the Emperor Constantine and accepted as dogma at the Council of Nicaea which he summoned in AD 325. The original followers of Jesus did not consider him divine or God or even god-like. The original teaching and intent of Jesus was recorded by thousands of his followers during his lifetime and in over eighty (80) gospels, including what are now called Gnostic Gospels: for example, the Gospels of Thomas, of Mary (Magdalene), of Philip, of Peter, of Judas and many others. 300 years after Jesus died and Mary fled to France, the number of Christians in the Roman Empire had grown considerably, but the official religion of the Empire was Sun worship (Sol Invictus – the Invincible Sun). Thus, conflicts between Roman pagans and Christians were threatening to tear the Empire apart. Constantine, wanting to unify the Empire with one religion chose to merge pagan Sun worship with the religion founded by the mortal prophet Jesus. In the year 325, he therefore called the Council of Nicaea where it was proposed to the assembled bishops that they start considering Jesus to be divine, the one God (which Romans already worshiped); the measure passed, but only by a slim margin. The assembled Christian bishops essentially agreed to change the teaching of Jesus in order to secure for themselves the favor of the Roman Emperor, and so this is how the Roman Catholic Church – the Vatican, as Brown usually refers to it – was formed. But in order to sell this new teaching about Jesus, Constantine needed a new Bible, one that contained accounts of Jesus as divine and god-like and disparaged Mary Magdalene, so he found (or re-edited) the four Gospels of the New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – for this purpose. All of the original (i.e., Gnostic) Gospels, he collected and had burned. Thus, Jesus’ teaching about the sacredness of woman and the feminine was suppressed and forgotten, and a patriarchal, oppressive Catholic Church – led from the Vatican – controlled people’s spiritual, and often temporal, lives. The Church (Catholic and Christian) and the Bible it wrote were invented to further a politically expedient lie, and every ruthless, blood-soaked means was employed to perpetuate and consolidate that lie. (Unknown to the Vatican – until discovered in the middle of the 20th century among the Dead Sea Scrolls and at a place in Egypt called Nag Hammadi – some of those suppressed Gnostic Gospels have survived, and so the truth about Jesus is at last becoming known despite the nefarious efforts of the Church.) While Constantine and the Vatican were reinventing Christianity, however, the holy and royal line descending from Jesus and Mary Magdalene secretly continued in France and eventually formed or was joined to the Frankish dynasty of kings, the Merovingians, who ultimately ruled France in Clovis I (c. 500 AD). After 200 years or so, this dynasty was deposed, but Jesus’ royal blood line continued in secret among the nobility of France. Eventually, when the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem in 1099, a French noble of the Merovingian line, formed a secret society, the Priory of Sion, and commissioned the Knights Templar (secretly founded for this purpose) to excavate under the site of the Temple to find documents hidden there for 1000 years which would prove the royal lineage descending from Jesus. The Knights Templar did find the documents and other artifacts which would disprove the lies on which the (Catholic) Church was founded, for they would show that Jesus was not divine and was, in fact, married to Mary Magdalene. The Templars had found the real Holy Grail. They took their treasure back to Europe, and used their knowledge of this explosive secret to amass great wealth (presumably by blackmailing the Vatican into paying the Templars to continue keeping the truth secret). Eventually, in 1307 the Vatican, under Pope Clement V grew strong enough to direct the King of France, Philip IV, to arrest the Templars, try them as heretics, burn them at the stake and confiscate their riches. All of this did take place, but the pope and king’s attempt to acquire the Grail documents, and so destroy evidence of Jesus’ true identity, failed, and the Grail documents passed into the possession of the Priory of Sion, where they have remained hidden up to today. The Priory of Sion has been headed by a number of illustrious men over the centuries, including Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Sir Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo. Leonardo, in particular, left clues as to the true identity of Mary Magdalene as the Holy Grail in his famous Last Supper. In 1975, a collection of documents describing the Priory of Sion were finally discovered as having been deposited in the National Library of France which gave the first public evidence of the existence and make-up of this secret society. The Vatican, or at least extreme members within the Catholic Church, such as Opus Dei, are still trying to find and destroy the evidence that disproves the lie at the heart of all Christian belief. Brown’s alleged historical facts (and the truth behind the fiction):
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