What About "The DaVinci Code"?

In this regular feature, Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call.Here’s this week’s question: Dear Dave and Tom: You guys make me a little angry.You spend a lot of time bad mouthing “The Passion of the Christ,” but I haven’t heard a peep out of you or your newsletter about “The Da Vinci Code”.Why don’t you rip a book and film that is clearly blasphemous, rather than one that is truly biblical?

Tom:

Well, Dave actually I prepared an article back when the book was very popular—actually toward the end of its popularity, but it’s still popular today, but at that point I knew that Ron Howard who is a absolutely terrific director, I mean in terms of the craft, this guy is good.And I also heard that they were going to cast Tom Hanks who is an Academy Award winning actor and I thought well we’ll wait and so perhaps for the June issue we’ll do the TBC Extra page and we’ll deal with it.But he says “The Passion of the Christ” is a truly biblical movie.You know this is one of the things that concern me.Movies like “The Last Temptation,” Christians are just up in arms about it and rightly so, this movie as well, “The Da Vinci Code” I think there have been six or seven big time authors, who are Christians who have come out against it.As a matter of fact, we just got a fund appeal from Campus Crusade saying that Josh McDowell had written a book on “The Da Vinci Code” and they were looking for if we sent in so much money that they would send us a gift for our donation.But this concerns me because what movie is biblically accurate?I don’t care if it is “The Jesus Project” or “The Passion of the Christ” and it concerns me even more that people are accepting those yet finding problems with this.

Dave:

Yes, well Tom, there are lots of reasons to find problems with this, but let me just go back over it.We’ve said it before and you of course covered it in your book Showtime for the Sheep.What’s biblical about “The Passion of the Christ”?Well Jesus is in the garden and you’ve got a snake wiggling in there.A huge snake and he stands up and stomps on its head.

Tom:

Dave, wrong garden.We’ve got the wrong garden here.

Dave:

Right, it’s not in the Bible.

Tom:

So that’s not biblical.

Dave:

So you’ve got Satan there with a—it’s a woman with a monk’s cowl over her head whispering temptations—not biblical, not in the Bible.You’ve got Pilate’s wife who gathers linens and brings them to the two Marys to wipe up the blood—not in the Bible.

Tom:

But Dave, even before we get to that we have the soldiers throwing Jesus over this bridge where he’s dangling from chains confronting Judas.

Dave:

Who’s cowering underneath the bridge.

Tom:

And Mel didn’t get that from the Bible; he got it from a mystical nun and her writings, but anyway, go ahead.

Dave:

It’s not in the Bible!And then you’ve got beating and beating and beating and beating and it becomes ridiculous.Read the four gospels.There’s nothing to indicate that the treatment that Jesus got when he was crucified was any different from what was given to everybody else who was crucified.

Tom:

With the exception of the crown of thorns and the purple robe.

Dave:

Right, but as far as the physical brutality, there was no difference.You’ve got St. Veronica who gives him her veil to wipe his face and then she stands over to the side and you see the face of Jesus.This is where the first icons came from.Not in the Bible!You’ve got a raven plucking the eye out of one of the thieves.Not in the Bible!These are devices to arouse the emotion of the people, but of course as you say, they picked them up from a mystic nun.It’s not biblical and the worst part of it Tom, as we have emphasized is that you get the impression that it was the physical beating by the Roman guards that paid the penalty for our sins.That they were the executors of God’s judgment for the sins of the world upon Jesus.You get nothing that would leave you to understand that God laid on him our sins and it pleased Yahweh to bruise him.He put him to grief; he made his soul an offering for sin, so it’s really a false gospel.They are looking to the physical sufferings of this man on this cross.

Tom:

But Dave, that’s what I grew up with as a Roman Catholic; that’s what we were taught.You would expiate your own sins through suffering.Some of the greatest saints, the ones we revered the most were the ones who suffered the most.I mean any Catholic will tell you that.And Mel Gibson is a Tridentene and very strict Catholic, goes back to the Latin Mass, alright?Doesn’t accept perhaps any of Vatican II and so on.So he was giving his view of salvation.That’s what it was about.

Dave:

And it’s a tragedy Tom, because it is a false gospel.Then we have Jim Caveizel who took wafer and went to Mass every day so he would have Jesus inside of him, so he could properly depict Jesus.

Tom:

Had relics on his body to help him through this process.

Dave:

I’m sorry Tom, it’s an abomination really.

Tom:

Okay but again, “The Da Vinci Code,” it’s an abomination.“The Passion of the Christ”—we have laid this out for people, but when you try to translate in my opinion, anything from the Bible visually you have added to beyond imagination, you have added to the Scriptures, which the Scriptures condemn.

Dave:

It’s not just a paraphrase or somebody adding on their ideas—

Tom:

That’s bad enough.

Dave:

That’s bad enough, but now, Tom you can tell it, you’ve got the director, the lighting, the scripting, you’ve got the actors and actresses, the whole thing.

Tom:

Well for example Dave, let’s say you’ve got a film crew and you go to the Garden of Gethsemane, the exact place itself, alright?They look around and they say this will never fly, people won’t believe this.This is not what is in the imagination of people when they think of Gethsemane, so they go someplace else.What does that have to do with truth?It doesn’t. It has to do with perception and that’s what movies are about.That’s why you can’t use them, in my opinion, to convey what’s in the Scriptures.

Dave:

So we’ve lost the Bible and now they have the entire New Testament and they’re putting the entire Bible on video.

Tom:

The goal of the American Bible Society is to put the entire Bible on video, so people don’t have to read anymore.They don’t have to listen to preachers.All they have to do is come in and get a commentary here and there as they are watching this visually.That’s an abomination Dave.

Dave:

Absolutely.This is the WORD of God, not the picture book of God.And Peter says we are born again by the WORD of God.The Scriptures say we are to meditate on the WORD of God.Now we’ve lost the Word of God and we have the ideas of man acted out on the screen and we are raising a generation on spiritual junk food and they no longer know what God really says.