By Phil Karayan

The Book the Da Vinci Code is a publishing phenomenon, selling more then 40 million copies, a New York Times bestseller for more then 50 weeks. The Da Vinci Code has caused many to rethink their whole concept of Christianity.   Just why is this book so popular?  Why is there such a fuss being made about a novel? What is the Da Vinci Code? The book is a murder mystery suspense novel, taking place in Paris and London. The story is built around “Facts” that reveal the hidden identity of Jesus. These “Facts” reveal:  • That Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene who had a child who escaped to France. • Mary Magdalene was to head the church, but Peter and the other disciples took over. • Jesus was turned into “God” in order to protect the patriarchal system, the Catholic Church along with the rest of Christianity has worked together to maintain this 2000-year cover up.  • The secret of Jesus’ “True Identity” is maintained by a group known as the “Priory of Sion” that has existed since 1099.  • Documents found in Paris in 1975 confirm its existence. • Sir Isaac Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci were Grand Masters in this organization.

What's the Big Deal?  While most murder, mystery novels would not cause much of a stir, the difference here is about the claims in the very first pages of this book.  Prior to the prologue, the book makes a claim of fact.  Dan Brown, author of the Da Vinci Code claims these facts.The Priory of Sion was a secret organization founded in 1099 whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci. This is based on discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets found in 1975 at Paris’s Bibliotheque National. The Opus Dei is a devout Catholic sect who recently completed construction of their $47 million dollar headquarters on 243 Lexington Avenue. New York City. All descriptions of secret rituals, artwork, architecture and documents are real.Does Dan Brown believe the facts?  Dan Brown was interviewed by Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show, who asked, “How much of this is based on reality in terms of things that actually occurred?”Brown responded, “Absolutely all of it. Obviously Robert Langdon is fictional, but all of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies—all of that is historical fact....

( Continued from Part one )

4. Who was Mary Magdalene?: 'One particularly troubling theme kept recurring in the [Gnostic] gospels. Mary Magdalene….More specifically, her marriage to Jesus Christ” (Davinci Code..Pg. 244) 'The Gospel of Philip says that “‘the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” ’…As any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion in those days, literally meant spouse.' (Da Vinici Code page 246). The basis Brown uses for this claim is the Gnostic Gospels, specifically The Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Phillip, neither contain any mention of Jesus’ marriage to Mary, nor do any of the Gnostic Gospels. Brown’s argument for Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene tries to infer that Jesus married marry from a line in the Gospel of Philip.

The Da Vinci Code would have us believe, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were participants in these sex-rites of the Gnostics. The Jesus of the Da Vinci Code is the Gnostic Jesus. Mary Magdalene was part of a group of women who were followers of Christ along with the disciples. She was a witness to his resurrection and healing but nowhere in the Gospels is any marriage even hinted at in the slightest. Jesus healed Mary Magdalene of demonic possession, the idea that Mary was the harlot of Luke 7:36-50 is only made because Mary Magdalene is mentioned in Luke chapter 8, following the story of the adulterous women in Luke 7:36-50....

© Michael S. Sanders

"And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: [he made] the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that [it was] good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day." Genesis 1:14-19. There is of course an ongoing debate between mainstream science and Bible Fundamentalists as to the age of the earth. The majority of the latter accept the date of creation as being in the vicinity of that proposed by Archbishop Ussher (1581-1656) as around 4,004 BC.

The above quotation from Genesis casts at least some doubt on that proposition as many Orthodox Jewish Kabbalists have long proclaimed. The question centers of course around the nature and length of a "day" before the "Fourth Day" of creation. If there were no lights in the firmament to divide day from night before this time and God placed them there as a sign for seasons, days, and years, on day four, then why would one take for granted that the length of a "day" was the same before day four as after it? One of the great Jewish writers of this century in his commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah (The Book of Creation) which is the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabbalistic texts, states:- "Some early sources state that these Seven Universes are the seven thousand years that the world is supposed to exist. The first six parallel the six weekdays, while the seventh thousand years is the 'day when all will be Sabbath.' Others relate the Seven Universes to the Kabbalistic doctrine of Sabbaticals. This states that there are seven distinct periods of creation, each lasting seven thousand years...

A Review by Philip Gardiner

The Da Vinci Code and the madness that surrounds it is indicative of one thing – the fact that in the 21st century mankind is still in the dark about a great many things. We may have sent rockets into space; we may be able to develop nano-technology and we can even heat up food with micro-wave radiation, but we are still no closer to the truth about our own religions and the secretive organisations that surround them. The most powerful of them all is of course the Catholic Church and it is this Empire building religion that lies at the heart of the book.

The Da Vinci Code and the madness that surrounds it is indicative of one thing – the fact that in the 21st century mankind is still in the dark about a great many things. We may have sent rockets into space; we may be able to develop nano-technology and we can even heat up food with micro-wave radiation, but we are still no closer to the truth about our own religions and the secretive organisations that surround them. The most powerful of them all is of course the Catholic Church and it is this Empire building religion that lies at the heart of the book. To begin with we do need to take a look at the claims made in the Da Vinci Code in relationship to the Holy Grail in-order to understand what the reality of the matter really is.

The Da Vinci Code Fiasco: One question regarding the Holy Grail that the early medieval writers asked was "who does it serve?" Well, let's have a look at the current Grail world and see if it is serving us, or are we serving it? Very briefly and for those among us who have been on the planet Sanity for the last few of years, the Da Vinci Code is a fiction based around a man who discovers a code that reveals the true identity of the Holy Grail to be nothing more than the very bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Unfortunately the author, Dan Brown, claimed his now infamous book to be based upon real factual organisations and events. This however could not be farther from the truth.Lets take it apart starting with the:

 Priory of Sion: This supposedly ancient and enigmatic group allegedly once had Leonardo da Vinci himself as a Grand Master, not to mention several other notables such as Nicolas Flamel and Isaac Newton. However, there is no truth in it at all. Sion was the name of a hill nearby the residences of Pierre Plantard and Gerade de Sede – two of the original creators of the Priory of Sion hoax. The documents of the Priory secreted in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris have been proven to be forgeries...

by Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (Doubleday, 1995)

Our planet has been shaken by five major extinctions in the four billion year history of life. The first, 450 million years ago, occurred shortly after the evolution of the first land-based plants and 100 million years after the Cambrian Explosion of animal life beneath the seas.

The second extinction spasm came 350 million years ago, causing the formation of coal forests. Then the Earth experienced two mass extinctions during the Triassic period, between 250 and 200 million years ago. The fifth mass extinction, probably caused by a giant meteor collision, occurred 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, and ended the reptilian dominance of the Earth. This led to the current mammalian domination of the Earth.

So what is the Sixth Extinction? When is it coming? And what is its cause? "It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause," explains Dr. Richard Leakey, the world's most famous paleoanthropologist. Every year, between 17,000 and 100,000 species vanish from our planet, he says. "For the sake of argument, let's assume the number is 50,000 a year. Whatever way you look at it, we're destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, or even a shower of vast heavenly bodies." The statistics he has assembled are staggering. Fifty per cent of the Earth's species will have vanished inside the next 100 years; mankind is using almost half the energy available to sustain life on the planet, and this figure will only grow as our population leaps from 5.7 billion to ten billion inside the next half-century. Such a dramatic and overwhelming mass extinction threatens the entire complex fabric of life on Earth, including the species responsible for it: Homo sapiens.

Chapter 13: The Sixth Extinction: AN ACCIDENT OF HISTORY we may be, but there is no question that Homo sapiens is the single most dominant species on Earth today. We arrived late on the evolutionary scene and at a time when the diversity of life on the planet was near its all-time high. And, as we saw in chapter 10, we arrived equipped with the capacity to devastate that diversity wherever human populations travelled. Blessed with reason and insight, we move toward the twenty-first century in a world of our own creation, an essentially artificial world in which (for some, at least) technology brings material comfort and leisure brings unprecedented artistic creation. So far, unfortunately, our reason and insight have not prevented us from collectively exploiting Earth's resources-biological and physical-in unprecedented ways...

By Tim Callahan

Like The Exorcist in the 1970s, The Da Vinci Code has become so popular (it has for weeks been number one on the New York Times bestseller list) that the mythic elements within it have given energy to a set of beliefs about the real world, beliefs that do fall under the scope of skeptical investigation.

The popularity of The Exorcist was owed to its novelty, to its well researched material on the whole culture of the Roman Catholic church, and its approach to the subject of demonic possession and exorcism. It was, of course, a well-crafted work of fiction. But a deeper reason for the success of The Exorcist is that it tapped into a basic human fear of mind control from within. Possession would amount to the ultimate violation of one's integrity, and the paranoid fear that unseen intelligences have specifically targeted one for such an invasion is sufficient to override rational objections against its likelihood. The popularity of The Da Vinci Code likewise owes something to the novelty of its central idea, the soundness of its supporting research, and the professional crafting of its plot and characters. However, it also owes much of its success to the provocative religious theory and mythic theme at its core...