Expert Opinion on the Da Vinci Code

Craig Evans is Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College of Acadia University. Author and editor of more than fifty books and hundreds of articles and reviews, Professor Evans has given lectures at Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, Yale, and other universities, colleges, seminaries, and museums, such as the Field Museum in Chicago and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. He also regularly lectures and gives talks at popular conferences and retreats on the Bible and Archaeology, and Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Evans has appeared several times on the television programs Faith and Reason and the John Ankerberg Show. He has appeared in several History Channel and BBC documentaries and is a regular guest on Dateline NBC. Evans also served on the National Geographic Society’s Gospel of Judas project.

Here is what he has to say about the Da Vinci Code:

"I readily acknowledge that I am no expert in artwork, architecture, and secret rituals. I know little about the various Holy Grail legends and next to nothing about deciphering codes and anagrams. But I do know some of the documents to which the author refers, particularly the canonical and apocryphal Gospels and the Dead Sea Scrolls. And it is here that Dan Brown is often very inaccurate. How accurate or inaccurate he is in art and secret rituals I leave to others.

Brown gets into trouble by giving far too much credit to Constantine, claiming that that fourth-century emperor gave Christians a new Bible—largely by omitting the oldest Gospels—and elevated the mortal Jesus to divine status (Da Vinci Code, pp. 234-35). Constantine certainly exerted influence on the church, but he did not decide the contents of the Christian canon of Scripture and the deification of Jesus did not begin with him. The canon was more or less fixed by the fourth century and Jesus is called “Son of God” in the first-century New Testament writings.

Brown’s confusion is partly owing to his mistaken belief that the oldest Christian documents are found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic books from Nag Hammadi, Egypt (see Da Vinci Code, p. 245). There are no Christian writings among the Scrolls, nor is there any reference to Jesus, his brother James, or John the Baptist, as a few sensationalists in recent years have claimed. The Gospel of Thomas is the only writing from Nag Hammadi that has the slimmest chance of dating to the first century. Most think it dates to the second century and is in fact dependent on the four New Testament Gospels.

Although a few scholars have argued that early, independent tradition can be gleaned from the Gospel of Thomas and from a few other second-century noncanonical sources, most scholars remain very skeptical. I believe this skepticism is fully justified.

Brown has been influenced by the popular Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1983), whose authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh argued that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had produced offspring from which sprang the French Merovingian dynasty. Brown’s allegations that the Vatican has tried to suppress the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Da Vinci Code, p. 234)—which is a view held by no credible scholar—is based on part by The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1992), another implausible book by Baigent and Leigh.

Brown’s curious theories of Gospel sources and what he thinks is the true story of the historical Jesus find no support in sober scholarship—whether Protestant, Catholic, liberal, or conservative. Instead, what Brown gives us is a fascinating amalgam of legend, unsupported theories, and egregious inaccuracies when it comes to his most important documents. He would have us believe that the true story of Jesus is preserved in Gnostic Gospels and the symbols and metaphors of the Priory of Sion, the Masons, the Knights Templar, and other groups of Medieval origin.

The Da Vinci Code makes for a light, enjoyable read. But no one should take seriously what the author claims is “Fact,” especially with reference to the documents inside and outside the New Testament."