Dan Browns :The DaVinci Code:Fiction or reality?

Ive have read the DaVincis code once in my life. I though it was a fictionous book but ive seen over the years that its defenders do indeed believe that Jesus had children or was married.This speculation i suppose comes from his early life where we dont have any knowing of . What are your toughts?Is it just speculation ? Is it just a poor way to shed some dust in the church and mock the faith maybe? Do you think Dan Brown falls into the "conspiracy theory"spectrum with his ideas? And lastly are there any evidence to suupoer this claim ,that maybe we are(or i am )unaware of?

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Brown writes a good thriller, but I never took it to be more than fiction with a bit of interesting history mixed in. I think it is a form of historical fiction - though the characters are modern they are interacting with a mix of historical fact and speculation. One of these speculations is a secret society dedicated to ā€¦ spoilers,

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I too got it as fiction.But there are a lot of ā€œfansā€? and Brown himself who apparently argues that is real though

It is certainly plausible, especially given the edited history. I donā€™t need to know, and if there are living descendants of Jesus then itā€™s better they are never revealed. We get enough nonsense about the British Royal family as it is - this would be worse! :wink:

In what actuall way?There are no evidence about this and that actually discredits Christianity though

Itā€™s perfectly plausible for a 30-year-old man to be married and have kids. We know that evidence for or against was redacted by the early church, so unless new evidence comes to light there is no confirming or denying.

If someone wanted to discredit Christianity, it seems like there are better ways to do it than historical speculation.

Sources?How do we know that? So you think that the early church hidded things?What scholar or anyone in academia hold that view?

The bible itself records quite a few examples of redaction and editing. Here are some examples-

OT and Christian writers rewriting the story of prophet Balaam, changing him into a heretic

The story of Elhanan and goliath gets turned into David and goliath

The polemical golden calf story against Jeroboam is rewritten as a polemical story against the Aaronic priestly lineage

Editorial fatigue is strong evidence Matthew and Luke copied Mark

Matthew inventively creates a lineage for Jesus

This is even more evident when compared with Lukeā€™s genealogy

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Thatā€™s probably true, if we assume that the target audience isnā€™t a bunch of people who just believe something because itā€™s written down in a book. Should we assume that?

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Isnā€™t that what the Council of Nicea did, formalizing the acceptable text and doing away with 30 years of the life of Jesus? Sources would be great, but we havenā€™t got many aside from Dan Brown.

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To a lot of people the stories about Jesus are fiction. So Dan Brownā€™s book are fiction stories expanding on other fictitious stories for purely entertainment value.

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Itā€™s perfectly plausible for a 30-year-old man to be NOT married and have kids

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The Talpiot tomb provides possible evidence for the Jesus had a wife and child hypothesis. If it was Jesusā€™ tomb, of course; Iā€™ll agree with the scholarly consensus it probably isnā€™t, but it is possible. The tomb itselfā€™s provenance and authenticity of the inscriptions is generally uncontested.

The fact that the Talpiot tomb contains two ossuaries inscribed with names of womenā€” Maria on one and Mariamene Mara on the secondā€”plus a third ossuary Judas son of Jesus , strongly suggests that one of these two Marys is most likely the mother of the son, and thus the wife of the Jesus buried in this tomb. The DNA evidence done on the bones from the Yeshua and the Mariamene ossuaries, further shows that Mariamene Mara is not Jesusā€™ mother or his sister, leaving her as a possible candidate for his wife, and thus the mother of the son Judas. Jesus of Nazareth had a mother named Mary, and apparently one of his sisters was also named Mary.[i] If Jesusā€™ sister Mary were married, which seems likely given the norms of the culture, she would not be in his tomb but in the tomb of her husband. If the Talpiot tomb is that of Jesus and his family, the second Maryā€”Mariaā€”is most likely either his mother, unless she lived past 70 CE when the tomb went unused. Alternatively, the second Mary could perhaps be a wife of one of his brothers. That leaves Mariamene Mara as the most likely candidate to be the mother of his child.

https://amp.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/3j49lf/what_to_make_of_the_talpiot_tomb/

The opposition though was the Arians.Which they only differed on the Jesus nature.In all others aspects they agreed with thew Nicaens.So whats the argument?

No and no.

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AND

OK, Iā€™m willing to be wrong on this, but we are still missing 30 years from the life of Jesus. Thatā€™s the elephant shaped void in the room that generally gets ignored.

And if someone redacted 30 years from one account, then itā€™s plausible that other church history has been edited too. This is about the point Dan Brown picks up the story.

ā€˜Redactedā€™ implies that there was ever a written account of Jesusā€™ early life. What makes you think there was? (Leaving aside late, obviously fictional accounts.)

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Please do not mistake that I am advocating this position. Iā€™m pointing out that is has been the subject of considerable speculation for a very long time.

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The Da Vinci Code is fiction. Hereā€™s what Biblical scholar (and skeptic) Bart Ehrman says about the book, in his blog article, ā€œThe Son of God, the Council of Nicea, and the Da Vinci Codeā€ (February 16, 2016):

Iā€™m afraid many people today (most?) get their knowledge of Arius, the Arian Controversy, and the Council of Nicea from that inestimable authority, Dan Brown, who wrote about it at length in that great work of historical realism, The Da Vinci Code. I tell my students at Chapel Hill that if they want to learn about the history of the Middle Ages, the way to do that is not by watching ā€œMonty Python and the Holy Grail.ā€ And if they want to learn about the history of early Christianity, the way to do that is not by reading The Da Vinci Code.

The Da Vinci Code is wrong about just about everything it says about the Arian Controversy, the emperor Constantine, and the Council of Nicea. Thatā€™s why I wrote my earlier book Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code. There were tons of books written in response to Dan Brownā€™s novel, but virtually all of them were by highly religious (and angry) people ā€“ either Roman Catholic or conservative evangelicals ā€“ who had deep-seated theological reasons for really disliking the book. I myself did not dislike it so much: I thought for a page-turner at the beach, it was rather fun. My sense is that people who donā€™t like it (i.e., most of my friends) are simply expecting way too much of it as a work of fiction. Itā€™s not a great work of fiction. But itā€™s a good blow-off novel if you donā€™t want a lot of substance. Still, the problem I had with it was that so much information was wrong, even when getting it right would not have had any effect on the plot or the characters. It was just gratuitously wrong. This included most everything it says about the historical Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the New Testament, and yes, the Arian Controversy and the Council of Nicea.

And hereā€™s what Ehrman has to say on Dan Brownā€™s claims about Mary Magdalene, in a blog article titled, Jesus Kissing Mary Magdalene (Febraury 4, 2014):

Some of the historical claims about the non-canonical Gospels in the Da Vinci Code have struck scholars as outrageous, or at least outrageously funny. The book claims, for example, that some of these Gospels were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. That of course is completely wrong: the Dead Sea Scrolls do not contain any Gospels, or any Christian writings of any sort. They are Jewish texts, which never mention Jesus or any of his followers. And the novel claims that Jesusā€™ marriage to Mary Magdalene is frequently reported in the Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament. On the contrary, not only is their marriage not reported frequently, it is never reported at all, in any surviving Gospel, canonical or non-canonical.

The Da Vinci Codeā€™s claims about Mary Magdalene are thoroughly debunked in a review by another Biblical scholar, Bruce Fisk.

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