Egypt and The Da Vinci Code
Some aspects of the novel and film The Da Vinci Code are based on the heretical teachings of the Gnostics. The word gnosis derives from Greek and connotes “knowledge” or the “act of knowing”. A more common term is ‘agnostic’, literally “not knowing”. The Gnostic knowledge was not based on rational or observable facts as we think of knowledge, but on their secret individual beliefs.
Christianity has been always based on facts. As St John wrote:
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us” (1 John 1:1-3).
The Gospels were factual eyewitness accounts of first hand experience. Later some other writers wrote their imaginary accounts based upon what they imagined or secretly had revealed to them alone. We knew that these accounts were written, but we did not have any copies of them, because these heresies were destroyed.
One December day in 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, an Arab peasant, digging his field, happened upon an old, rather large red earthenware jar. Hoping to have found a buried treasure, and with due hesitation and apprehension about the jinn who might attend such a hoard, he smashed the jar open. Inside he discovered no treasure and no genie, but instead books: more than a dozen old codices bound in golden brown leather. He had found an extraordinary collection of ancient texts, hidden a millennium and a half before – probably by monks from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius seeking to preserve them from a destruction ordered by the church as part of its violent expunging of heterodoxy and heresy.
These thirteen papyrus codices containing fifty-two sacred texts are representatives of the long lost Gnostic Gospels, a last extant testament of what orthodox Christianity perceived to be its most dangerous heresy – Gnosticism.
Gnostics claimed God is a dyad of masculine and feminine sexual elements. Hence Jesus as God would be also, thus a sexual relationship with the only woman possible, Mary Magdalene was proposed. The Gnostics revered her as the consort to Jesus who were parents of children (possible because they said Jesus did not die upon the Cross). This obviously is fictitious, contrary to all eyewitness accounts. But this is the basis of the novel and film about which there is such worldwide concern.
GORDON MOYES
