But It’s Just Fiction….(Part 5)

Part 5


At [the Council of Nicea]….many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus….until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.

This is a half-truth. The Council of Nicea did seriously consider alternating views of Jesus, not so much as “mortal” versus “God” but as “eternal” versus “created,” and they were debating because heretics had come out against the already-held view that Jesus was divine. The heretical view, held by the presbyter Arius, maintained that Jesus was not divine by nature, but was created in ages past by God. Jesus was thus not argued to be “mortal” or just a “great and powerful man” even by the heretical. (As an aside, Constantine, who Teabing blames so much on, was himself sympathetic to the Arians!

Beyond this, the New Testament itself gives clear evidence of Jesus being viewed as divine:

Through the New Testament, Jesus describes himself, and other New Testament writers describe him, in terms of the Wisdom of God, a pre-New Testament Jewish figure that was regarded as divine, and as an attribute of God personified.

Jesus identified himself as the Son of Man, a phrase associated with a divine figure in Daniel 7.

Paul in 1 Cor. 8:4-6 offers a revised version of the Jewish Shema which includes Jesus in the identity of Yahweh, the God of the Jews.

A variety of New Testament passages affirm the absolute and full deity of Christ, such as John 1:1 (“the Word was God”), John 5:18 (“calling God His own Father, making himself equal with God”), John 20:28 (“[you are] my Lord and my God”), “Titus 2:13 (our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ,”), Romans 9:5 (“God over all, blessed forever”), and Colossians 2:9 (“within Him dwells all the fullness of being God in bodily form”), and others.

Chapter 55 of The DaVinci Code, then, is laden with error and represents the poorest scholarship one will find between two covers. To put these sorts of statements into the mouth of a historian is an insult to the profession.

Part 6 Coming soon......