WCPI focuses on ?DaVinci Code?
Central Church of Christ elder and local pharmacist Nestor Stewart joins Locust Street Church of God minister Roland Sharp in a discussion of writer Dan Brown’s controversial novel “The DaVinci Code” and the recently-released movie of the same name when the half-hour feature “Focus” airs at 1:03 p.m. Thursday and again about 1:03 a.m. Friday, WCPI program director Gloria Grissom announced.
The book and the movie argue that Jesus Christ and his disciple and helper, Mary Magdalene, were married and that she secretly fled Jerusalem to give birth to a child–inconvenient circumstances which the Roman Catholic Church fought for 2000 years to conceal. Catholic officials and Christian leaders in many different countries have vehemently rejected Brown’s “revisionist history” and some have denounced his literary work as blasphemous.
“Brown is a skillful writer who has subtly blended well-known historical facts and places with his own imaginative theories, most of which are either unsupported or are flatly contradicted by the evidence,” said Bill Zechman, one of WCPI’s volunteer producers and host of the weekly program “Focus.”
“For instance, he uses the Fibonacci sequence as the ultra-secret password to the road map to the Holy Grail. Those numbers are so well-known and invariable that no sensible person would use them for his computer pass-code, and certainly not his ATM code,” Zechman noted. “He has the Roman Emperor Constantine basically fabricating Christ’s divinity in an effort to quell violence between pagans and early Christians. Brown says Constantine was pursuing that agenda in 275; actually, this future ruler wasn’t born until about 280 AD.”
Sharp and Stewart offer their views on Brown’s theological theories and discuss the different impacts the book and movie are likely to have on two distinct groups–Christians with a firm grasp of biblical history and others less knowledgeable about the Bible, who might be inclined accept literary invention as “the gospel.?
“It is in this narrow contact layer between undisputed fact and conjecture and myth that Mr. Brown finds millions of interested and often impressionable readers and movie-goers,” Zechman remarked. “One thing about ‘The DaVinci Code’ cannot be doubted, however, and that is that it has made Mr. Brown an immensely wealthy man.”