Bock's De-Coder Ring
By Darrell Bock
April 1, 2004
You see Darrell Bock everywhere these days. He's on Good Morning America and PrimeTime Live. He's in major newspapers. And everywhere he is, Bock is talking about Jesus. His book Breaking the Da Vinci Code (Nelson, 2004) is a debunking of the popular novel The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. A New Testament professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, Bock is responding to the new curiosity about Jesus. He says church leaders should capitalize on this odd and unexpected opportunity. What makes The Da Vinci Code worth talking about? It's an entertaining novel, but about midway through it gets into various aspects of Christian history and that's where problems come in. Brown makes claims like Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, had children, and they ended up in the south of France. He suggests the church suppressed this knowledge because it would undercut Jesus' divinity; the Council of Nicea was responsible for making official the doctrine of Jesus' divinity by a very close vote. He claims there were more than 80 gospels and the church picked four for the Bible in a power play around the time of the council. These claims suggest original Christianity had a merely human Jesus and the idea of Jesus' divinity came later. It wouldn't be an issue had he not made the claim that this was true. The Da Vinci Code has been at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. Why is it so popular? It's well written and kind of romantic. It's set in Paris and Edinburgh. There's mystery; there's the invoking of secret Gospels, which suggest that the book is revealing knowledge that has been suppressed. He is working with elements of scholarship that have popularized some of the ideas surrounding the secret Gospels. This is an attempt ...
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