Leadership Journal

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 to de-center the role of the Bible by suggesting there are other texts that say different things.

It's a novel! Will readers take those ideas as fact?

Basically yes. The real problem is that he's writing about areas that people don't know much about. The author suggests that he's researched it carefully, and you tend to trust him.

But wasn't establishing the New Testament a messy process?

The process of canonization is really a process of recognition. Those parts that became a part of the Bible were being read in many churches as Christianity spread.

An important date for the book is A.D. 325. It's a demarcation line. However, by the end of the second century the four Gospels were very clearly established on their own, according to church history. Perhaps the best piece of evidence is Tatian's Diatessaron, which tried to take the Gospels and put them into one story. But the four Gospels were so well established the Diatessaron never caught on.

What role can churches play in the discussion?

The positive thing is with so many people reading it and having questions, it's a wonderful opportunity to talk about Jesus and early church history and how we got our Bible. The problem is correcting all the errors.

When talking to people about the book, ...