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"The book was miss-titled "DaVinci Codes" to get your attention. I thought I was going to learn something new about art, design, etc., from a master who had left some important insights in his work. It does not do that. The only use of DaVinci is to try to give legitimacy to their attack on traditional Christian belief and to state that a man, who lived 15 centuries after Christ, knew more of the "true history" than the writers of the Bible and that he left the "true message" hidden in his art works so that "enlightened men" could discover them later. "

Brother John Gassaway

OPIE'S ANSWER TO GIBSON'S `PASSION'

Brother John Gassaway


     This month I am going to break up the series on the resurrection with a topic that I feel needs attention now. That is the fascination that the media and general public has shown for this heresy called the DaVinci Code. Just in case you have missed being fully informed on this, I am writing this for you. Many people are reading this book and will see the movie that is coming out. Some will be able to pick up on the subtleties of the message in this book Others may not if they have not been keeping up with literature over the years. I am writing and sending this in a panic mode, because this thing about the DaVinci codes is hitting the news hard now and a lot of people will be curious enough to read it and see the movie. They are in for an earth and faith-shaking event if they read it before they settle the resurrection issue solidly in their faith. It is more blessed to believe without proof, but perhaps more precarious, for one may come to disbelieve just as easily when given cleverly disguised lies. Holy Blood, Holy Grail and this book are poison for anyone who is barely hanging on. I will return to the resurrection series in coming months.

Opie's Answer to Gibson's 'Passion'

     We may soon see if the same detractors who subjected every frame of Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" to unprecedented scrutiny will do the same for Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code.

     Brown's best-selling novel is headed to the big screen. Former Mayberry resident Ron Howard is listed as director, with Tom Hanks having a starring role. Brown's book outlines a conspiracy by the Roman Catholic Church to cover up a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. On the book's first page, the author claims, "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." Unfortunately the rest of his conclusions about religion are based on lies and deception, so much so that officials from Britain's Westminster Abbey refused to allow filming to take place in the Abbey, claiming that the book is "theologically unsound". Instead, the filming will take place at Lincoln Cathedral in eastern England. The first filming took place in Paris at the Louvre where much of the plot happens. The book has sold an amazing seven million copies in the US and over half a million in the UK, making it the biggest selling adult fiction book ever. No doubt, this movie will be a blockbuster and the subject of discussion for a long time. I give you here the story "behind the story" from my perspective as a researcher of this subject and a Primitive Baptist who starts his religious beliefs with absolutely no doubt as to the validity of the Scriptures and the reality of Jesus Christ being the Son of God and that He was crucified, was dead and buried, was raised on the third day and ascended to heaven and sits on His Father's throne until His enemies become His footstool. What this book says and the movie will amplify, denies every premise but does so in a very clever and subtle way. Knowing the history behind the whole false story is VERY important if you are to stand up to those who will be fools and believe the lies. The lies are that good.

     In this book the message of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG later) is revived and The DaVinci Code is just a rewrite in my opinion with some bells and whistles.

     I am going to address the HBHG next month, as it is the basis for most of the heresy that is found in The DaVinci Code.

     Sometime back years ago just for this type of reason, I felt that Primitive Baptists, old and young, needed to have on hand and in mind a defense of the resurrection, whether or not they plan to see such movies. Their friends and acquaintances will and they will eventually get to your kids. Oral Roberts had a son who committed suicide when he was challenged in the eastern university setting where he attended college. He just could not stand up to their attack and only had the spiritual and emotional side of his religious experience to rely upon, and not facts of the Bible and history. The "facts" as given by these HBHG disciples overwhelmed him. I began putting together the Defense of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ after I first read Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

     I have read The DaVinci Code and had to restrain the constant need to throw up. It is subtle. It is intriguing. It will lead many astray again in their poorly prepared state of having built on sand to begin with. It is written in the style of a Tom Clancy mystery cliffhanger but embedded in it are the old LIES of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and comes straight out of the higher critics of 19th century Germany as well as Freemasonry. A less than conclusive list of charges is:

  1. Jesus was NOT the Son of God.

  2. The Bible is a collection of revered myths and truths that really only found a final form in the fourth century when Constantine, who they state, was a pragmatist and tagged onto the growing Christian fad and approved it and made it into another branch of paganism anyway. This is partly true in regard to the Roman church of Constantine's day and I have stated that, but in the context of the traditions that the church has added to the only true Christian message, a crucified, resurrected Jesus, who will come back in the future to set things aright, a Jesus Christ who gave us some hints about how to please Him and live a better life, while here on Earth.

  3. Jesus was a good and wise teacher. His disciples decided to make him divine long after His death.

  4. The Church Councils were political bodies that sought to establish Christianity under edict of law and had no basis in facts. That is partly true since all that was settled there was a reaffirmation of what the Holy Bible states, that Jesus was the Son of God, both God and man. The councils were only needed because of Gnostic heresies which had arisen during the centuries between 33 AD and the fourth century. (Here is a typical excerpt from The DaVinci Code. Speaking of Constantine and the Council of Nicaea, the Harvard professor explains to the young Sophie how Jesus Christ was not held to be divine by his own disciples. Speaking to Sophie, Teabing states, "My dear," Teabing declared, "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." Sophie: "Not the Son of God?" Teabing: "Right," Teabing said. "Jesus' establishment as the Son Of God was officially proposed and voted on by the council of Nicaea."

  5. Jesus really was, otherwise, an ordinary man.

  6. He loved Mary Magdalene and was married to her. The disciples did not like the attention He paid her. All sorts of Gnostic writings are used to support all of these charges.

  7. They had children and after Jesus was executed, (no mention of a resurrection), Mary Magdalene fled with some others to France (where else would you expect this to come from?). The facts are that it is PROBABLE that she and the household of Bethany and Joseph of Arimathea, DID flee during the first persecution of 36 AD, and DID wind up in France. The women stayed in France and set up several churches in the south of France. History will support that. Lazarus probably went to Crete. Joseph went on to Briton, where he had contacts and influence. So the book picks the "traditions" that we accept but don't REQUIRE in order to believe the Gospel story, but then hang a MUCH LESS supported mythical tradition to more reasonable traditions so as to make the whole of the Joseph and Bethany household traditions distasteful. That is the way of Satan. If you can't destroy a story that is true and maybe encouraging to Christians, then turn it into a story that is so atrocious that most Christians will simply throw the truth out with the whole muddied up bath water, the resurrection, the Gospels - everything.

  8. The descendants of this union between Mary and Jesus produced the Merovingian line of "rightful kings" of France (therefore Europe, since France must always be considered the "greatest"). The rightful royal line has been protected by this Priori de Sion, from the early days of persecution by the Catholic Church. (Partly true, in terms of the Catholic oppression). This secret order lasted through the years and exists today, waiting to take power again when the time is right to "reveal the secret".

  9. They hold a secret that is so "TRUE", when compared to the "myths and fables" of the Bible, that if they released it, it would cause the church to implode. So they have held it in secret for years. That secret is the REAL truth as they claim, and the Gospel stories are very suspect, written by MEN, who in search of their own power, have oppressed women and kept them out of their rightful place in church leadership. (Beginning to sound familiar?).

  10. Their military arm that discovered these "truths" was the Knights Templar who occupied Jerusalem during the time of the crusades and discovered this "secret" and "real truth" that would make them extraordinarily rich, by either blackmailing the Vatican and they found the treasures of Solomon that people have thought existed. (Those treasures were long gone since the days when Egyptian pharaohs sacked Jerusalem in the days after Solomon. What was left, Nebuchadnezzar, and later the Romans, removed from the Temple.)

  11. The "true" and most revered religion of the world was the worship of fertility and especially women who reproduced offspring. The "true", ancient, and therefore, the original religion was worship of "Mother Earth" and therefore the woman's place in the hierarchy or the deity, was repressed and oppressed by a bunch of power hungry men of the middle ages who wanted power only for themselves. That (they), without the balance of the "feminine", would lead to the imbalance between the "yin and yang" that MUST exist in the world for "peace" and has led to wars and general mayhem. DaVinci was supposedly very aware of this, the great "thinker" that he was. (Sounding more familiar?").

  12. Men need to get into contact with their "female" side and become more like women. (Getting a bit sick?). The DaWnci Code is given some "modern" color by making it a love story between two people who were caught up in the mystery as it had developed in latter days. It involved a strict order of the Catholic Church, Opus Deum, which was attempting to keep the "secret" from being exposed, fearing catastrophic damage to the Church. A murder of the curator of the Louvre Museum in Paris who happens to be a descendant of this union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene then involves a slick Harvard professor of comparative religion in solving the mystery through his "great knowledge" of ancient religions, symbolism and religious relics. It involves codes and coda-breaking, evolves along with a rather soft and alluring "love story" between this Harvard professor, who teaches the sort of rot above to students at his post in Harvard, and a Merovingian descendant and granddaughter of the curator of the Louvre; the curator is murdered by a monk who is involved in a plot by the Opus Deum to obtain this secret (the Holy Grail) in order to destroy it before it can be released to public scrutiny and threaten the Catholic Church. The granddaughter is a cryptologist with the Paris police force, and unaware of her "royal bloodline." (Opus Deum is a Catholic organization of orthodox Catholics, mostly young men, whose aim is to bring the Catholics back to orthodoxy and away from the new-age degradation that has infected the Catholic Church since Vatican II reforms of Pope John III. In general they are not the bad guys that this book portrays. They are not secretive and they do not have any dark plans to murder their opposition).

     In this book and movie, DaVinci is portrayed as a mastermind who knew the "truth" and had incorporated the mystery into his paintings as a slap at the Church. An example is DaVinci's "Last Supper." The depiction of John leaning on the shoulder of Jesus is one of a very "feminine" like person and Dan Brown states that DaVinci was in fact placing the subtle hint that it was Mary Magdalene who was depicted there, not John! The author makes it almost believable, unless one is WELL grounded in their faith. Holy Blood, Holy Grail was even more compelling, IF you didn't know your Bible, particularly the Gospels. I have said before that you should not read Holy Blood, Holy Grail unless you are sure of your faith. The same goes for The DaVinci Code.

     In The DaVinci Code the author, Dan Brown, somehow finds out that DaVinci was aware of the golden mean, 1.617647, derived from the Fibonacci series of numbers, 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21, found in nature as an ever repeating ratio in the growth and development of organisms, even our bodily proportions. (You add two numbers together and you get the next one in the series and so on. Division of a number by its preceding number approaches 1.617647 as the series is carried to the number 55 and even a longer fraction if desired.) Somehow, because DaVinci knew about it, he is lionized as if he INVENTED it! It shows INTELLIGENT DESIGN, nothing else. Intelligent design requires an intelligent DESIGNER! Of course these people never concede that. They just love the men who discover such but especially if those people deny the true and living God, as DaVinci did according to my best information.

     The book was miss-titled "DaVinci Codes" to get your attention. I thought I was going to learn something new about art, design, etc., from a master who had left some important insights in his work. It does not do that. The only use of DaVinci is to try to give legitimacy to their attack on traditional Christian belief and to state that a man, who lived 15 centuries after Christ, knew more of the "true history" than the writers of the Bible and that he left the "true message" hidden in his art works so that "enlightened men" could discover them later. Here is a book, the Bible, that has manuscripts going back to the earliest days of the apostles ... a book that spread horizontally, DURING THE LIFETIMES of the disciples, translated DURING THE LIFETIMES of the disciples into neighboring culture's language of Syriac, Hebrew, Coptic, Ethiopic and Latin, a book that has MORE and EARLIER manuscript support than the works of Homer, Aristotle, or Virgil. THE DaVINCI CODE, spewing the Arian heresy and the cult of the Priori de Sion and claiming as true, a tale that is hidden in some art works of a master, DaVinci. He was an infidel, a rogue, who took the money from the church (Vatican) to paint for them, but then trashed their beliefs ... this book is touted as being more reliable than the scriptures. DaVinci somehow is supposed to be the holder of great truths. The cult that kept the "secret" and hid it all over Europe to "protect it" from destruction by the Catholic bad guys...,that cult is supposed to be more believable than the authors of the Biblel The book is well enough written to make it interesting but embedded in it are all these subtleties.

     I suspect "Opie" will present the big LIE in the movie. He got into the Hollywood liberal crowd at a young age and was thoroughly indoctrinated by them. I hate that. Andy Griffith was old enough to avoid it as well as Don Knotts. I still love that show. It was what my children went to sleep to every night, not Superman, the Hulk and such. I think it might have had a good effect, seeing life in a simple and ideal form, in an old southern town without all the problems of our modern day, promoting Christian morality and NO violence unless it was Barney misfiring his gun into the floor and then having his bullets taken away by Andy as punishment! That is true of our everyday experience in the greater parts of rural America.

     There are many Good Friday advocates in this world of "Easter sunrise-worship church-goers" who will have their "faith" shaken to the ground by this sort of stuff. I found myself screaming out loud in protest very often as I read the distortions of truth or outright lies. They use Clintonian tactics. They ascribe to the Christians and the Church, their very own methods; they then call Christianity a bunch of lies and cloak themselves in a selfrighteous aura of having told the "true story". I am sure that the Scottish Rite at the highest levels of freemasonry is deeply involved with this denial of Jesus Christ and the true Gospel story concerning Him.

     There are probably many other impressions you would get from this book and movie, but the ones above are the core of the story on which a pretty interesting mystery story is told. Get it and read it, see the movie, if you need an adrenaline rush, but read the true facts of history as told by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter and Paul before you get into this stuff. If you do not have some historic certainty about the resurrection already, neither this book nor Holy Blood, Holy Grail, is safe to read. They are the worst of brainwashing or deprogramming methods. With them, there is no such thing as original sin. They use the same tactics that Satan used in the garden. "Yea, hath God REALLY said that?" Question the truth, then offer a different version that is more appealing to the nature of man, a sinner.


     Part 2 : Freemasonry; the Vatican; The DaVinci Code; Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the Subversion of Christianity.

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