{"id":2269,"date":"2006-05-08T22:47:35","date_gmt":"2006-05-08T22:47:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/just-the-facts.html"},"modified":"2006-05-08T22:47:35","modified_gmt":"2006-05-08T22:47:35","slug":"just-the-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/05\/just-the-facts.html","title":{"rendered":"Just the facts.."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

From the UK Telegraph<\/a><\/p>\n

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Now another major chunk of dodgy faction is about to be rolled out in cinemas across the world – yes, it’s The Da Vinci Code<\/a>. The film’s source, Dan Brown’s multi-million-selling thriller, is choc-a-bloc with seriously untrue "facts" about Christianity. How, I wondered, are readers reacting to these fictions? I compiled a questionnaire and buttonholed 100 strangers, friends and colleagues.<\/p>\n

I didn’t bother asking about Brown’s obvious howlers: the claims that the early Church was run from the Vatican, or that Wagner was a Freemason. And I certainly didn’t ask if St John in The Last Supper was really Mary Magdalene; Leonardo is notorious for painting androgynous saints – try Googling for his Baptist.<\/p>\n

But how about the "fact" in Brown’s preface that the Priory of Sion is a European secret society founded in 1099? My fears were justified: 39 of the people I asked believed that. They didn’t know that the Priory was invented by a couple of Frenchmen and registered on May 7, 1956.<\/p>\n

Then the compass shifted: only nine believed the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that their descendants became kings of France; only 11 that "the Holy Grail" is a coded reference to this claim; only eight that the Priory possesses Magdalene’s account of her time with Jesus; only six that she’s buried under the Louvre’s glass pyramid.<\/p>\n

So far, so reassuring. Then a shock – 43 readers believed that the Roman Catholic Church burned five million women at the stake because they were witches. Five million women? True, another 18 suspected the figure might be high. It was: the current estimate is that the total killed in Catholic and Protestant countries was between fifty and one hundred thousand; terrible enough, but nowhere near Brown’s fantasy figure.<\/p>\n

Next, the notion that for the first 300 years Christians believed that Jesus was only a man and not divine. Half my respondents ticked this one, unaware that St John and St Paul, superstar leader-writers of the first-century Church, proclaimed in the most spectacular fashion that Jesus was God.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2269\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}