Defending the catholic faith

DaVinci Code - the errors
With the world-wide release of The DaVinci Code movie fast approaching, as a service to our readers, we post Bart Ehrman's list of the 10 historical errors contained in the book.
1. Jesus’ life was decidedly not “recorded by thousands of followers across the land.” He didn’t even have thousands of followers, let alone literate ones.
2. It’s not true that eighty Gospels “were considered for the New Testament." This makes it sound like there was a contest, entered by mail. . .
3. It’s absolutely not true that Jesus was not considered divine until the Council of Nicea, that before that he was considered merely as “a mortal prophet.” The vast majority of Christians by the early fourth century acknowledged him as divine. (Some thought he was so divine he wasn’t even human!)
4. Constantine did not commission a “new Bible” that omitted references to Jesus’ human traits. For one thing, he didn’t commission a new Bible at all. For another thing, the books that did get included are chock-full of references to his human traits (he gets hungry, tired, angry; he gets upset; he bleeds, he dies...).
5. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not “found in the 1950s.” It was 1947. And the Nag Hammadi documents do not tell the Grail story at all, nor do they emphasize Jesus’ human traits. Quite the contrary.
6. “Jewish decorum” in no way forbade “a Jewish man to be unmarried.” In fact, most of the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls were male unmarried celibates.
7. The Dead Sea Scrolls were not among “the earliest Christian records.” They are Jewish, with nothing Christian in them.
8. We have no idea about the lineage of Mary Magdalene; nothing connects her with the “house of Benjamin.” And even if she were, this wouldn’t make her a descendent of David.
9. Mary Magdalene was pregnant at the crucifixion? That’s a good one.
10. The Q document is not a surviving source being hid by the Vatican, nor is it a book allegedly written by Jesus himself. It’s a hypothetical document that scholars have posited as having been available to Matthew and Luke, principally a collection of the sayings of Jesus. Roman Catholic scholars think the same of it as non-Catholics; there’s nothing secretive about it.