Jesus, Mary and da Vinci

I caught most of ABC’s special, Jesus, Mary and da Vinci, and to be honest, it wasn’t all that interesting or even provocative. The show investigated the claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdelene, and Leonardo DaVinci was a member of a secret society that was meant to guard this devastating information.

The show was pretty predictable, although to ABC’s credit they did have at least two evangelical scholars, Jeffrey Bingham and Darrell Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary. That’s a far cry from the one-sidedness they displayed in Peter Jennings In Search of the Historical Jesus from a couple of years ago.

Dan Brown, author of the bestseller The DaVinci Code was one of the “believers” of this theory, which he has incorporated into the novel. Brown was, in the fashion of a novelist, pulling things out of nowhere the entire show. Albert Mohler, the president of my seminary, has a pretty good rundown of Brown’s book if you’re interested.

The funny thing was that as the eerie music played in the background, the three people in the world who believe this story were doing their best to make absolutely no evidence sound compelling. There are people who can make a lack of evidence sound compelling, and these people are dangerous. The speculators on ABC’s show were not such people.

The host of the show concluded, in the typical postmodern way, that there was no conclusion. I’d love to have ABC be prosecuting me in a court of law with methods like this—I could get away with anything. This show was simply one of those “unsolved mysteries” types where the most mysterious thing is the strange chanting going on behind the voiceovers.