Still today the Da Vinci Code has people talking and debating about the truth of what is said in the pages of one of the most controversial books written in decades. It is always a positive activity to talk about one's beliefs, to look a little deeper into why a person believes what they believe to be truth.

Here we are going to challenge two main myths of the Da Vinci Code, two of the most talked about elements. The real relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, and whether the Holy Grail is really a metaphor for that bloodline. What is the truth behind these positions?

Myth #1 The Da Vinci Code alleges that there a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene that left a living bloodline? What is the Truth?

While it makes for an interesting plot element in The Da Vinci Code, we are going to look at the truth of what the Bible says. As tradition goes, Mary Magdalene was a prostitute who was saved by Jesus. The first time we are introduced to Mary is in Luke 8:1-2 "soon after he went through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news. And the twelve were with him, and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward and Susanna and many others, who provided for them out of their means."

This is then followed by another story in Luke 7; here while Jesus is preaching in Capernaum, a Pharisee by the name of Simon invites him into his house. While Jesus is there a woman comes in, she is a sinner and she begins to weep, wetting the feet of Jesus with her tears, wiping them with her hair and anointing them with ointment. Jesus then tells her that her faith has saved her and to go in peace. The word that was translated as sinner is hamartolos in the original Greek, a word that is related to hamartia, which is a Greek concept of a fatal flaw. So it is through this implication that this woman is called a prostitute and that Mary Magdalene is identified as this woman.

Mary is again in the Crucifixion of Mark 15:40, and at the burial of Jesus and at his Resurrection, as well as in the Gospel of John it is Mary that sees the stone rolled away from the sepulcher and Jesus' body is missing, then Mary is the first person to meet Jesus after he is resurrected. The truth is that the only clear reference to Mary’s past in the Bible is in Luke, where it says that she had been possessed by seven demons, from which Jesus had freed her.

Granted, the fact that Mary is the first person to see Jesus in his resurrected state does indicate that they shared a special relationship, but it is a stretch to say that it was sexual in nature. In Jn. 20:17, in the King James Version, you will see the Jesus tells Mary Magdalene not to touch him and not to hold him, in the Revised Standard Version, because he has not ascended. Going back to the original Greek, the word haptomai means to attach oneself and is related to the word hapto which means to fasten or to set on fire. This indicates that Mary was trying to hold Jesus with a certain amount of emotion and intensity.

There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the the idea in The Da Vinci Code that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a sexual relationship. All the other elements in relation to this in The Da Vinci Code are pure fabrication, rather than the truth.

Myth #2 The Da Vinci Code alleges that the Holy Grail is a symbol or metaphor for Mary and Jesus' blood line? What is the truth?

There are many questions that seem to surround the Holy Grail. Some of these questions are dealth with as the truth in The Da Vinci Code. Is the truth that the Holy Grail was the cup that Christ himself drank from at the Last Supper? Is it the truth that Joseph of Arimathea really caught Jesus' blood at the Crucifixion? Finally… is it the truth, as it is stated in the Da Vinci Code, that the Holy Grail is really a metaphor for the bloodline created between Mary and Jesus?

Let's tackle each question raised by The Da Vinci Code here in order to be fair. While truth is that in all four gospels that Joseph of Arimathea procures the body of Christ from Pontius Pilate and provides a sepulcher for his body… the Bible does not tell of him catching Jesus' blood in a chalice. It is believed that the very first mention of the "Holy Grail" was made in a poem written by Chreten de Troyes somewhere between 1180 and 1190. So the legend then of Joseph catching the blood of Jesus in a chalice and taking it to France really came quite late in origin.

The truth is that the word Grail is a shortened form of the word gradalis which is Medieval Latin for dish or cup. It also seems to be a corruption of another Latin word, crater or cratalis. The grail (the older spelling of Grail) later became known as the san grael which means holy chalice. This is important because if you slightly change the spelling of one of those words you can bring more emphasis to one meaning over the other. Hence, san greal changed to sang real means blood royal. This helps feed the idea presented as the truth in the book, The Da Vinci Code, that Mary of Magdalene was pregnant with Jesus' baby, and that baby would be the vessel that carried the royal blood or royal bloodline.

Here is the truth about what we know for certain of the cup that is referred to as the "holy grail." The beliefs about this cup are not biblical concepts. The Bible mentions a cup used by Jesus in Matthew 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22 at the Passover meal now commonly referred to as the Last Supper. This cup is never mentioned anywhere else in the Bible and no one knows what became of it. Rumors of the Holy Grail started to circulate in the 12th century in which the cup had special powers and by the 15th century it was no longer just a cup with powers but a bloodline or family tree of Christ. This rumor has spread to become the topic of many story tellers. That is where Dan Brown gets his inspiration for this aspect of the plot of The Da Vinci Code.

In fact, even before The Da Vinci Code, this rumor has been given more credence with the 1982 publication of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail written by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Lewis. It is in this book the authors insist that the Merovingian kings were descendants of Mary and Jesus. They present this as being the truth about the Holy Grail.

In Conclusion

So these claims are not the truth. It is possible for us to go on and on about how the claims that are made in the Da Vinci Code are nothing more than false claims made by someone who was trying to come up with a clever story line, but it really won't solve anything. People, the imperfect beings that we are, will always question the divine. We have done that since the beginning of time.

Take a look back at the Old Testament where Moses has led the people into the wilderness, where they are to remain until God tells them to go forward… if you read those passages carefully… you will see that when the people were being made to things they no longer wanted to do, they decide to disbelieve in God and to turn on Moses.

The truth is that things haven’t changed much since then.