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By Perry Gil S. Mallari, Reporter
Josh McDowell is among the foremost Christian
apologists today and a prolific author of 77 books on Christianity
and apologetics. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Talbot
Theological Seminary of Biola University in California.
Apologetics is a division of Christianity that
deals with questions, oppositions and criticisms on the revelation
of God through Jesus Christ and the Bible. McDowell as a
practitioner of Christian apologetics is recognizably an
evidentialist. His background as an apologist is unique due to the
fact that he is a former agnostic (one who believes that it is
impossible to know whether there is a God).
Out to disprove the Christian faith, McDowell in
college began to comb through every piece of evidence on the subject
he could found. After years of examining legal, historical and
archeological proofs, the man who initially committed himself to
discredit Christianity ended up embracing the faith. McDowell in
various interviews claims that his investigation yielded
substantiation for Christianity and not against it.
Among McDowell’s most popular works are More
Than a Carpenter and Evidence that Demands a Verdict where he
presented arguments and proofs regarding the deity of Jesus Christ
and various biblical accounts. Just two years ago, he caught the
public’s attention when he published his book The Da Vinci Code, A
Quest for Answers in response to Dan Brown’s controversial novel
The Da Vinci Code.
Displaying his savvy as an evidentialist
apologist, McDowell in his book presented hard facts exposing the
many fallacies contained in Brown’s magnum opus. Among them is the
historical basis of the Priory of Sion, a supposed European secret
society that is a pivotal element in Brown’s book. Page one of The
Da Vinci Code reads, “FACT: The Priory of Scion—a European
secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. In 1975,
Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les
Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of
Scion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Boticelli, Victor Hugo and
Leonardo Da Vinci. In page 5 of The Da Vinci Code, A Quest for
Answers, McDowell states, “Dr. Paul Maier, a professor of ancient
history at Western Michigan University says Les Dossiers Secrets
were planted in the Bibliotheque Nationale by Pierre Plantard. He
says one of Plantard’s co-conspirators admitted to helping him
fabricate documents, including the genealogical tables and list of
the Priory’s grandmasters—Newton, Boticelli, Leonardo and so on.
It turns out that Plantard’s hoax was exposed back in the nineties
in a series of French books and a BBC documentary. Laura Miller, a
reviewer of The New York Times revealed Plantard to be anti-Semite
with a criminal record for fraud while the real Priory of Sion is a
little social splinter group founded just half a century ago.”
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