Index To   The Da Vinci Code  

Fantasy, Faith and History: A Book Review By Viola Larson (Below)

Every few years a popular conspiracy theory about the origins of Christianity reemerges once everyone has forgotten how it was refuted the last time it appeared. The premise that underlies the story in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code last appeared in a book titled Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Delacorte Press, 1982).1 At that time, one theory purported that the “Holy Grail” was not the cup used by Jesus Christ at the last supper; instead, it was a royal bloodline fostered by Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene. Religious scholars completely ignored or dismissed this theory because they had little patience for the claims of documents and societies that supposedly possessed “secret” knowledge that the academic world had missed for centuries. Nothing in scholarship or evidence to date has changed to supplant this dismissive evaluation. Theories like this, moreover, are promulgated not in peer-reviewed scholarly journals but in popular presses in which the exercise of critical faculties is optional. The Da Vinci Code is merely resurrecting in vain a thesis that serious scholars have condemned and buried decades ago.

Despite being merely a rehash of a discredited thesis, The Da Vinci Code has stayed atop the New York Times bestseller list for months. In addition, Sony Pictures has acquired the rights to the book and has recruited director Ron Howard to work on the film. Ironically, were the book about any other subject, it is unlikely that it would have become a bestseller on the basis of academic merit and certainly would not have become one on the basis of literary merit. The Da Vinci Code is best described as a historical/ technological fiction thriller, the sort of energetic composition that makes for excellent reading on a summer vacation but does not satisfy those seeking in-depth plot and character development.

The story begins with the murder of a French museum curator, who was the guardian of a secret cache of documents held in the tomb of Mary Magdalene. The latter is alleged to have been the wife of Jesus and the true heiress to the reins of the Christian church, whose intent was to establish a feminist-centered nature religion. The Roman Catholic Church is cast in the role of the primary arch-villain that seeks to suppress these documents and keep them hidden. Playing the background heroic role is a secretive group called The Priory of Sion, of whom the murdered curator was a leader and Leonardo da Vinci a past leader. The Priory (monastery) has kept the documents concealed under the pretense that the world as a whole is “not ready” for the startling revelations contained in them.

Much of the novel focuses on symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptographer Sophie Neveu. The two protagonists travel from place to place while solving puzzles left behind by the curator, which lead them to the location of Mary’s tomb. In the end, however, though the tomb is located, it remains unopened, and the documents remain concealed. Brown’s fast-paced novel thereby ends with a disappointing crash into a concrete wall; it promises the uncovering of secrets but never follows through.2

FACT OR FICTION?

Though marketed as fiction, The Da Vinci Code is clearly intended to present what Brown believes is factual material about the origins of the Christian church. “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel,” the preface states, “are accurate.” Brown himself has said after a year and a half of research, he “became a believer” in the thesis that Mary Magdalene’s role in the church was purposefully obscured, as was her marriage to Jesus.³

Many readers and reviewers of The Da Vinci Code unfortunately have reached the conclusion that Brown is presenting sound research. The New York Daily News, for example, described Brown’s research as “impeccable.” Critical investigation, however, reveals that Brown has simply accepted a tendentious and unsupportable version of history put together by non scholars. He is able to do this by assuring himself, as do many readers of The Da Vinci Code and adherents to popular conspiracy theories, that the “truth” has been suppressed and that history has been “written by the winners” (the Christian church, p. 256), who felt free to distort the record. Such claims are mere contrivances, however, and are often circular in nature. Those who make such claims accept whatever evidence they can as positive and dismiss negative evidence or lack of evidence as further proof that the “winners” have been covering up the truth. Such theories are positioned to be unfalsifiable and therefore are critically worthless.

AN ARTFUL CONSPIRACY

A central theme of Brown’s work is that Leonardo da Vinci, as a former head of the Priory of Sion, left encoded messages in his art in order to direct seekers to the truth about Christian origins. Brown makes several highly questionable assertions about da Vinci’s work through the book’s characters. Langdon, for example, suggests that da Vinci’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, was meant to carry a “subtle message of androgyny” (120) and may have been intended to portray da Vinci as the woman; hence the Mona Lisa’s mysterious smile, which signifies “Da Vinci’s little secret” (121). This idea is further supported with the claim that the name “Mona Lisa” is an anagram for “Amon L’isa,” combining the names of the male Egyptian deity Amon and an alternate pictographic name for the female Egyptian deity Isis.

The claim that “L’isa” is an allusion to Isis is seriously questionable. There is no documentation from academic sources on Egyptology that “Isa” is an acceptable variant spelling of “Isis” and thus no support for the idea that “Isa,” combined with the Italian prefix “L” (meaning “the”), refers to “the Isis.”

Several more tangible difficulties attend Brown’s thesis. First, the closest historical testimony, by Giorgio Vasari, indicates that the Mona Lisa is a genuine portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy merchant.4 Second, the painting is not known as the “Mona Lisa” in either its country of origin, Italy (where it is called La Gioconda), or its current place of residence, France (where it is called La Joconde).5 Third, it is a matter of record that the Mona Lisa’s smile was not considered mysterious until the 19th century.6 Finally, “Mona” is short for Mia donna, Italian for “my lady,” but the English spelling “Mona” is erroneous; it should be spelled Monna.7 Brown’s anagram fails to account for that extra n!

Brown also offers a distorted history of another of da Vinci’s paintings, The Virgin of the Rocks. He correctly reports that a group of nuns commissioned this painting for a church in Milan and that a second version exists in London. He makes the unsubstantiated claim, however, that the “explosive and disturbing details” (138) in the painting disturbed the nuns, who thought those details were symbolically offensive. Brown also claims that da Vinci “mollified” the nuns by painting a second version without the offensive symbolism. A comparison of the two versions in art history books, however, reveals that although there are minor differences, all of the “disturbing” elements Brown lists are found in both paintings. For example, Mary the mother of Jesus allegedly making a “decidedly threatening gesture” (139) with her hand above the head of the infant John the Baptist. Brown also incorrectly reports the nature of the controversy: the nuns were indeed unhappy, but this was because da Vinci took several years to complete the painting.8 Da Vinci’s delays eventually resulted in legal action by the nuns, which had nothing to do with the contents of the painting. Art history as recorded by serious scholars simply does not confirm Brown’s claims.

MARY? QUITE CONTRARY

Brown continues to misuse da Vinci in connection with his thesis that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married and produced a “royal bloodline,” which is the true Holy Grail. One of Brown’s characters, a “historian” named Leigh Teabing,9 alleges that da Vinci inserted Mary Magdalene into his painting The Last Supper (243–44) and signified the Grail bloodline by separating Christ and Mary with a V-shaped space, which represents the Grail as a womb.

Not surprisingly, all of Brown’s claims about The Last Supper are unsupported by the consensus of art historians. The “woman” Brown finds is all but unanimously identified by da Vinci experts as a youthful apostle John.10 The V-shaped space between the two figures actually expresses the concept of “dynamic masses”11 found in Renaissance art: da Vinci purposely used the space to separate the two groups of figures in the painting for artistic balance. Finally, Langdon claims that Peter is depicted “leaning menacingly toward Mary Magdalene and slicing his bladelike hand across her neck” in a threatening manner. Professional art historians, however, say Peter is leaning forward in dismay after hearing Christ announce His imminent betrayal. They also describe the “slicing” hand as actually “forming a bridge between the heads of St. John and Judas,” thus underlying “the contrast between innocence and villainy.”12 Brown’s analysis of this painting bears little resemblance to that of scholars educated in the artistic techniques of da Vinci and other Renaissance painters.

Even more questionable are the claims Brown puts into his historian’s mouth about customs and documents of the New Testament era, supposedly pointing to Mary’s marriage to Jesus. He correctly notes that the common identification of Mary as a prostitute is false; the New Testament actually depicts her as a wealthy supporter of Jesus’ ministry.13 Brown, however, uncritically following the theories found in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, claims that Jesus must have been married because in the Jewish world, “social decorum…virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried” (245). Not only is this an argument from silence, it is patently false. The Jewish atmosphere of Jesus’ day clearly had a tradition of celibacy for those who devoted their lives to God, as exemplified by the unmarried prophets Jeremiah and Elijah and as expressed by New Testament-era groups such as the Essenes and figures such as John the Baptist and Banus the prophet (Josephus, Life 2.11). Celibacy and singleness were indeed exceptional, but contrary to Brown, they were not forbidden by any “social decorum.”

Brown’s historian also appeals to two documents from the early church era as proof of Mary’s marriage to Jesus. Claiming that they are part of the “earliest Christian records,”14 the Nag Hammadi documents, Teabing appeals to both the gospel of Philip, which claims that Jesus “used to kiss [Mary] often” and says Mary was Jesus’ “companion,”15 and the gospel of Mary Magdalene, which says Jesus loved Mary more than the other disciples.16 Serious scholarship, however, dates neither of these documents earlier than the mid-third century and the late-second century, respectively, and reckons them to be the product of Gnostic thought, which was completely foreign to the Jewish-Palestinian context from which Christianity emerged. These documents, rather, express the much later Gnostic view that “spiritual beings exist in male and female pairs.”17 Scholars are nearly unanimous in rejecting these works as the spurious creations of a deviant movement. Religious scholar Philip Jenkins notes, “Instead of representing the lost original truth of Christianity, the Gnostic world should rather be seen as the first of many popular reactions against the institutional structures of the existing church.”18

Brown makes a number of other errors in his treatment of biblical topics. Langdon incorrectly states the Romans “originated” the cross for crucifixion (145); in fact, the first recorded use of crucifixion was by the Persians in the sixth century BC.19 Teabing claims that the pagan deity Mithras was “called the Son of God and the Light of the World — was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days” (232). Not one of these descriptions of Mithra is accurate: Mithraic scholarship knows of no such titles for Mithra, nor any birthdate, and as one Mithraic scholar rather bluntly puts it, “there is no death of Mithras” — and so, neither can there be a burial or a resurrection.20

CONSTANTINE THE GREAT REVISER?

The great historical villain, for Brown, is the emperor Constantine the Great (d. AD 337). Teabing claims that Constantine “collated” the various documents that comprise the Bible “as we know it today,” causing dozens of other gospels to be discarded and destroyed in favor of the current collection of four in the New Testament (231). He also claims that Christians originally honored the Jewish Sabbath but that Constantine “shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun” (232–33). Finally, Brown’s historian avers that Constantine assembled the Council of Nicaea, at which the church voted on several subjects, among them “the divinity of Jesus.” “Until that moment in history,” Teabing states, “Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless” (233). Constantine, Teabing asserts, stood behind this effort to turn Jesus into the “Son of God,” as he and the Roman Catholic Church set about “hijacking [Jesus’] human message, shrouding it in an impenetrable cloak of divinity, and using it to expand their own power.” The Council of Nicaea, therefore, decided on Jesus’ divinity by a “relatively close vote,” which forever destroyed the original Christian message.

It would be a profound embarrassment to any serious historian were he or she to make the errors that permeate these statements. Contrary to Teabing, Constantine did not establish the New Testament canon. Instead, over a period of time the Christian community identified which books were divinely inspired while coming to grips with its own identity and mission. Robert Grant, a scholar specializing in the composition of the canon, writes that the canon was “not the product of official assemblies or even of the studies of a few theologians,” but rather it “reflects and expresses the ideal self-understanding of a whole religious movement which, in spite of temporal, geographical, and even ideological differences, could finally be united in accepting these 27 diverse documents as expressing the meaning of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ and to his church.”²¹ No single person decided the canon, and the canonical process was functioning well before the time of Constantine.²²

In terms of the Sabbath day, this, too, was a decision made long before Constantine.²³ Paul had explained to Gentile believers that observation of a Sabbath or a special day was a matter of one’s own conviction (Rom. 14:5–6) and that the schedule of Jewish holidays was a system that was no longer in effect for Christians (Col. 2:14–17). Testimonies from early church figures who significantly predate Constantine, such as Justin Martyr (AD 150) and Ignatius of Antioch (AD 110), show that Sunday was already the standard day for Christian assembly.²⁴ The Council of Nicaea itself said and did nothing about the Lord’s Day or the Sabbath other than declaring that certain prayers on Sunday ought to be made while standing (Nicene Creed, canon 20).

Finally, Teabing grossly misrepresents both the nature and the outcome of the Council of Nicaea. The issue before the council was not “Jesus: Divine or Mortal?” — both sides agreed that Jesus was divine and not merely mortal. The issue was put on the table, however, because a particular heretic named Arius had declared, against the belief already held by the church at large (and affirmed by the New Testament itself), that rather than being eternal, Jesus was caused to exist by God at a particular point in time. Arius did not regard Jesus as a “mere mortal” but as a godlike being who had been called into existence by the Father. The vote, despite Teabing’s claim, was not even close: the final tally of approximately 300 bishops left only two who sided with Arius.²⁵ It seems that the only matter Brown correctly reports about the Council of Nicaea is its location!

THE CODE CRACKED

It is indeed unfortunate that many readers of this book have been mesmerized by Brown’s storyline and have become convinced that The Da Vinci Code presents, or may present, a true, academic account of history. On the contrary, art scholars do not support Brown’s claims about Renaissance art and biblical and patristic scholars do not confirm his assertions regarding Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the church, and Constantine. In the final analysis, Brown’s claims turn out to be just as fictional as the rest of The Da Vinci Code.

— reviewed by James Patrick Holding

NOTES

1. See Brian Onken’s summary critique of Holy Blood, Holy Grail immediately following this article.

2. One of Brown’s characters makes the astonishing claim that there are “tens of thousands of pages” (p. 256) of documentation for the “true” version of Christian origins. Given that we seldom have as much as even a single book’s worth of information on the vast majority of ancient historical figures (e.g., Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar), the claim that anyone would have compiled such encyclopedic resources about Jesus is outlandish, especially since writing materials were so scarce and expensive, and the ancient literacy rate was no more than 10 percent.

3. Roxanne Roberts, “The Mysteries of Mary Magdalene: ‘The Da Vinci Code’ Resurrects a Debate of Biblical Proportions,” Washington Post, Sunday, July 20, 2003, sec. D. Brown reaffirmed his view on the November 3, 2003, ABC special “Jesus, Mary and Da Vinci.”

4. Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa (New York: Harcourt, 2001), 2, 18. Vasari’s testimony contains some minor errors about the painting itself (perhaps because he saw only an unfinished version or depended on a hearsay description), but he was a contemporary of Lisa Gherardini, and his testimony is regarded as the “least unreliable” about the origins of the painting. Sassoon notes that while other women have been proposed as the subject of the painting by later writers, there is “no real evidence” (22) for any of these alternatives, and he conspicuously fails to mention the possibility that the painting is a secret message promoting androgyny.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid. Sassoon adds that “smiles are not infrequent in Renaissance paintings, and they also abound in Greek statues.”

7. Ibid.

8. Carmen Bambach, ed., Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 236ff.

9. Alert readers may notice that this character’s name is Brown’s cryptic tribute to Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent (“Teabing” is an anagram for Baigent), even though neither of them are credentialed historians.

10. Producers of the ABC special found only one art historian who agreed that the figure depicted was a woman. Brown simply dismissed the scholarly consensus against his claim with the statement, “We see what we’ve been told to see.”

11. Carlo Pedretti, ed., Leonardo: Studies for the Last Supper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 19.

12. Ibid., 20.

13. Luke 8:2–3.

14. Brown’s historian commits a particularly embarrassing blunder when he also refers to the Dead Sea Scrolls as part of the “earliest Christian records.” The Scrolls are entirely Jewish documents that make no mention of Christianity.

15. In yet another blunder, Teabing says, “As any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion in those days, literally meant spouse” (246). This is of no relevance even if true because the gospel of Philip is only extant in Greek.

16. As a result of the popularity of The Da Vinci Code, a commentary on the gospel of Mary Magdalene, edited by Jean-Yves Leloup (Inner Traditions, 2002) has also become a fashionable item, ranking 226th on Amazon.com’s bestsellers’ list the week of November 24, 2003.

17. See Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 117–18, 138–42.

18. Ibid., 118.

19. Herodotus History of the Persian Wars 1.128.2.

20. Richard Gordon, Image and Value in the Greco-Roman World (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996), 96.

21. Robert Grant, The Formation of the New Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 10.

22. Langdon (234) also makes the linguistically outrageous claim that the word heretic “derives from that moment in history” when Constantine declared that anyone who chose forbidden gospels over the canonical ones was a “heretic.” Langdon explains that heretic comes from the Latin word haereticus, meaning “choice,” so that “heretics” were those who had “chosen” the original history of Christianity. In fact, “heresy” derives from the Greek word haireomai, which does mean “choose” (cf. Phil. 1:22; 2 Thess. 2:13), while not carrying any sort of pejorative connotation. The related word hairesis is used much earlier than Constantine’s time. For example, the Jewish historian Josephus used the word to describe the three major sects of Judaism (the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes), and Tertullus also used it for Christianity in Acts 24:5. Hairesis is sometimes used in the New Testament in a pejorative sense, in which a negative connotation is indicated by the context. For example, it is used of the schisms Paul condemns in the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 11:19; cf. Gal. 5:20), and in 2 Peter 2:1 it acquires a negative connotation because it is preceded by the word damnable.

23. See James Borland, “Should We Keep the Sabbath?” Christian Research Journal 26, 2 (2003): 22–31.

24. Justin Martyr, First Apology, chap. 67; Ignatius of Antioch, Letters to the Magnesians, 9.1.

25. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 203.

Fantasy, Faith and History: A Book Review (By Viola Larson) of: The Da Vinci Code

By Dan Brown. Doubleday. 2003. 449 pages

Dan Brown has written an absorbing mystery; the kind of story that keeps one glued to the book until it is finished. The book, The Da Vinci Code, contains the deciphering of codes, a unique rewriting of religious history and a decidedly postmodern view of truth with an overcast of medieval and primitive images. The story begins with the murder of Jacques Sauniere, the curator of the Louvre in Paris. As the curator is dying, he leaves behind several cryptic messages, including the strange position of his own body. With the unfolding of the many puzzles the plot of the story unfolds. As the two main protagonists, Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology, and Sophie Neveu, who works for the Paris Department of Cryptology, follow the continuing trail of mysterious codes the reader is barraged by an alternative view of Christian history. Perhaps, because the author concentrates on so many mysteries, codes and audacious religious histories, the characters of the story are rather weak and underdeveloped. The novel is full of fantastically told stories of the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar. The Gnostic Gospels are used as factual material about the beginning of Christianity. Brown's alternative views of Christian history include his opinion that Jesus Christ was supposedly married to Mary Magdalene and propagated a family, which, according to the story line, continues to survive in Europe and England. Purportedly, both Jesus and Mary were intent on promulgating a primitive goddess religion rather than the orthodoxy of the historical Christian church.

The Knights Templar

Few historians would take any of the supposed facts of the novel seriously, but many non-historians are confused about the information in the story. This is partly because Brown states in his list of facts, before the story begins, that, “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” One important part of the story, the secret surrounding the Holy Grail, is intertwined with the history of the Knights Templar. Brown, in his novel, portrays them as a group formed to find secret documents about the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the supposed worship of the divine feminine purportedly connected to Mary Magdalene. The author refers to someone he calls a French King, Godefroi de Bouillon. Brown writes that Bouillon had created a secret organization called, “The Priory of Sion,” and was also the founder of the order of the Knights Templar. In reality, Godefroi, (Godfrey) de Bouillon was the Duke of Lower Lorraine who led, with his brother Baldwin, one of the four military units that participated in the first Crusade.1 The nobles who conquered Jerusalem elected Godfrey ruler and he took the name of “Advocate (or lay-protector) of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.” However, when Godfrey died, his brother Baldwin later took the title of King of Jerusalem. Godfrey died sometime before 1100 A.D., and the Templars were founded later in 1119.2 Their order was formed as one of the monastic military orders whose members both fought and cared for others during the crusades.3 The Templars existing alongside another military order, the Knights Hospitallers, built large castle-like fortresses for protection since they were few in number.

Brown is right when he writes that the Knights Templar became wealthy in the later Middle Ages, but his statements about the events surrounding their wealth as well as their demise are not factual. Suggesting that at first the Catholic Church helped the Templars amass wealth as a means of keeping them silent about the marriage of Jesus and Mary and the early church's supposed worship of the divine feminine, Brown writes:

Nobody was certain whether the Knights had blackmailed the Vatican or whether the Church simply tried to buy the Knights silence, but Pope Innocent the II immediately issued an unprecedented papal bull that afforded the Knights Templar limitless power and declared them “a law unto themselves”- an autonomous army independent of all interference from kings and prelates, both religious and political. (159)

A “law unto themselves” is Brown's interpretation. He seems unaware, that many monastic orders since the time of the Cluniac order, 910, have been placed directly under the Pope as a means of keeping the orders pure. While it did not always help, it was meant as a way of keeping rich Lords and Kings from unduly influencing the monastic orders. St Berno, the founder of the Cluny monastic order, and the lay founder, William the Pious, sought for more uniformity and accountability among the Cluniac monasteries. By placing the monasteries directly under the Pope, a hierarchical system was devised that was meant to preserve the pure intentions of the movement. No one outside of the Cluniac system could interfere, but each monastery was subject to a motherhouse and that house's abbot.4 Such a system was intended to preserve the spirituality of the order not to cover up information.

Brown goes on to have his protagonist, Langdon, state that in the fourteenth century, Pope Clement V, with some help from King Phillip IV of France, “ingeniously planned” a “sting operation to quash the Templars and seize their treasure, thus taking control of the secrets held over the Vatican (159).” The reality is that King Phillip of France was the real instigator of this infamous event of the Templars history, since Pope Clement V was under the thumb of the French king. This began the so-called “ Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy. Beginning with Clement V, the Popes, from 1309 to 1377, would reside at Avignon. As Kenneth Scot Latourette points out the kings of France were often the dominating ruler, above the Pope, during this period.5 In fact, the king kidnapped Boniface, the pope preceding Clement, in a dispute over Phillip's taxation of the church. Boniface escaped but his health was broken and he died not long after his ordeal.6 Noting the riches of the Templars' order, King Phillip had his police arrest the Templars and read accusations against them trumped up by a man who had given the accusations to the king's council. This was in 1305; the Pope, ailing and old, intervened citing `right of clergy,' and the investigation went on for seven more years. In the end Phillip, by calling for a council of states at Tours and obtaining a decree against the Templars, pressured Clement, who by this time was dying, to take action against them.7 Some of the Templars survived and Henri Daniel-Rops notes that in Portugal they were known as the `Milita of Christ,' later assisting “Henry the Navigator to undertake his great voyages of discovery.”8 The end of the Templars as a strong order in Europe and elsewhere was not an advantage for the Roman church; rather, it was one of the signs of the decline of the Church as a ruling power since it marked the elevation of king's and state's authority over popes. 9  [See More On The Knights Templar]

The Goddess Rather Than the One God Of the Jews

More damaging than his misuse of history is Brown's slurs concerning the Knights Templars' method of worship. He has joined forces with those who misrepresented the Templars in the fourteenth century and those who have done so since. While Brown does not have his characters say the Templars spat on the crucifix or engaged in homosexual orgies as their original accusers did, he does have Langdon explain their worship in a manner that would have, undoubtedly, caused the monastic brothers sorrow and outrage. Both Langdon and another character, Teabing, insist the Templars worshiped “Baphomet” a fertility god, “by encircling a stone replica of his head and chanting prayers.” Teabing states, “The ceremony honored the creative magic of sexual union (316).” Furthermore, in Brown's reworking of the story of Jesus, this is the main emphasis on worship, sexual union between a man and a woman with the important point being the uplifting of the divine feminine. Langdon explains to Sophie the importance of sexual union as a means of experiencing God. He states:

Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine. Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis-knowledge of the divine. Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man's only bridge from earth to heaven. (308)

Langdon further states that the Jews also worshiped using sexual union in Solomon's Temple with the aid of priestesses. According to Brown, using the voice of Langdon, the Temple was the house not only for God but, “also His powerful female equal, Shekinah.”(309) Brown attempts to center any knowledge about Jesus within a fictional religion that involves and absorbs ancient Judaism, pagan goddesses, and ancient fertility rites. There are two blatant errors Brown has made with his view of religion and sexual rites. First, Brown has not and cannot establish any historical connection between ancient pagan goddesses and Jesus and Mary Magdalene nor can he place the goddesses in any modern or medieval time frame. Second he cannot so easily turn the Jewish faith and its history into a pagan religion as he has attempted to do. These two errors will be explored in turn.

Brown has merged a fiction of the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene with a nineteenth century fiction that pagan goddess worship was a continuing, but underground system in Europe during the middle ages and even into contemporary times. However, according to Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, the belief that pagan society and the worship of the goddess had survived into modern times began with Victorian writers and folklore societies in England. In untangling this historical web, Hutton cites the work of Gillian Bennett and Mary Beard and then adds his own research. Evidently those who conducted folklore research from 1870 to 1970 used a model that depended on an evolutionary theory as well as comparative method. As Hutton puts it when explaining Bennett's research, “Folk customs, therefore, could represent cultural fossils, left over from the earlier stages of civilized societies, and a comparative study of them could provide a general theory of religious development for the human race.”10 Hutton's addition to this was the concept of German Romanticism searching for a national identity in folk customs hopefully wedded to the ancient past.11 Mary Beard's work focused on Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and his method of writing religious history by using the comparative method.12 Hutton adds to Beards study the understanding that both Frazer and another folklorist, Sir Edward Tylor, intended to “discredit religion in general, and Christianity in particular, in order to assist the progress of humanity towards a more perfect rationalism.”13

The end result of the comparative and evolutionary model of religious research by folklorist was a forced picture of the reasons for rural celebrations and religious practices. Many practices were misinterpreted to fit the model of a fossil of some ancient ritual or as a reference to some ancient person, god or goddess. For example, Hutton writes of how in the first issue of the Folk-Lore Society, in 1890, Sidney Hartland interpreted “the legend of Lady Godiva as an example of a pagan fertility rite later converted into an occasion for Christian civic pride.”14 Hutton gives a long list of misinterpretations given by folklorists of the day. The list accumulates until it reaches the incredulous work of a “distinguished academic expert in Near Eastern Religion, S.H. Hooke, who suggested that pancake-tossing had been a magical rite to make crops grow, that Shrove Tuesday football matches had begun as ritual struggles representing the forces of dark and light, and that Mother's Day was a relic of the worship of the ancient Corn Mother.”15

Additionally a belief that all ancient societies worshiped a mother goddess, manifested in various regional goddesses, was wedded to this way of understanding local culture. Goddesses were imagined in places they had never been. Hutton traces this through the literature of the nineteenth century to a French archaeologist, Joseph Dechelette who “proposed that the cult of the Great Goddess had been conceived in the Neolithic of Asia Minor and the Balkans and carried thence across the Mediterranean to the whole Stone Age Western Europe.” Additionally, Dechelette conceived of her as having been visualized both as a giver of life and fertility and as a giver of death and rebirth; a light and a dark goddess.”16 Hutton explains how poets, novelists, and various intellectual thinkers of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth carried on the concept of a Great Mother Goddess who was known worldwide under various names. Robert Graves' book, The White Goddess was and is one of the more influential books in promoting this view of the goddess, especially among adherents of modern Witchcraft. 17 But the academic world connected with paganism sometime before the 1990's and most pagan academics and those who read them see the view that there was a continuing line of paganism from the distant past through the Middle Ages to modern times as a myth.18 To put it another way, there were goddesses in the distant past such as the goddess Freya worshiped by ancient Norse pagans, and there are pagans today who worship the ancient goddesses, including Freya, in various ways. However, there were no continuing worshipers of these various goddesses within Christian civilization during the middle ages.

The idea that sexual rituals were performed in Solomon's Temple or that a female deity shared honor with Jehovah is particularly disturbing because Brown has to shove aside the Jewish tradition of monotheism, the teaching of Torah and the ministry of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible in order to make such a statement. He portrays the Jewish people in France protecting Mary Magdalene and her baby, but he turns their community into a pagan society by misrepresenting their religious history. The reality of sexual rites and Jewish worship is that Israel in her early history struggled between the worship of the one true God, Yehweh, and the gods and goddesses of the nations surrounding her. She was warned by God not to do, “what is done in the land of Egypt where you lived, nor are you to do what is done in the land of Canaan where I am bringing you; you shall not walk in their statutes (Leviticus 18:3).” This included both immoral living and false worship. The choice was between those who held to the view of God's self-revelation that, “The Lord is our God, the Lord is one (Deut. 6:4b),”and those who worshiped the gods and goddesses. The divide was always between worshiping the one true God, who demanded acts of kindness and charity, and worshiping false gods and goddesses, whose worship included sexual ritual and at times even child sacrifice. K. A. Kitchens names the gods and goddesses of Canaan which included Baal and the goddesses Asherah and Astarte who “had multi-coloured personalities of sex and war.” He writes of the religious practices of the Canaanites, whom the Israelites and their brothers in Judah emulated, that it “appealed to the bestial and material in human nature.”19

The Jewish prophets thundered against Israel and Judah's apostasy to other deities as well as her disregard for the poor, the oppressed and the foreigner living in their land. The same prophet who denounces Judah with the words, “The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and women knead dough to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods in order to spite me [the Lord], (Jeremiah. 7:18) also pleads with the people to “not oppress the alien, the orphan, or the widow (Jeremiah 7:6a).” The same evil king, Manasseh, who set up alters in the house of the Lord for the host of heaven and made his son pass through the fire to a false god, who practiced witchcraft and used divination as well as dealing with mediums and spiritists, who set up a carved image of Asherah in the house of God and placed male prostitutes in the Lord's house, was also the one who “shed very much innocent blood until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another (2 Kings 21: 5-7b; 23:6).” The biblical writers show the sinfulness that existed in Israel and Judah when it pictures both the sin of false worship and the oppression of others, and that is a warning meant for all of humanity. It is often those who reject the history of the Jewish people or attempt to change it that throw away the ethics that are encased in the prophetic message and the law. Brown's mystery is an example. Brown honors sexual ritual as a proper means of worship while his book, The Da Vinci Code, has little human quality or moral viewpoint; only the mysteries are important. In truth, the story transports the reader on a search for clue after clue, until the need to know keeps one on the edge almost in frustration. This, of course, works well in a book written by one who uses gnostic stories as an authoritative view of early church history. That is, Brown sees, as the authoritative spokespersons for the stories about Jesus and Mary Magdalene as well as the early church, those who held a belief that knowledge, (gnosis), was a means to salvation.

Gnostic Gospels and The New Testament

The characters, Langdon and Teabing, attempt to prove to Sophie the truth of their tales about Mary Magdalene and the goddess by discrediting the New Testament and elevating several gnostic gospels to a place of authority. Brown's basic assumption, through the mouth of his characters, is that the Roman emperor Constantine “commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels [gnostic gospels] that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those gospels [New Testament] that made Him godlike (233-34).” The truth is that the Gnostics were not at all interested in Jesus' human traits; in many gnostic gospels there is no hint of his personality or his deeds, only a record of his sayings. This was because most Gnostics believed the material world was evil and unimportant. In most gnostic gospels, where Christ is mentioned, he is simply a phantom or spirit who descends on the man Jesus and leaves as Jesus dies. The man, Jesus, in the gnostic gospels is not important but is simply a means to an end, he is a vessel used to hold Christ. The Gnostic Christ has no humanity. It is in the New Testament that Jesus Christ is seen as both human and divine. He hungers yet overloads a fishing boat with a bountiful catch. He weeps because of the death of a friend and is compassionate while he heals the sick and raises the dead. He eats and sleeps, but walks on water and stills the storm. He dies yet rises physically to life. He suffers while redeeming humanity.

The gnostic gospels that Brown mentions in his novel, are, “The Gospel of Phillip” and “The Gospel of Mary.” E.M. Yamauchi writes that although there were various types of gnosticism, most gnostics held certain beliefs in common. Among the basic gnostic doctrines Yamauchi lists are:

a dualism that opposed the transcendent God and an ignorant demiurge (often a caricature of the OT Jehovah).” In some systems the creation of the world resulted from the presumption of Sophia (Wisdom). The material creation, including the body, was regarded as inherently evil. Sparks of divinity, however, had been encapsuled in the bodies of certain pneumatic or spiritual individuals, who were ignorant of their celestial origins. The transcendent God sent down a redeemer, who brought them salvation in the form of secret gnosis.

See The Gnostic Gospels

“The Gospel of Phillip” belongs to the Valentinian type of gnosticism. Valentinus was a gnostic teacher who wrote around 140 AD. He emphasized the idea that some humans contained sparks of divinity. He divided humanity into three classes, “hylics, or unbelievers immersed in nature and the flesh; psychics, or common Christians who lived by faith; and pneumatics or spiritual Gnostics.” 20 Ben Witherington places the date of “The Gospel of Phillip,” in the early or late third century. 21 He places The Gospel of Mary in the second century. 22 In “The Gospel of Mary,” Mary Magdalene refers to differing powers, such as ignorance, which she tells the disciples the soul passes as it ascends. Like all gnostic texts this one implies the soul must overcome ignorance and other powers as well as the material world and one must look within to accomplish this. Allegedly, this gnostic view of salvation is part of the secret knowledge Mary was given by Jesus.23 However, neither the teachings nor the dating of these gnostic texts gives them any standing as truthful history about the life or teachings of Jesus. First, their gnostic doctrines contradict the whole Jewish background of the early church. Once again the Hebrew Bible and Jewish history come under attack. Secondly, these texts were written much later than the authentic texts of the New Testament. Finally, Brown's assertion that Constantine was the one who selected the texts and produced the New Testament has no basis in history. The fact is that Constantine had nothing to do with choosing the books of the New Testament. The books of the New Testament did not receive their status as the official canon at the Council of Nicaea, but at the Synod of Hippo in 393 and this “was re-promulgated by the Third Synod of Carthage” four years later.24 And it is certain the books were not canonized without first having been recognized by the Christian church as possessing authority. As F.F. Bruce writes:

There is a distinction between the canonicity of a book of the Bible and its authority. Its canonicity is dependent upon its authority. For when we ascribe canonicity to a book we simply mean that it belongs to the canon or list. But why does it so belong? Because it was recognized as possessing special authority. People frequently speak and write as if the authority with which the books of the Bible are invested in the minds of the Christians is the result of their having been included in the sacred list. But the historical fact is the other way about; they were and are included in the lists because they were acknowledged as authoritative. 25
 

Was Jesus Christ God?

In a continuing focus on Constantine and the Nicaea Council, Brown states that until the Council, Christians believed that Jesus was only a man, not a god. In truth, the Council of Nicaea was called to settle the Arian controversy. Arius, against the church of his day, insisted that Jesus was a created being, lower than the Father, and certainly not God. Contrary to Brown's opinion, the church had always maintained that Jesus Christ was Lord. That is the first creed of the church found in the New Testament. For instance, after the resurrection of Jesus, when Thomas sees the places where Christ had been wounded in his hands and side, he says to him, “My Lord and my God (John 20:28).” Paul writing to Timothy states: “By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness: He who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory (1 Timothy 3:16).” Paul corresponding with the church at Philippi, writes of Jesus, “who, though He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:3,4). Writing to the church at Colossae, Paul warns them, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form (Colossians 2:8,9). The Council of Nicaea simply settled the question, maintaining the biblical witness that Jesus Christ is, “very God of very God.”

Brown and the reliability of his religious views in the Da Vinci Code, reminds one of a character, Potty Peake, in one of Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. In The Nine Tailors, Lord Wimsey is questioning Mrs. Venables about the reliability of Potty Peake's testimony.

“ `Can one place any sort of reliance on his account of anything?'

`Well,” said Mrs. Venables, `sometimes one can and sometimes one can't. He gets mixed up, you know. He's quite truthful, as far as his understanding goes, but he gets fancies and then tells them as if they were facts. You can't trust anything he says about ropes or hanging-that's his little peculiarity. Otherwise-if it was a question of pigs, for instance, or the church organ-he's quite good and reliable.'

`I see,' said Wimsey. `Well, he has been talking a good bit about ropes and hanging.'”26

In Sayers' mystery, the truth was, Potty Peake did see ropes he just misinterpreted their meaning. Reading a mystery that includes medieval and ancient church history, as well as the figures of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is very satisfying when the historical facts do not get so entangled with fantasy. Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries as well as Umberto Eco's The Name of The Rose are proof that mystery mixed with truthful history makes excellent reading. In fact, reading mysteries can even be a spiritual activity, as Eugene Peterson points out in his book on spiritual reading. He writes that we may like mysteries because, “right and wrong, so often obscured in the ambiguities of everyday living, are cleanly, delineated in the murder mystery. The story gives us moral and intellectual breathing room when we are about to be suffocated in the hot air and heavy panting of relativism and subjectivism.” 27 If Peterson is right and I believe he is, The Da Vinci Code fails in so many ways. The book is too much like the postmodern, American way of life, running here and there in the dead of night, never stopping until every new fad and every bit of religious landscape is explored. When the reader is finished the truth is buried and the reader is exhausted.

1 R.H.C. Davis, A History of Medieval Europe: From Constantine to Saint Louis, second edition, (London: Longman 1988) 268.

2 Ibid., 271.

3 Ibid.,273.

4 Justo L. Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, Harper Collins Publ. 1984), 278.

5 Kenneth Scot Latourette, A History of Christianity: Beginnings to 1500, Vol. 1 revised edition, (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco 1975) 488-9.

6 Thomas Bokenkotter, A Concise History of the Catholic Church, revised edition, (Garden City, New York: Image Books, Doubleday 7 Co.), 186-89.

7 Henri Daniel-Rops, Cathedral and Crusade: Studies of the Medieval Church 1050-1350, Vol II, trans. John Warrington, (Librairie Artheme Fayard, Garden City, New York: Image Books, Doubleday & Co. 1963), 345-50.

8 Ibid., n. 13, 348.

9 Ibid., 349-50.

10 Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), 113. Referring to Gillian Bennett, `Geologists and Folklorists: Cultural Evolution and the Science of Folklore', Folklore 105 (1994), 25-37.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid., Referring to Mary Beard, `Frazer, Leach and Virgil: the Popularity (and Unpopularity) of The Golden Bough', Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992), 203-24.

13 Ibid., 114.

14 Ibid., Citing E. Sidney Hartland, `Peeping Tom and Lady Godiva', Folk-Lore 1 (1890), 225.

15 Ibid., 128-29, Citing S.H. Hooke, `Time and Custom', Folk-Lore 48 (1937), 17-24.

16 Ibid., 37, Citing Joseph Dechelette, Manual d'archeologie prehistorique Celtique et Gallo-Romaine, vol1 (Paris, 1908), 594-6.

17 Ibid.,41.

18 Ibid., “Coming of Age,” 369-388. Hutton names many who contributed to this change in views about Wicca's past. They include: Isaac Bonewits, Aidan Kelly, Margot Adler and Vivianne Crowley, as well as the members of the Pagan Federation.

19 K. A. Kitchen, “Canaan, Canaanites,” New Bible Dictionary, editors, I. Howard Marshall, A.R. Millard, J.I. Packer, D.J. Wiseman, (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press), 164.

20 E.M. Yamauchi, “Gnosticism,” Dictionary of New Testament Background: A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship, eds. Craig A. Evans & Stanley E. Porter, (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press 2000), 414-418.

21 2 Ben Witherington III, Women In The Earliest Churches; Society for New Testament Studies, Monograph Series, Ed. G.N. Stanton, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989) 208.

22 Ibid., 207.

23 “ The Gospel of Mary,” in The Gospels of Mary: The Secret Tradition of Mary Magdalene the Companion of Jesus, Marvin Meyer with Esther A. de Boer, editors and commentary, (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco 2004), 19-22.

24 F.F. Bruce, The Books and the Parchments: How we got our English Bible, revised and updated, (Old Tappen, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Company 1984), n. 30, 103-4.

25 Ibid.,87.

26 Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors, (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, A Harvest/ HBJ Book n.d.), 236.

27 Eugene H. Peterson, Take & Read: Spiritual Reading: An Annotated List, (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing 1996), 73.

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