The Da Vinci Code Broken

Dan Brown’s best selling novel is now a Hollywood blockbuster. The Da Vinci Code has stormed into western consciousness in a way that has been unparalleled. “A gripping read,” the credits claim. “A must-see movie!” However, it has raised a storm of protest. The Archbishop of Canterbury called it “cynical” in his Easter sermon. Westminster Abbey refused to allow it to be filmed on its property (so Lincoln Cathedral stepped in instead!) About a dozen books and numerous events and debates have arisen in the wake of the continuing popularity of the novel. So what’s all the fuss about? Kernowyouth asked historian Phil Hadley to investigate.

The fuss starts with the first page of the novel. Dan Brown heads it “Fact”. He then says the Priory of Sion – a European secret society founded in 1099 – is a real organisation. He talks about Opus Dei, and then ends the page with the words: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.”  The controversy was heightened when on 3 November 2003 Dan Brown claimed before a tv audience of 15 million on “Good Morning America” that his book was not just a novel, but scholarly fact – real history. His website states that it is “my belief that the theories discussed by these characters may have merit.”

Fact or Fiction?

However it is on this first page of the novel that Dan Brown proves he is writing fiction. He writes, “In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo di Vinci.” On page 280 of the Corgi paperback edition he adds that the Dossier “had been authenticated by many specialists.” The Dossiers are in fact a hoax. Two French journalists, Marie-France Etchegoin and Frederic Lenoir have traced the creation of the Priory of Sion back to 1956. In the 1960’s and 1970’s a Frenchman Pierre Plantard produced a series of documents that proved the existance of a secret society dedicated to maintaining the secret character of the Holy Grail. These documents traced a royal bloodline from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, through the kings of France, to Pierre himself. These claims were popularised in 1982 in the now discredited book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.” Pierre Plantard testified under oath in 1993 that he had made the whole thing up!

Artwork

As for Brown’s descriptions of artwork, he shows an incredible lack of knowledge and understanding. Of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Brown claims it was named (in code) after the Egyptian god and goddess of fertility: Amon and L’Ise (Isis), and that it is actually a portrait of Leonardo himself as a woman. However, the painting did not receive the name Mona Lisa until after Leonardo’s lifetime. Even then it was not Mona but Monna (short for Madonna). The figure in it is clearly a woman and doesn’t look anything like the bearded Leonardo we know from other paintings. Nor did any of Leonardo’s contemporaries suggest it was him!

Brown claims too, that in Leonardo’s Last Supper Painting the figure of John on Jesus’ right is actually Mary Magdalene. If this were the case, then John would be missing from the supper. Again, none of Leonardo’s contemporaries thought this was the case. Dan Brown claims the figure to the right of Jesus has been hidden for centuries until the actual fresco was cleaned down to Da Vinci’s original layer of paint. The fact is Da Vinci’s original layer of paint is so damaged, no one can tell if the figure is male or female. Even if the original Last Supper were recognisable, Leonardo da Vinci consistently portrays young men as having very feminine features, such as his last masterpiece entitled St John the Baptist located at the Louvre in Paris.

Da Vinci always worked on sketches of his paintings first. In Venice there is the original sketch of the Last Supper. Da Vinci has labelled the figure to the right of Jesus as John the apostle.

Architecture

Brown makes some claims concerning architecture as well. In The Da Vinci Code he claims the Paris meridian leads straight to the church of Saint Sulpice. In fact they are 30 feet apart. Inside the church he claims the obelisk standing in the northern transept is of Egyptian pagan origin. In fact, it is a gnomon, a scientific tool installed by astronomers in 1743 to calculate the earth’s rotation and the date of the spring equinox. In the Grand Gallery at the Louvre, the window at the far end through which Langon and Neveu attempt to escape by jumping, is just a figment of Dan Brown’s imagination. It does not exist.

However it is the claims Dan Brown makes about Jesus and the development of Christianity that have aroused the most discussion.

The central theme of the book is that the Holy Grail is not, as tradition suggests, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. According to Brown, it is Mary Magdalene. Apparently, Jesus had married her, and they’d had a daughter called Sarah. After the crucifixion they had fled to France and here the bloodline of Jesus intermarried with the French Royal Family to establish the royal Merovingian line. The line continues to this day somewhere in Europe.  Somewhere also, the body of Mary is buried and with her, vital documents that will reveal the true story of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Thus the quest for the Holy Grail is, according to Brown, “the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one, the lost sacred feminine.”

Documents

Brown claims his evidence is the fact that the earliest Christian documents were not the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but the writings of the Gnostic movement. These claim Jesus was just a man, that he married Mary Magdalene by whom he had a child, and that he did not die on the cross. They claim that Mary Magdalene was chief among the apostles. Brown claims that the church rewrote the story in the fourth century to downgrade women in a scheme masterminded by Emperor Constantine. He says the Gnostic writings were destroyed, but the church’s cover up was blown apart by the discovery of a collection of Gnostic writings at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 and the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950’s.

But here again what Brown claims as fact is pure fiction. There is no historical evidence that Jesus married or that he fathered a child. Brown’s character Teabing quotes the Gnostic writing the Gospel of Philip to prove his claim: “And the companion of [....] Mary Magdalene.  [....] loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on [.....].” Brown inserts the word mouth into the third blank space, even though the original document is damaged and there are parts missing, so the dots in the brackets mean that part is lost. Thus Brown makes it read “Used to kiss her often on the mouth.” Teabling then claims “As any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion, in those days, literally meant spouse.”

However, the Nag Hammadi Gospel of Philip was written in Coptic, not Aramaic, but at this point the word used is borrowed from a familiar Greek word koinonos which means associate, partner or companion. The word for spouse or wife is a completely different word. The idea that Jesus fathered a child is pure fiction. There is not a shred of historical evidence for it.

As for the Nag Hammadi documents, these were found by two peasant farmers in a jar they found while digging in December 1945. One of them took home the papyrus manuscripts (12 codices and 8 leaves from a 13th century codex). They include the Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Mary. Dan Brown suggests in the Da Vinci Code that these documents were Gnostic gospels earlier than the New Testament gospels. However, the Gospel of Philip mentioned above was written 250 years after the events it describes, and even quotes from the New Testament (eg 1 Corinthians 8 v1; 1 Peter 4 v8; Matthew 15 v13). This surely is good evidence that the gospel of Philip was written after the New Testament and not before.

Dan Brown also makes the mistake of grouping the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Nag Hammadi documents as the “earliest Christian documents.” Firstly, he is wrong that the Scrolls were found in the 1950’s. They were discovered in 1947 near Qumran. Secondly, the Dead Sea Scrolls are not Christian documents. They do not even mention Jesus Christ, let alone speak of his ministry “in very human terms.” The Scrolls contain all the Old Testament books except Esther. For example, the oldest copy of Isaiah by 1,000 years. They contain Biblical commentaries on Old Testament books, psalms and hymns. Some contain sectarian material belonging to the Qumran community itself.

Brown’s claim that the church rewrote the story of Jesus in the fourth century again shows his ignorance of history. He claims that more than 80 gospels were considered for inclusion in the New Testament. Again that is pure fiction. Neither were any of the Gnostic gospels ever considered for inclusion.

Neither is it true to say that prior to 325AD no one believed Jesus was divine. Pliny, the Roman governor, writing in AD112 records that “Christians were in the habit of meeting regularly before dawn on a fixed date to chant verses alternately among themselves in honour of Christ as to a God.” The New Testament, with Paul’s writings beginning in AD48, is full of references to Jesus as divine. Incidentally they also show Jesus as fully human too.

According to the Da Vinci Code Jesus was established as “The Son of God” by a close vote at the Council Of Nicaea. The Council, summoned and opened by Constantine, met to end disunity and controversy caused by Arius who was teaching that although Jesus was the Son of God he was less than the Father, a lesser god. The Arian creed was rejected and they produced the Nicene Creed with four anti-Arian anathemas attached. This was accepted by all but two of the 220+ bishops there. That is, over 99% were in favour. The Council simply reaffirmed what was previously believed, it did not establish Jesus as the Son of God.

Nor is it true to say that the “Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.” Constantine had become a Christian long before his “deathbed baptism, too weak to protest,” but he had nothing to do with fixing the Canon of Scripture. The Muratorian fragment (C170AD) demonstrates that 61 out of the 66 books of our Bible were already treated as sacred 100 years before Constantine was born! It is also absurd to suggest that Constantine “embellished” the Gospels that we have. We have fragments of Johns Gospel in the John Rylands library in Manchester that date from around 130AD.

The novel refers to the legendary “Q” Document that is a book of Jesus’ teachings: “possibly written by Jesus himself”. “Q” is well known in academic circles as the hypothetical source of the sayings of Jesus that are common in some of the first three Gospels. No one has ever suggested that Jesus wrote it and we do not even know that it exists. But if it does, it makes no difference to anything we have in the four Gospels.

Secret rituals

Finally the Da Vinci Code claims that sex is a “spiritual act” in which one may find the “spark of divinity.” Brown is partly correct: God is the ultimate source of our sexuality. According to Genesis, “God created humanity in his own image, male and female he created them.” Yet – and this is where the Da Vinci Code goes wrong – sexual pleasure is not intended to be an end in itself. Certainly, God didn’t plan our sexuality to be a frenzied group ritual, such as the one celebrated in the Da Vinci Code. Rather, the intimate pleasure expressed between a husband and his wife is intended to be a reflection of the intense, exclusive passion that God feels for his people. Therefore, there is no “spark of divinity” that we can find in a moment of sexual pleasure. What we can find, within the context that God created for sexual expression, is a beautiful reflection of divine love.

Unfounded too is Brown’s claim that the church recast sex as “a shameful act”. A glance at some Old and New Testament passages quickly calls this claim into question: “Rejoice in the wife of your youth, let her breasts fill you with delight.” Another text explicitly describes the bride and groom on their wedding night. According to the apostle Paul, the only reason for a wife and husband not to have sex consistently was if they agreed to “devote themselves to prayer for a limited time.” Certainly, some church leaders have frowned on sex, but their teachings do not agree with Scripture.

Brown, in his desire to promote the sacred feminine claims Shekinah was the “powerful female equal” of God worshipped alongside YHWH (Yahweh) in the Old Testament. The term “Shekinah” never appears in Old or New Testaments. It is a Hebrew term used by later rabbis to describe God’s presence among his people. It simply means “the one who dwells.” At no point did “Shekinah” refer to a separate, female deity.”

Conclusion

So are “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel accurate?”  The answer has to be a resounding “No!”  As Brian Edwards puts it, “Dan Brown’s knowledge of linguistics fails him, his grasp of church history is weak and his understanding of the transmission of the New Testament is sadly flawed.” The Da Vinci Code, hailed by the New York Daily Times with the words, “His research is impeccable” is a broken book. Enjoy the read, be entertained by the film and then put its ideas in the trash where they belong.

by Phil Hadley. May 2006.

SOURCES USED TO RESEARCH THIS ARTICLE:

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Corgi 2004)
Gnosis An Introduction by Christoph Markschies (T&T Clark Trans 2003)
The Books The Church Suppressed by Dr Michael Green (Monarch 2005)
The Da Vinci Code by Garry Williams (Christian Focus 2006)
The Da Vinci Code: a response by Nicky Gumbel (Alpha International 2005)
Da Vinci: A broken code by Brian H Edwards (Day One 2006)
Answers to the Da Vinci Code by Timothy Paul Jones (Rose Publishing 2004)
Paris and the Da Vinci Code by Stephane Calmeyn (Reader’s Digest May 2006)
Easter Sermon 2006 by Dr Rowan Williams (various British media reports)
The Da Vinci Code – Fact or Fiction? By Christopher Shell (Revival Times Magazine Online)
The New Testament (New International Version)

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