Author: Dan Brown
Ordinarily I like to read murder mysteries, books about espionage, and books that contain some kind of riddle to be solved. A former cryptographer, I am still fascinated with the making and breaking of codes and I enjoy word puzzles, puns, and anagrams. Add an element of theological controversy, and you have the sort of book I’d normally look forward to reading.
The Da Vinci Code has everything in it that I ought to like. Most of the action in its 454 pages takes place in the span of barely 12 hours. Right in the very first sentence, the reader encounters a murder in progress. And a great many of the subsequent 105 chapters have car chases and, if not actual gun fights, guns drawn.
But by the time I’d read half way through the book, it was an effort to continue. For one thing, the author’s gimmicks had lost their ability to hold me in suspense, and I was weary of his name-dropping. For another, there is something flat about the characters. All the protagonists are good-natured, sophisticated, intelligent, glamorous, courageous, likable pagans––the “cultured despisers” of Christianity––and all the bad guys are rigid, hateful, obscurantist Christians, hungry for power and money, and willing to go to any lengths (including assassination) to suppress the truth that will discredit the Church’s fraudulent claims about Jesus.
This might not be so serious in a novel, except that following the title page is another page titled “Fact,” on which the author states: “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” The reader is led to believe that every statement made in this book about the origins of Christianity and the Bible has been thoroughly researched. That is why I don’t think it far-fetched to call The Da Vinci Code a systematically deceitful book.
The novel’s “thesis statement” is found in comments like these dropped from the mouths of the protagonists: “...almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.” And Dan Brown, through his characters, sets out to tell the “true truth” that has been concealed from you through the centuries.
This truth, according to Brown, is that Jesus was a remarkable human being, a wise teacher, a charismatic leader, and the rightful King of Israel. In this merely human life, he married Mary Magdalene, by whom he had a child. (One of Brown’s characters says this marriage “is a matter of historical record”– an example of the liberties he takes with the truth.) Before his death (according to the novel), Jesus entrusted his authority and teaching to Mary. But the jealous apostles (male apostles– what else do you expect?) conspired to suppress all knowledge of this and drove Mary Magdalene into hiding, along with the child she had by Jesus. And from that time to this, the real truth has been entrusted to a favored few, and quietly acknowledged by scholars as a factual account of Christianity’s origins.
Authentic Christianity, according to Brown, was Gnosticism. Real Gnosticism (it has lots of variants) is a philosophy based on escape from the material world by initiation into higher levels of spiritual knowledge. The created world is evil or, at best, an illusion. According to what is historically known about Gnosticism, the Gnostic teachers claimed Jesus was a pure spirit being, who only seemed human. He did not really die on a cross; Simon of Cyrene was crucified in his place. The “Gnostic gospels”––there never were 80 of them, as Brown implies––do not present a human Jesus, but just the opposite, a magical character who lived “once upon a time,” rather than in any concrete historical time. As far as I know, it would be antithetical to real Gnosticism to be enmeshed with the “goddess” religions and the “sacred feminine,” as Brown claims. Goddess religions typically teach that there is nothing created that is not, in some sense, god; whereas Gnosticism operates on the assumption that the created world is inherently evil, a trap from which our spirits have to escape.
Just to name a few of the other obvious inaccuracies which Brown, through his “scholarly” characters, presents as historical facts: The Emperor Constantine did not decide on the choice of the four Gospels for the New Testament canon. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were recognized as authoritative by Christians everywhere much earlier than that. Other New Testament writings, particularly some of the shorter epistles, took longer to be incorporated into the canon, but Constantine had nothing to do with their selection.
It is laughably anachronistic to speak of the “Vatican power base” as a synonym for the Roman Catholic Church in the time of Constantine-- or even to speak of a Roman Catholic Church, more than seven centuries before the Church was divided between the Roman west and the Orthodox east. The Vatican hill by then was a sacred place for Christians who came to pray at the site where St. Peter had been martyred, but it did not become a residence for popes until a couple of centuries after Constantine.
The belief in Jesus’ divinity was not an invention of Constantine imposed on the Council of Nicaea in 325 a.d. Most of the apostles and many of their early converts went to their deaths rather than deny that Jesus is Lord, God, and Savior. “Jehovah” was never one of the biblical names of God. Jewish scribes, when they added vowel notations to manuscripts of the Scriptures, added the vowels for Adonai, “Lord,” to the consonants for Yahweh (or Jahweh), so as to prevent readers from saying the “unspeakable” name of God out loud. Gentile translators, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and now Dan Brown, fell for the trick.
There is page after page of distortions and half-truths. Willful exaggerations of the number of accused witches burned in Europe. Bizarre claims about the sexual symbolism in gothic architecture. And ask any devout Jew: Is it in any way plausible that Israel’s “authentic” worship as practiced in Solomon’s Temple included rituals involving sacred prostitutes? (That is, before the sex-hating villains came along and stamped it out.)
As to Brown’s use of Leonardo da Vinci’s art to support his claims, I admit to not knowing all that much about art and art history. I’m willing to say, “Okay, show me.” I’m willing to acknowledge that at least some Christian symbolism came into being through the “baptism” of pre-Christian symbols. There’s a great deal I don’t know about secret societies like the Knights Templar. But based on the self-evident falsehoods I have already detected I would have to hear the rest of Brown’s case through a filter of suspicion.
Readers who like multilingual puns might enjoy unraveling the symbolism in the characters’ names. Episcopalian readers might be amused by one character’s reference to Anglican “bleakness”: “Anglicans drink their religion straight. Nothing to distract from their misery.” But Brown’s main target is the Roman Catholic Church, and the more I read of this book, the more it seems to be capitalizing on last year’s scandals and appealing to people who have a grudge against the Roman Catholic Church.
Clearly lots of people are enjoying this book. It has been a number one best-seller since last March. It bothers me that well-intentioned Christians who have, until now, preferred not to know much about Church history and the development of Christian doctrine, will take Brown at his word. Anyone who has attended Wednesday Eucharist and heard me tell chapters of the Church’s story through the lives of some of the saints in our calendar will appreciate that it is a complex history. Brown has reduced it all to a black-and-white conspiracy theory. His “supporting documentation” includes a small amount of credible scholarship, which, alas, he has failed to grasp, along with a great deal of revisionist, agenda-driven pseudo-scholarship.
If you haven’t read it yet, you might not want to miss out any longer on the fun and suspense, but don’t let yourself be misled about the author’s intentions. Ultimately, which is it going to be? Salvation through initiation into higher realms of secret knowledge– if you're smart enough to be so favored? Or salvation as a gift, openly offered to all who by faith receive the one who loved us and laid down his life for us?