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Can you sense it?
The leaves are rustling, the smell is in the air—there is a
storm coming. It is a storm of
controversy, and the media is buzzing, the experts are lined up, 
and
the political and religious figures are booked for the talk shows.
Why, you ask? Because of the May 19 release of the movie The Da Vinci Code, based upon Dan
Brown’s controversial novel. Anyone
with cable or satellite has undoubtedly seen the numerous shows about the book
for some time, but the theatrical premiere has stoked the flames.
If anything, the talk is bigger, because, let’s face it; more people
watch movies than read books nowadays. So
what is the big deal? 
The book is about a
professor
of Religious Symbology at Harvard University named Robert Langdon (Tom
Hanks in the movie) who becomes involved in the investigation of a
mysterious murder at the Louvre. What
follows is an intricate game of cat and mouse and a scavenger hunt of clues and
codes as Langdon and a young 
member
of France’s Direction Centrale Police Judiciaire
(who happens to be the murder victim’s granddaughter)
untangle a centuries held secret—a secret certain fanatical members of the
Church will kill to keep—concerning the Gnostic gospels, the Holy Grail and
its true meaning, and the Merovingian bloodline (the
controversial bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdelene).
Several of the
viewpoints supported in this book are not accepted by most Orthodox Church
denominations and many scholars have accused Dan Brown of misrepresenting
certain historical and religious facts. It
wouldn’t be the first time a book or movie stepped on some religious toes, but
once again, Christians
keep responding in exactly the wrong way.
The two extreme
reactions are either to say
absolutely nothing (thus allowing the inaccuracies to remain unchallenged
and uncorrected, meaning that those who don’t know the truth about it will be
deceived) or to form
a witch-hunt and froth at the mouth to every news camera they can
find. Neither of these approaches
are productive, and will only result in marginalizing the whole faith even
further than it already is.
That is just fine with
the ‘powers that be’, which want Christians to
keep their beliefs out of the public
arena (even though everyone else gets to bring in their
beliefs). This should come
as no surprise to believers because Jesus clearly warned us in the Bible that ‘if
they hated me, they will hate you.’
It goes with the territory. But
Christians
have every right to engage the culture—to affect it with their
belief system. What is good for the
goose is good for the gander. If a
piece of fiction comes along that totally misrepresents their viewpoints,
historical facts, etc., then they should be able to speak their piece and
correct all those fallacies.
So that is what I am
going to do. I am not going to
stand by and let people that don’t know any better believe this stuff without
hearing the other side of the story. But
I won’t light any torches for angry mobs either—I mean, let’s keep this in
perspective; it’s only a movie (well, it was a book
first, but you know what I mean).
First I am going to
play book critic and evaluate the novel. As
of the writing of this article, the movie isn’t out yet, but I have read the
book, so it is there I will begin.
The book has several
things going for it. The world
loves a good conspiracy story, and this one is a doozey.
The sheer magnitude of it is very bold—an entire world faith system has
had the wool pulled over its eyes by some corrupt leaders for a millennium, and
a mysterious secret society has preserved the truth through subtle clues hidden
in priceless works of art and historical landmarks. The protagonists are likeable, particularly Langdon, who is
abruptly thrust into the middle of the intrigue, and who scrapes through it
nobly and heroically. The
author’s use of mathematical puzzles in the Fibonacci sequence and Divine
Proportion (Phi) is very educating and
entertaining, as are his anagrams, various hidden clues and clever ciphers.
There is an exciting dose of danger, some chases, several good escapes
and a few plot twists.
On the other hand,
there are quite a few tired clichés. 
The psychopathic albino assassin has been done to death, and although Dan
Brown claims on his own website that he tried to portray him as sympathetic; I
didn’t get that when I read it. The
heroine is a beautiful redhead (brunette in the movie)
expert in codes for the DCPJ (France’s FBI) who
just happens to be the granddaughter of the murdered curator of the Louvre, and
she predictably toys with a romance with Langdon.
There’s even the playful English knight, Sir Leah Teabing, who seems to
skip into each successive predicament with a carefree ‘what
shall we do next’ attitude, and is in constant supply of pithy
witticisms designed for comic relief.
All that, I can take,
but the book is very preachy. An
author should never tell his readers what to think, and he not only does, but
also frames the religious issues in such a way as to give one the impression
that there is no real controversy. If
you are enlightened you will agree with him, and if you don’t, then you are a
sexist ignoramus in league with the bad guys—there is no other option.
Anything pagan is good, and anything Christian is bad.
(I could not remember a single character that was
Christian that was portrayed in a positive light).
Here ends the artistic evaluation.
My chief objection to
the novel is Brown’s distortion of history.
For all the talk about ‘it’s a fiction, not a
history’, the very first page of the book demonstrates his weak grasp
upon truth. It begins:
“Fact: The Priory of
Sion, a European secret society founded 1099 is a real society.”
Okay, stop right there.
The
Priory of Sion was founded in 1956 by a French man named Pierre
Plantard, an anti-Semite who had spent six months in prison for fraud and
embezzlement. The Priory claimed
connection to numerous esoteric orders, knowledge of the lost treasure of the
Knights Templars and, incredibly, even Plantard’s own role as the rightful
heir in the Merovingian bloodline as a descendant of Dagobert II.
The Priory claimed as proof of their legitimacy a series of documents
called Les Dossiers
Secretes, identifying supposed former members including Sir Isaac
Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci, but
these documents are widely held to be forgeries.
Two sources of The
Da Vinci Code, according to his website are the books Holy
Blood, Holy Grail and The
Messianic Legacy, whose
own authors question the validity of Les Dossiers Secretes.
“The Messianic Legacy recounts much hugger-mugger about missing documentation and forged signatures until Baigent and company begin to doubt Plantard’s candor. Well they should have, because the dossiers give every appearance of having been "salted" into the library with pseudonymous by-lines and falsified publication dates.” 1. Olson and Miesel, The Da Vinci Hoax.
There was a real Priory
of Sion, an authentic Catholic monastic order, but it ceased to exist in 1617,
being absorbed into the Jesuit order. It
was never a cabal of esoteric interests as Brown indicates, never
had any influence over the Templars, and does not exist today as a legitimate
order.
There are several
factual problems that seem insignificant, such as his reference to the title
Mona 
Lisa
having to do with the Holy Grail, (forgetting that the
title of the Mona Lisa is actually La Giaconda); his claim that Rosslyn
Chapel was built by the Knights Templar (it was actually
Sir William St. Clair, third Earl of Orkney); his claim that Da Vinci’s
Virgin on the Rocks
was rejected for its heretical content (no evidence
whatsoever of this); his relating the Olympics to worship of the goddess
Venus (it was actually Zeus and Pelops); and that
the celestial Venus (the planet) draws a pentacle
in the sky over four years to coincide with the games being held every four
years (I don’t know about the pentacle, but Venus
completes five cycles in eight years, not four).
These minor errors were mere collateral damage in his fervor to
demonstrate the sacred feminine theme so central to the book.
The distortions that really need correcting are those concerning
historical Christianity and the Bible.
On page
231, the book states:
“The Bible is a product of man, my dear.
Not of God….The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan
Roman emperor Constantine the Great” p.
231
The first statement,
that the Bible is a product of man, not God, is an opinion of one of the
characters, and while I don’t agree with it, I don’t object to its inclusion
in the book. But he follows it with
the incorrect
statement that Constantine collated the Bible, which is
absolutely untrue. It is not an
opinion; it is a historical statement that does not line up with the facts.
The Old Testament canon had been forming for centuries. Jesus and the
apostles already recognized the authority of the Old Testament writings that
existed in their time, as illustrated by the following verses:
"And
beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the
scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27).
"You
search the scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life;
and it is they that bear witness to me" (John 5:39).
"And
Paul went in, as was his custom, and for three weeks he argued with them
from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the
Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead" (Acts 17:2-3).
"From
infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise
for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus" (2 Tim. 3:15, NIV).
In the first century, the apostles and other believers wrote the books of the New Testament, the latest of which was written only 70 years after Christ the nearest writings are now estimated to be 35-40 years after Christ). These were passed down, generation after generation, and read in the churches from the time before they ever had church buildings (they were meeting in homes or catacombs). They were universally accepted. In the second and third centuries, Gnostics began to manufacture scripture, claiming it was from the apostles, and that contradicted the previous ones. They were not present in the beginning of the Church, so they were rejected. In the ensuing struggle, the Church decided to draw up a list of the already accepted scriptures to distinguish from the new dubious ones. This list became known as the Muratorian Canon. By the time Constantine came on the scene in the early fourth century, the list was largely complete. He neither started the project, nor did he manage it. There was a separate list (now called the deuterocanonical books, or apocrypha) that was still being debated even after Constantine, but it was not his doing.
Referring to the First
Council of Nicaea, which took place in A.D. 325, The Da Vinci Code
states:
“Until that moment in history,
Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful
man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal. . . . By officially endorsing Jesus as the
Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity.”
P. 234
It is true that
Constantine, following his conversion to Christ, presided over the First Council
of Nicaea (with about as much authority as someone
performing a benediction), but it is not true that Constantine "turned
Jesus into a deity" or that Christians had not viewed Jesus as God
prior to this event.
Even a cursory reading of the New Testament confirms this. (See Matthew 14:33, 16:16, 26:63, 27:43, 27: 54, Mark 1: 24, 2:7, 3:11, 15:39, Luke 8:28, 9:20, 22:70, John 1:1, 1:34, 1:49, 5:18, 10:33, 11:27, 20:28) Incidentally, not once does Brown quote any scripture from the Bible that is in the accepted canon.
There are other leaps,
such as his claim that Mary Magdalene was from the tribe of Benjamin, and
her marriage to Jesus united both Saul’s royal line and David’s to make a
potent claim to the throne. There
is absolutely no
evidence that the two were married, much less had a child, and
Magdala is actually located in northern Israel, whereas the tribe of Benjamin
was in the south, making that allegation very unlikely. As for the Merovingian bloodline…that is an article for
another time.
Brown suggests that the
Tetragrammaton (the name for God, commonly known as Yaweh
or Jehovah) is an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah
and the pre-Hebraic name of Eve, Havah, but in fact, the four
letters in Hebrew (Yud,
Hay, Vav, Hay) actually literally translate to ‘To
be, to become’, or (as the Bible explains)
I Am,
the name he told to Moses.
He makes reference to
the early Israelites worshipping the goddess Shekinah as the equal to Yaweh via
the services of sacred prostitutes. Shekinah
is actually held to represent the female attributes of the One God, not a
separate goddess, and while there was much decadence in Solomon’s time (having
left Judaism for the occult), such defiling with prostitutes were
forbidden and condemned.
These types of
controversies have made headlines, and headlines sell books and movie tickets,
so it is no wonder Dan Brown is encouraging as much discussion as he can.
He’ll be discussing all the way to the bank.
Should believers get upset about all this?
Why get mad at a pagan for acting like a pagan?
Yes, we should know the truth about these errors, and correct them where
we can, but please, no picket signs, no burning torches, no midnight lynchings.
Marilyn Manson can testify that protesting church groups are responsible
for most of the tickets he sells, and Da Vinci Code is no different.
Instead,
use the situation for the opportunity it is.
This book and movie provides an acceptable excuse to bring up the topic
of God to friends and co-workers that would usually run from such discussions.
Make the most of it, but don’t throw a hissy fit.
We’ve got enough nuts in the Church to make us look crazy; don’t make
it any worse.
Darren Turney
May 18, 2006