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by Byron Barlowe
Leadership University
Editor/Webmaster
September 30, 2005
from
LeaderShipUniversity Website
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Released in March 2003, The Da Vinci
Code by Dan Brown has sold more than 4.5 million copies
(as of January 2004, despite the six percent decline in hardback
sales overall). It has camped atop the New York Times bestseller
list. In November, ABC aired a primetime special entitled Jesus,
Mary and Da Vinci: Exploring Controversial Theories About Religious
Figures and the Holy Grail.
Variety.com recently announced,
"Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Akiva
Goldsman—the Oscar-winning triumvirate from ’A Beautiful
Mind’—are reteaming to make ’The Da Vinci Code’ for Sony
Pictures Entertainment.”
According to
USA Today,
"Code’ s popularity shows that
’readers are clamoring for books which combine historic fact
with a contemporary story line,’ says Carol Fitzgerald,
president of
Bookreporter.com.... ’They say,
"I like being able to learn something as well as read a
story".’"
USA Today also noted at least 90
related books on religion, history and art, which have seen sales
rise as well.
According to Richard Wightman Fox, author of the
soon-to-be-published Jesus in America in a U.S. News & World
Report article last month, The Da Vinci Code,
"is riding the wave of revulsion
against corruption in
the Catholic Church." The
article continues, "What Brown’s novel taps into above all is a
persistent American desire to recapture the true, original
Jesus. ’That’s what Protestantism itself has always been about,’
says Fox."
The book—complete with footnotes of
source materials—is a novel, but in a controversial introductory
note, Brown writes that "all descriptions of documents and
secret rituals are accurate." Are they? An incomplete list of author
Dan Brown’s theses include (the following list primarily based on
The feminist mystique, first published in Haaretz Daily
(Jerusalem) by Aviad Kleinberg November 7, 2003):
-
early Christianity entailed "the
cult of the Great Mother"
-
Mary Magdalene represented the
feminine cult and the Holy Grail of traditional lore
-
she was also Jesus’ wife and the
mother of his children
-
Magdalene’s womb, carrying Jesus
offspring, was the legendary Holy Grail (as seen in
Da Vinci’s encoded paining, The Last Supper)
-
Jesus was not seen as divine
(God) by His followers until Emperor Constantine
declared him so for his own purposes
-
The Nicean Council of the
3rd Century was the context for Constantine’s
power grab and the relationship of Magdalene as paramour of
Christ was quashed there
-
"Mary Magdalene’s remains and
the secret documents that tell the real story were found on
the Temple Mount when Jerusalem was conquered in the First
Crusade.”
-
Brown sees a connection
between the Nag Hammadi documents (a.k.a., Gnostic
Gospels) discovered in 1945 and this storyline
-
The "truth" about Christ
and Mary Magdalene has been kept alive by a secret society
named the
Priory of Sion that was
lead by great minds like Da Vinci
Dubious doctrines like Goddess
worship and neo-Gnosticism, critics charge, provide the
core of Brown’s acclaimed novel (although Brown makes
egregious errors even within those, e.g., Gnostics would be repulsed
by the idea of physical relations between Mary Magdalene and Jesus).
Given the book’s liberal use of
long-debunked heresies and flashy but baseless theories
on everything from church tradition to architecture to the heads of
a secret society, cataloguing Brown’s scholarly infractions
will exhaust the casual reader who will likelier readily embrace
such fast-paced fiction uncritically. As Sandra Miesner
(featured below) states, "The Da Vinci Code takes esoterica
mainstream.” Thus, as similar volumes and a film adaptation follow
on its tail, we hope to shed light on at least some of the critical,
if unoriginal, issues raised by the book.
Critics assail Brown’s appeals to scholarship and history,
which range from questionable to outlandish to (some say)
outrageous. Yet, hot sales and fawning reviews by the press and
readers alike indicate that many are buying into this brew of
conspiracy theory, romance novel and pseudo-scholarship. Perhaps
postmodernists, given to thinking via emotions and wide-open to
conspiracy theories surrounding empowered groups, have found the
perfect mix. Do Brown’s claims and implications line up with
evidence, historical fact or truth? Does this matter or is "truth"
only a bargaining chip for the empowered group of the day, such as
the Catholic Church?
Where did these notions originate? Dr. James Hitchcock, cited
on
Beliefnet.com December 30, 2003,
writes,
"The Gnostics did not accept the
Incarnation of Jesus and treated doctrinal orthodoxy as being
too literal-minded. The gospels were not to be taken at face
value but as stories with hidden symbolic meanings.”
Hitchcock further explains,
"Thus it was possible to write new ’gospels,’ since the Gnostics
were not bound by what may or may not have happened while Jesus
was on earth. Mary Magdalene could become Jesus’ intimate, and
the New Testament could be dismissed as essentially false.
([Again,] modern people like Dan
Brown, who treat the Gnostic gospels as history, miss the
point—to the Gnostics themselves it was irrelevant what actually
happened when Jesus was on earth, if he ever was.)”
Writing in Crisis, Sandra
Meisel coolly notes,
"By manipulating his audience
through the conventions of romance-writing, Brown invites
readers to identify with his smart, glamorous characters who’ve
seen through the impostures of the clerics who hide the ’truth’
about Jesus and his wife. Blasphemy is delivered in a
soft voice with a knowing chuckle: ’[E]very faith in the world
is based on fabrication.’”
The wisest sage of all time wrote,
"There is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1: 9b). Here, in
The Da Vinci Code, we hear echoes of the Jesus Seminar which
in its heyday in the 1990s recycled Gnostic heresies and took the
dead-end path of higher criticism of the late 19th
Century. Apologetics researcher Rich Poll observes that the
early Church spent much of its energy battling heresy. This
doctrinal war, in many ways, culminated in the Nicene Council’s
creed. How interesting that a revisionist account of such times and
issues dressed up as well-researched historical fiction brings us
full circle.
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