The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (2 page)

2005014004

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Bob Funk and Char Majetovsky, for a thousand kindnesses, including suggesting I write this book!

Introduction

NOVEL IDEA

T
hose of us who teach and practice scientific biblical criticism often find ourselves engaged in an uphill battle against the misconceptions of popular, TV-preacher-driven fundamentalism. But we have our work cut out for us in another direction, too. For there exists a surprisingly large public who has notions about Jesus and the Bible that are every bit as ill founded and erroneous as those of the fundamentalists—only these people believe themselves to be, like us, scientific critics of scripture. They are avid readers of books that claim to “blow the lid off Christianity” by means of new discoveries, real or imagined. Don’t get me wrong: In many ways, the work of biblical critics has threatened to blow the lid off traditional faith, or so our critics claim. But such is not our goal. Our aim is only to pursue the facts wherever they seem to lead. By contrast, much of the popular radical criticism is based squarely on fiction. This is not on purpose, mind you. It is just that these people, despite their admirable intellectual curiosity, just do not know how to separate fact from fiction. And in recent days their imaginations have been much stirred up by the best-selling novel
The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown. It is a fictional narrative, but its author claims it is based on fact. That, too, alas, is part of the fiction.

The novel begins with the murder of a curator at the Louvre. His body is discovered in a odd position, aping that of Leonardo’s famous “Vitruvian Man” diagram, depicting a spread-eagled male form with double limbs, almost seeming to move like hands around a clock face. He has written a cryptic clue in his own blood. Eventually a pair of investigators plumb the mystery. They are Sophie, eventually revealed as the dead man’s estranged granddaughter, and Robert Langdon, a symbolism expert from Harvard. Framed for the murder, they flee into France, seeking safe haven with Langdon’s friend and colleague Professor Lee Teabing, a crippled savant steeped in the lore of the Holy Grail. He explains to them, and to the reader, that the grail was a coded symbol revealing (to insiders) and concealing (from outsiders) the fact of the royal bloodline of the Merovingian kings of France, who happen to be descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene! This is important to the story because it develops that the slain curator, Sophie’s grandfather, was one of the elite guardians of this secret, the latest Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, a secret society reaching all the way back to the Crusader-era Knights Templar. He must have been killed by zealous Catholics who wanted to prevent the secret from ever coming to public notice, as the news of a married, hence human, Jesus would explode the Church dogma of Jesus as a superhuman god, not a man. Teabing leads the pair out of France, a step ahead of the authorities, back to England, where the trio drops into one grail-related site after another, looking for clues. Shockingly, it turns out that the much-maligned Catholics, particularly the ultra-conservative Opus Dei group, had nothing to do with the killing or the intrigue. Instead, the whole affair has been engineered by none other than the learned Professor Teabing for ambitious reasons of his own! He has dedicated himself to finding the true grail (the mummified body of Mary Magdalene, as well as reams of secret gospel scrolls buried with her) at all costs. But he fails in his Promethean efforts, at the cost of his life. Langdon and Sophie, the latter now revealed as the current heir of Jesus Christ, live happily ever after, Langdon back in his cushy job at Harvard, Sophie with her long-lost grandmother in Scotland at her family’s ancestral seat. They had first imagined the Magdalene trove to lie there, but instead Langdon discovers it lies concealed in the Louvre, where the whole adventure started out.

Every time a book like Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code
makes waves in the religious public, one can be sure it will call forth a raft of books trying to refute it. This is one of them. But most of these books tend to be rejoinders in behalf of the oppressive orthodoxy that Brown’s novel attacks. They are defenses of the party line, cranked out by spin doctors for Mother Church. This book, however, is decidedly not one of
those
. No, though I myself am a loyal Episcopalian and a regular church-goer, my primary identity is that of a New Testament historian, and so my first duty is to the facts as far as I can discern them. Thus, I had my work cut out for me when I began to examine
The Da Vinci Code
, taking upon myself the task of clearing up the many serious errors Brown foists upon the reader as gospel truth (if you and he will forgive the expression).

I have tried to be as even-handed as possible, defending and explaining orthodox tradition where Brown has caricatured and vilified it, seconding him where he is right about its shortcomings, and frequently showing how the facts and possibilities may be much more extravagant than even he would lead readers to believe. This leads me to invoke the overcited old saw that the truth (in our case, the truth about Christian origins) is not only stranger than we think, but probably even stranger than we are capable of imagining. Dan Brown has not told you the half of it! I think I have.

STYLE IF NOT SUBSTANCE

The Da Vinci Code
is certainly a page turner. Its brisk narrative is full of twists and turns, and the reader’s perseverance is frequently rewarded with deft turns of phrase, sparkling metaphors, and resonating observations, the stock in trade of an author who can show us not only what we did
not
know but also what we
did
know but were not
aware
of knowing. There is a real wisdom in such art. And yet the book has certain major shortcomings. This is worth mentioning, it seems to me, since some advocates of the book seem to regard it as such a masterpiece of fiction that all the gaffes and historical errors are worthwhile, needful grist for the mill. But the book does not deserve such exemption.

First, there is no real protagonist. The ostensible hero, Robert Langdon, also stars in Brown’s previous novel,
Angels and Demons
. He is a Harvard professor of symbology. (Is there such a thing?) But that appears to be a pretty sedentary job. No Indiana Jones, our man Langdon seems merely an intranarrative incarnation of the reader. He is purely passive, figuring out occasional puzzles simply because the narrative requires them to be solved at this or that juncture before the action can get any further. The dutiful appearance of such solutions in the text at the appropriate point is often conveyed merely by means of italics and an exclamation mark, as if author Brown is cuing the reader, in the manner of a sitcom laugh track, to feel astonishment and a sense of (illusory) discovery.

Second, much of the resolution of the plot depends on a series of arbitrary mechanical reversals, with this or that character suddenly revealing unsuspected good or evil dimensions or hitherto-unhinted connections with other characters. Too much of it comes off as mere fiat on the part of the omnipotent author, who feels he has the right to jerk the reader around as he sees fit. By contrast, one expects of a more polished mystery that one shall have the opportunity to shift already-extant factors into different possible configurations (like a Rubik’s Cube), so as to disclose an implicit thread of logic. The greater the number of surprises needed to make the plot work, the less organic, the less plausible, the story will seem. Like the “hero,” the reader is reduced to near passivity.

Third, Brown trips over himself when he tries to supply a background of plausibility for the great secret that forms the prize that all the characters seek: the fanciful speculation that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene married and gave rise to the Merovingian dynasty of France with present-day heirs. Surely the whole premise of the book is that this supposed knowledge is a carefully guarded secret, in fact the secret of the ages. And yet we shortly discover that, thanks to books like Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln’s
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
, this “secret” is well known among scholars! Apparently it is only the definitive proof (in the form of a trove of first-century documents salvaged from the ruins of the Jerusalem Temple) of the secret bloodline of Jesus and Mary that awaits disclosure. But all this comes across as confusing back-pedaling. What exactly is the secret? The truth or the proof? Brown seems to shift from one foot to the other and back again.

FRIENDLY INQUISITION

That said, my strictly literary criticism of Dan Brown’s novel is done. The rest of the present book is dedicated to sifting the scholarly and pseudoscholarly assertions that pepper the text of
The Da Vinci Code
. Let it be clear from the outset that this book is not intended as a defense of what Dan Brown attacks. He aims a number of barbed harpoons at the beached whale of traditional, so-called orthodox Christianity. Some of the most astonishing contentions in the book are well founded, and here I distance my project from more orthodox attempts to refute Brown. My concern is just to scrub away the encrustation of bad research and misunderstanding that plagues
The Da Vinci Code
. To this end, my presentation distills a list of major topics addressed in Brown’s novel and seeks to set forth a fresh statement of the case, criticizing Brown or seconding his motion as either may seem appropriate. It may well be that, in some cases, the truth is even stranger than Brown’s fiction.

I will begin by surveying the context of Dan Brown’s book, the shelf of research materials he seems to have used. (“‘The royal bloodline of Jesus Christ has been chronicled in exhaustive detail by scores of historians.’ He ran a finger down a row of several dozen books. Sophie tilted her head and scanned the list of titles.”
¹
) In a number of cases, his point is much better understood once one realizes where it came from and just what particular ax the original author was grinding. Sometimes Brown is not grinding the same one. Many of these books are interested in putting down ancient roots for a modern organization, the Freemasons, and they do it by tracing back their antecedents, in an imaginative way, to the medieval order of the Knights Templar. Often these authors find Jesus a helpful link for casting speculative lines back even further through the time stream. And more often than not, it is a married messiah that helps the most. This is where Mary Magdalene comes in. So I will spend a little time guiding the reader through the initiatory labyrinth of some of these fascinating books, pausing to indicate where
The Da Vinci Code
has drawn upon them. And this will give me the chance to take the first of a few looks, from different vantage points, at the central contention that Jesus and the Magdalene were husband and wife. This, too, is the stage of the game where the Da Vinci link becomes relevant, and it will be easy to show there is rather less on that score than meets the eye. Contra frequent claims, there is no real reason to suppose that a holy man like Jesus would have, or must have, been married. Beyond this, there is certainly no real evidence that he was married to Mary Magdalene or anyone else. Moreover, the Gnostic gospels often cited to make the point do not change that verdict.

Dan Brown follows several of the same authors in viewing the enigmatic symbol of the Holy Grail as the tip of an iceberg of ancient conspiracy, concealing (or revealing, if you’re one of the in-crowd) the secret bloodline of Jesus and Mary. To evaluate this claim, we will have to dig a little into the fascinating history of the grail romances. If mention of the grail triggers visions of the mothballs of literature, then put this book down and go rent the DVD of John Boorman’s great 1981 film,
Excalibur
, and believe me, you will warm to the task! In any case, what we do know about the origin and evolution of the grail legend may make acceptance of the “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” theory no mere matter of faith. There are, it happens, facts to be checked. And we will see that the grail legend did not and cannot have originated as a blind for the secret of Jesus’s bloodline for the simple reason that the grail of the legends was originally a celtic myth, the magical cauldron of Bran the Blessed that served up whatever delicacy one might wish. Subsequently this legend was superficially Christianized; only in later versions does the horn of plenty become the chalice of the Last Supper.