The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (3 page)

A number of Brown’s predecessors have revived the ancient and perennially controversial theory that Jesus cheated death on the cross, taken down alive. Usually dubbed the Swoon Theory, this view is held today by all kinds of adherents, including members of the Ahmadiyya offshoot of Islam, writers of sensationalist pseudoscholarly books like Donovon Joyce’s
The Jesus Scroll
, and serious biblical critics like Barbara Thiering and J. Duncan M. Derrett. Can there be something to this view, so shocking to some? I will try to show why the theory continues to fascinate and to command attention. To sneak a peak at my conclusion, I will try to show how the gospels do in fact seem to betray traces of an earlier version of the passion story according to which Jesus escaped the cross still alive. Whether this is what actually happened to the historical Jesus is quite a different matter, as we can never really know his fate at all.

The Da Vinci Code
and its predecessors are filled with (mostly confused) references to something called “Gnosticism,” usually misleading the reader by making one think the word refers to any sort of minority freethinking variety of Christianity. The facts are otherwise, though considerably more astonishing. So I want to provide a brief account of what Gnosticism as an ancient religious philosophy was all about. But I also take seriously the wider reference people give the word today, and I will show how it is only once we understand what Gnosticism really was that we can see how very relevant it is to the modern religious outlook many of us share—much more than Dan Brown hints.

Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome, comes in for quite the drubbing in Dan Brown’s novel. Brown, as we will see, is just handing on the slander from the bad company he hangs with. Like sex education, church history is probably better learned in school than on the street from one’s half-educated pals. So I hope you’ll excuse a few of the facts in the case. Constantine, like many great historical figures, continues to provoke division and to arouse ire after he is gone. I’ll admit he is no favorite of mine. On the other hand, fair is fair, and I find myself obliged to try to set the facts straight here, too. The story of Constantine’s dramatic conversion at the Milvian Bridge, his beholding a cruciform vision in the sky, is no doubt a piece of propaganda, as Brown says. But this does not mean the emperor was a sneaky pagan. No, just the reverse: The legend masks the fact that he was, in all likelihood, born and raised a Christian! As such he had a lively interest in the theological debates of his day, and he blundered into them like a bull in a china shop, with historic results. But this is far from the silly caricature Brown promotes. And Constantine never had anything to do with determining the contents of the Bible.

Dan Brown’s smearing of Constantine reaches over, like the mark of a tar brush, onto the history of Christology, the theological study of Jesus Christ. Was he God or man, or neither, or a bit of both, or something else? It is admittedly quite a subject, but not unmanageable or even boring, if one has the right guide (namely, me). And I’m afraid you are obliged in good conscience to hear someone set the record straight after reading Brown’s hopelessly messed-up version of events and ideas. Do you think he is revealing the unknown truth under his literary microscope? You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet! The truth is much, much more colorful. Only the intellectually lazy will shun it. The official line on Jesus grew and developed, in its early stages, via widespread, popular, and informal debate. Once Christianity achieved an official status, the discussion was carried on through a series of ecumenical councils of bishops, starting with Nicea in 325 CE. And the resulting creeds, whether one accepts or rejects them, were certainly the product of careful and serious theological debate, not of conniving conspiracy by a cabal of ancient marketing executives, as Brown would have us believe.

Similarly, Brown’s hack job on the selection of writings that make up the Bible is just fantasy. And why resort to fabrication, when the truth is so much more interesting? But he does, God bless him, raise an excellent question, one that millions of believers somehow never ask or are afraid to ask. But when it comes to the answer, Brown is like a student with a hangover, trying to bluff his way through an exam he hasn’t studied for. Don’t worry: You’ll find the crib sheet here. You’ll end up knowing how the whole process worked and what decisions were made (well or badly) by whom. You won’t be able to take for granted the Bible’s table of contents any more, even if you still agree with it. You will know what scholars have pretty much always known: that the canon was the product of a gradual and anonymous process of selection, made “official” by two local North African synods of bishops in the late fourth century. Their criteria were rather arbitrary and, to us, probably unconvincing.

One of Brown’s throwaway comments that sent me running into far left field with the sun in my eyes is his claim that the early ecclesiastical censors waded through some eighty gospels before they weeded out seventy-six of them, like contestants on
American Idol
, for inclusion in the New Testament. In fact, there were very many gospels that failed to make the cut. All we have left of many is their bare titles, mentioned in this or that old treatise. But we do have a few whole texts of some, as well as substantial fragments of others. For a guide to these writings, as well as vibrant translations of every snippet of them, you couldn’t do better than the brilliant Robert J. Miller’s recent collection
The Complete Gospels
. But I feel I must provide a foretaste here, in the form of my own take on some of the most interesting pieces. So you’ll find liner notes for some thirty of these rejected gospels. Make your own choice.

I will return to the character and history of Mary Magdalene in a big way for a couple of chapters. One will explore the theory, central to
The Da Vinci Code
, that she was an apostle in her own right, the fountainhead of secret teaching in underground Christianity. I am going to trace this tradition to its source in the Gospel of Matthew, where the women disciples meet the Risen Jesus. Since this appearance scene is Matthew’s creation, based on a rewriting of Mark’s gospel, I conclude that the tradition of the Apostle Mary is largely fictitious, a verdict disappointing to me and a reversal of my own previously published theories. My other Magdalene chapter will consider the question of whether Mary is perhaps a Christian version of the goddess common to many ancient religions, Israelite religion included. Here I think a pretty strong case may be made, but then such a Mary Magdalene character turns out to be more of a myth than a historical figure. This result may not be pleasing or theologically useful, but that should not deter us.

In all of this, I would like to play the role of the Bunko Squad, warning the uninformed and misinformed reader when he or she is being sold a bill of goods. But on the other hand, I have no vested interest in any institutional party line either, and I will be setting forth some notions that no readers should ascribe to biblical critics as a whole. Each of us thinks for ourselves, and I hope you, dear reader, will, too. As ever, my aim is a Socratic one. I seek not to make converts to any pet theories of my own. Rather, my goal, the goal of this book, is to provoke and to assist every reader to think things through and arrive at his or her own conclusion. Let a hundred flowers bloom!

NOTE

1
Dan Brown,
The Da Vinci Code
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 253.

Chapter 1

CONSPIRACY OF DUNCES

Brown and the Pseudo-Templar Tradition

I
n view of the manifest shortcomings of
The Da Vinci Code
as a piece of narrative art, the book has achieved a remarkable degree of popularity. We may hope the reason for this is a suspicion on the part of many that there is a deeper truth to Christian origins than their churches have taught them and that people are hungry to know the inside story. Too bad they aren’t getting it in
The Da Vinci Code
. The trouble is, the author assures them that they are. He thinks so because he has read many books based on the same notions, and in them he thinks he has found adequate documentation. But no such luck. His version of Chartres Cathedral, so full of enticing and profound mysteries, turns out to be a flimsy house of (Tarot) cards, a tissue of mistakes, hoaxes, and arbitrary speculations.

A PRIORI SION

Right up front Brown promises the reader: “The Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. 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, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.”
¹
None of this is quite true.

The fact is that, while there was indeed a medieval monastic order called the Priory of Sion (Zion), it long ago died out, absorbed by the Jesuits in 1617. The name was revived and appropriated in 1956 by a far-right French political faction, previously called Alpha Galates and led by Pierre Plantard, an anti-Semite Vichy sympathizer who fancied himself the rightful Merovingian heir to the throne of France. Plantard’s group claimed connection to the original Priory for the same reason the Masonic Lodges claim (spuriously) to be descended from the Knights Templar.
²
It is no surprise that the Priory of Sion also claims descent from the Templars and, again like the Masons, to have received from them secret knowledge. But this is like Ralph Kramden’s Raccoon Lodge claiming the ancient secrets of Solomon. And as for the Secret Dossier, also known as the Priory Documents, these have been exposed as modern fakes perpetrated by the same political sect as part of the attempt to fabricate a venerable pedigree.
³
Once these facts are known, the whole sand castle washes away.

The Priory of Sion hoax (to which Dan Brown appears to be a victim, not an accomplice) was made popular twenty years ago through a long and tedious pseudodocumentary tome called
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. (Brown’s scholarly character Lee Teabing is a scrambled version of the names of Baigent and Leigh.) These gents argued that the Templar Knights were sent by the ultrasecret Priory of Sion on a top-secret mission to retrieve the legendary treasure of Solomon’s Temple or Herod’s Temple (which the authors, like the Knights, seem to regard as the same thing). They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, discovering also a cache of documents telling the real story of the Holy Grail, that is, the royal bloodline of Jesus. Possession of these moneys and of the highly volatile secret of Jesus and his queen Mary Magdalene enabled the Templars and Priory of Sion to bribe and blackmail their way to unchallenged prominence for centuries, all the while protecting the descendants of Jesus and Mary among the Merovingian dynasty. In turn, the Merovingian heirs, notably Crusader Godfrey de Bouillon, mindful of the messianic destiny implied in their very DNA, sought to regain their lost glory, finally establishing the short-lived Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. This much is absolutely fundamental to
The Da Vinci Code
. It really forms the whole premise. Without this, there is no secret, nothing for the rival international conspiracies to fight and to kill over.

Despite their indefatigable research, motivated no doubt by true scholarly zeal, these authors seem unacquainted with inductive historical method. They proceed instead, as they themselves recount the evolution of their hypothesis, more in a novelistic fashion, just like their recent disciple Dan Brown. That is, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln constantly connect the dots of data provided by medieval chronicles and such, linking them with the cheap Scotch tape of one speculation after another: “What if A were really B?” “What if B were really C?” “It is not impossible that. . . .” “If so-and-so were the case, this would certainly explain this and that.” These are the flashes of imaginative inspiration that allow fiction writers like Dan Brown to trace out intriguing plots. It is essentially a creative enterprise, not one of historical reconstruction. It seems the authors of
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
concocted more than anything else a novel much like
The Da Vinci Code
, and, like Dan Brown, they managed to convince themselves that it was really true. (In fact, I think this explains why the authors of the numerous faux-documentary volumes we will consider do not simply set forth their evidence and arguments but instead narrate the whole adventure of their research, their frustration at hitting temporary dead-ends, their excitement when making discoveries, etc. They are really engaged in writing a kind of historical fiction adventure novel starring themselves.)