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Introduction
"The Da Vinci Code” is the biggest book phenomenon since “Harry Potter.” Since its publication in March 2003, “The Da Vinci Code” sold 6 million copies in its first year, it's already sold 25 million copies world-wide and it has been translated into 42 different languages. The book had been on the New York Times Bestseller list for 58 weeks (often in the number one position), and it was selling between 80,000 and 90,000 copies per week. ABC did a TV special based on the book. And now a movie is in the making with Opie Cunningham (Ron Howard) as the director.
The story is set against a backdrop of religious and “historical” statements that are claimed to be “facts.” These are a mixture of anti-Christian teachings, radical feminist theology, and goddess worship. For example, the book says that the early Christians did not believe in the divinity of Christ; the Resurrection never happened; our Bible is the result of a political power play by the Roman Emperor Constantine; and early Christians worshiped the “divine feminine.” These statements are made by a likeable expert, a Harvard professor who (in the context of the novel) seems to be credible and authoritative.
Readers can become so engrossed in the fast-moving, suspenseful story that they swallow these so-called “facts” without even realizing it. Storytelling can be a powerful tool for changing the way that people think. This is especially true with movies, and Hollywood is making “The Da Vinci Code” into a movie.
Perhaps you are saying to yourself, “No thinking person would take that kind of thing seriously.” That is exactly what one Evangelical leader thought--until he started talking with people who had read the book. He discovered that the book hardens the unbelief of people who aren’t Christians, and it turns honest seekers away from Christianity. The book even caused some Christians to become confused and disillusioned.
The Bible warns us to be “sober” (not carried away with emotions) and “vigilant.” There is an enemy of our souls who is looking for opportunities to undermine our faith and “devour” us. (1 Peter 5:8)
Jesus warned us not to be deceived. So did the Apostle Paul. The Bible says,
“And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.” (Matthew 24:4)
“Beware lest any man spoil [ruin] you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” (Colossians 2:8)
“Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Timothy 4:1)
If you believe what Dan Brown tells you in “The Da Vinci Code,” then you will abandon your belief in the God of the Bible, and replace it with goddess worship. You will deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. You will deny that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. You won’t believe that Jesus died to save you from your sins. And you will think that your new beliefs are superior to true Christianity.
The cover of “The Da Vinci Code” says (in small print) that it is a novel. However, the book itself claims that its assertions are “facts” that are accepted by historians and scholars. When Dan Brown was interviewed by ABC television, he said that the information in the book is accurate. In an interview with Borders, Dan Brown said that all of the history portrayed in “The Da Vinci Code” is accurate. Countless Internet sites have quotes from the book and treat the historical and religious statements as being accurate.
According to Brown and author Margaret Starbird, Jesus not only married Mary Magdalene, but also fathered a child who became the head of the Merovingian royal dynasty. There can be no serious question about the marital status of Jesus. The canonical gospels, (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) preclude any option of understanding Jesus as married. He operates as an unmarried teacher with a band of devoted disciples. He is not the head of a household, but builds a household of faith--the church. At the crucifixion, he assigns John responsibility for caring for Mary, his mother. There is no mention of any wife, certainly no mention of children.
Father Richard McBrien of the University of Notre Dame quickly confirmed that if Jesus had married, it would have been to Mary Magdalene. "If he was married, it was obviously...oh, yeah, it was obviously Mary Magdalene." Father McBrien evidently confuses romance novels with the New Testament.
Starbird points to Jesus' instruction to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, as recorded in John's gospel. When Jesus tells Mary not to touch Him, Starbird claims that this actually means, "do not cling to me," which is further asserted to mean that they were married. As Elizabeth Vargas explains by means of a question: "and that kind of embrace would have been unusual if it were not between a man and a woman, husband and wife?" Darrell Bock, professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, countered Starbird's assertion. "Its just her single act of devotion," Bock explained, "given to him without concern about what people are thinking about what she's doing." Vargas then conceded that the majority of biblical scholars consulted for the program agreed with Professor Bock's assessment.
Starbird was featured on the prime time television program, where she argued that John 20:17, “Touch me not,” implied a very close relationship between Mary and Jesus, for the word “touch” meant to cling to. Evangelical scholar Darrell Bock replied that Mary’s reaction was simply that of ordinary devotion and emotion. Bob Passantino comments, “Jesus was going to be around for forty days providing multiple evidences of his resurrection, so Mary did not need to fear that he would leave immediately and not return. There was no reason to cling to one who was in no hurry to go off! The whole point of the resurrection appearances was to prove that he was resurrected in the same body, now glorified, that had hung on the cross. It was not an emphemeral ‘spiritual’ resurrection unable to be empirically verified (Luke 24:39).”
According to Brown's thesis, Da Vinci hid hints of Jesus' marriage in works of art such as his famous masterpiece, "The Last Supper." Brown argues that one of the figures in the fresco standing next to Jesus isn't a man at all, but Mary Magdalene. The theory that Leonardo DaVinci included Mary Magdalene in his painting The Last Supper is not accepted by art historians, who say that the “feminine” figure seated to the left of Jesus is the boyish Apostle John as he is normally depicted in artwork of the period. The identification that it was “Mary” was also explicitly rejected by Carmen Bombach, an expert on DaVinci interviewed by Katie Couric on the Today show. Jack Wasserman of Temple University a prominent art historian, countered that the figure doesn't even look like a woman, once we understand the artistic style of the era. The ABC special was only able to locate one art historian, Carlo Pedretti, who agreed that DaVinci had painted this figure as a woman, based seemingly on a faint resemblance of the figure to a woman in another painting. When Elizabeth Vargas asked Dan Brown why so many art historians dismiss his theories "as absolutely bizarre and crazy," Brown explained: "I think its because we see what we've been told we see." Oh, now we see. Instead of seeing what we've been told we should see, we should now see what Dan Brown wants us to see. See?
The name of Brown's historian, Teabing, is an anagram for Baigent!
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Brown opens his novel with the words “FACT” in bold, capital letters and this statement:
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.
Anyone who thinks Brown did decent research for The DeVinci Code deserves this wake-up call. This is not Tom Clancy we're talking here, but someone who just makes up stuff as he goes along; let that speak as well of what it says about Brown on religious issues.
Now Let's See His Mistakes
1) Brown incorrectly reports that the ancient Olympics were held to honor Aphrodite. In fact they were held to honor Zeus.
2) Brown’s contention that the five linked rings of the modern Olympic Games are a secret tribute to the goddess is also wrong—each set of games was supposed to add a ring to the design but the organizers stopped at five.
3) The ancient Olympic games occurred every four years.
4) A chief henchman in the book is identified as a “monk” of the Opus Dei Catholic organization, the organization has no monks.
But a far more important example is Brown’s treatment of Gothic architecture as a style full of goddess-worshipping symbols and coded messages to confound the uninitiated. Building on Barbara Walker’s claim that “like a pagan temple, the Gothic cathedral represented the body of the Goddess,” The Templar Revelation asserts: “Sexual symbolism is found in the great Gothic cathedrals which were masterminded by the Knights Templar...both of which represent intimate female anatomy: the arch, which draws the worshipper into the body of Mother Church, evokes the vulva.” In The Da Vinci Code, these sentiments are transformed into a character’s description of “a cathedral’s long hollow nave as a secret tribute to a woman’s womb...complete with receding labial ridges and a nice little cinquefoil clitoris above the doorway.”
5) The Templars had nothing to do with the cathedrals of their time, which were commissioned by bishops and their canons throughout Europe. They were unlettered men with no arcane knowledge of “sacred geometry” passed down from the pyramid builders. They did not wield tools themselves on their own projects, nor did they found masons’ guilds to build for others. Not all their churches were round, nor was roundness a defiant insult to the Church. Rather than being a tribute to the divine feminine, their round churches honored the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
6) Actually looking at Gothic churches and their predecessors deflates the idea of female symbolism. Large medieval churches typically had three front doors on the west plus triple entrances to their transepts on the north and south. (What part of a woman’s anatomy does a transept represent? Or the kink in Chartres’s main aisle?) Romanesque churches—including ones that predate the founding of the Templars—have similar bands of decoration arching over their entrances. Both Gothic and Romanesque churches have the long, rectangular nave inherited from Late Antique basilicas, ultimately derived from Roman public buildings. Neither Brown nor his sources consider what symbolism medieval churchmen such as Suger of St.-Denis or William Durandus read in church design. It certainly wasn’t goddess-worship.
7) Brown reports that the Pyramid of the Louvre is composed of 666 panes of glass. In fact, it is composed of 673. See “The Louvre's Pyramid celebrates its 10th Anniversary from 7 to 21 April 1999,” http://www.louvre.or.jp/louvre/presse/en/activites/archives/anniv.htm
(The office of the architect who designed the Pyramid, said that there were actually 698 pieces of glass)Either way it's not "666"!
8) It is claimed that the Church burned five million woman as witches over its history. The actual number executed in the “witch crazes” of Europe was somewhere between between 30,000 and 60,000; not all were women, not all were burned, and not all were executed by the Church. [See Bob and Gretchen Passantino, Satanism [Zondervan, 1995), 33-34).
9) Brown is woefully ignorant of the origin and composition of the Bible.
10) Brown has another astonishing claim, that the tetragrammaton YHWH derives from “Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah.” But as any first-year Scripture student could tell you, Jehovah is actually a 16th-century rendering of Yahweh using the vowels of Adonai (“Lord”). The tetragrammaton actually derives from the Hebrew verb for “to be” and is an indication of God’s eternal nature, not any gender or gender mixing.
11) Starbird’s credentials are given, a Masters degree and that she studied at a divinity school. Actually Margaret Starbird holds two degrees BA and MA degrees from the University of Maryland where she concentrated on German, comparative literature and medieval studies (NOT Biblical studies) and only attended classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School without any degree awarded.
12) Teabing's saying that "until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet...a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless." In reality, early Christians overwhelmingly worshipped Jesus Christ as their risen Savior and Lord. Before the church adopted comprehensive doctrinal creeds, early Christian leaders developed a set of instructional summaries of belief, termed the "Rule" or "Canon" of Faith, which affirmed this truth. To take one example, the canon of prominent second-century bishop Irenaeus took its cue from 1 Corinthians 8:6: "Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ." Christians before the year 325 AD believed that Jesus was God or the Son of God to some degree or another. Some pagans mocked the Christians for their belief that Jesus was God. Hiercoles, Lucian of Samosata, and Celsus were among those who did this. The work by Hiercoles against the Christians does not survive, but a quotation from him about Christians believing Jesus to be God survives in the work Against Hiercoles (in chapter 2) by Eusebius of Caesaria. This book is online at this address http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/eusebius_against_hierocles.htm
13) Dan Brown has no idea of Geography either. He says the Albino monk is badly beaten in a harbor and finds shelter in Andorra. Andorra is a small country in the Pyrenees, hundreds of miles from any harbor, especially as he says later that the beating happened in Marseilles. He could have chosen an Atlantic place at least!
14) There are no prisons in Andorra, at least none so important as to have people there for twelve years.
15) There are very few earthquakes too.
16)There is no railway and the only way of arriving to one would be from the Pas de la Casa – in the French area of Andorra, as he has arrived there from France – through the Port d’Envalira and through Andorra la Vella till crossing the Pyrenees and arriving to Spanish la Seu d’Urgell, where there is a railway.
17) It’s claimed that the Star of David goes back to the time of David and Solomon; it is actually only a few hundred years old.
It is also breathtaking to read that the heroine, Sophie Neveu, uses one of Leonardo's paintings, "The Madonna of the Rocks," as a shield, pressing it so close to her body that it bends.
18) Brown gets the size of Madonna of the Rocks wrong; it is 6' 6", not 5'.
19) “ pressing it so close to her body that it bends.” Madonna of the Rocks is painted on wood, not on canvas, therefore the "Madonna" is unlikely to be so supple.
20) The Madonna of the Rocks is a painting weighing any where from 250 to 300 pounds, it is so heavy that Sophie "would have to be unbelievably strong to pull it off the wall and set it down without wrecking it."
21) FICTION: Our hero lectures to a group of prisoners about the "Mona Lisa." There the old canard about the portrait as Leonardo in drag appears, and according to Langdon, this is "a subtle message of androgyny," strengthened by computerized analysis of the painting and self-portraits of the artist. FACT: We know that the sitter was a woman from contemporary documents, and that contrary to popular opinion; there are no definitively documented images of Leonardo.
22) Mr. Brown has it that the “Last Supper” mural tempera was painted on fresco, when it is really stone.
23) Langdon believes this second figure is not John, as conventionally interpreted, but Mary Magdalene, the "bride of Christ," dressed as a man. It’s John.
24) The painting conforms to traditional Florentine depictions of the Last Supper, stressing the betrayal and sacrifice of Jesus rather than the institution of the Eucharist and the chalice (as Brown would have it.) Parallels for the absence of a chalice appear in earlier Italian examples.
25) Mr. Brown misinterprets other pieces of "evidence" in the painting. Langdon draws attention to a dagger that seems to be wielded by a "disembodied" hand in the group around St. Peter; yet this hand is not disembodied. Both a preliminary drawing by Leonardo and early copies of "The Last Supper" show that the hand and dagger belong to Peter — a reference to a passage in the Gospel of St. John, in which Peter draws a sword in defense of Jesus.
26) Teabing refers to Constantine creating a "new Vatican power base." The Vatican as such did not exist until the 14th century as the Pope's residence; in Constantine's time it was still a "swampy marsh."
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27) Fiction: The Da Vinci Code implies that Constantine was baptized against his wishes. FACT: Actually, the Emperor had desired to be baptized in the waters of the Jordan River, where Jesus had been baptized, but it was not to be. Not long after the Easter of 337 he called together some bishops, removed his purple robe, and put on the white garments of a catechumen, then was baptized by Eusebius, the bishop of Nicomedia (Jones, 195-200). He died a few days later. It was common for Christians at the time to put off baptism until their deathbed. Serious sins committed after baptism would require severe penance, so some considered it safer to wait until the end of life to be baptized. (This practice was mentioned by Augustine in Confessions (Book 1, ch. 10.17 ). This approach to baptism would have fit Constantine’s case since he undoubtedly understood that many of his actions were considered grave sins by the Church: "It was common at this time (and continued so until about A.D. 400) to postpone baptism to the end of one’s life, especially if one’s duty as an official included torture and execution of criminals. Part of the reason for postponement lay in the seriousness with which the responsibilities were taken" (Chadwick, The Early Church, 127).
28) Brown has no idea what it really means that Opus Dei is a "personal prelature". He makes it out to mean that it is a church unto itself (it isn't) and a personal army of the Pope. "Personal prelature" only means that it is an institution with jurisdiction applying to persons rather than a territory. Persons in such groups are still subject to the authority of local bishops (for Baptists, it is like Baptist campus ministries with members who are still part of a local church, roughly speaking).
29) Brown depicts Leonardo as being into the "darker arts"; in fact Leonardo was "severely critical" of the occult and pseudo-sciences (Abanes notes that one of the quotes Brown uses, allegedly as Leonardo criticizing the superstition of religion, was made actually in reference to the occult!) and only gave some respect to alchemy where it came closer to being chemistry.
30) Leonardo only gave some respect to alchemy where it came closer to being chemistry. He did not, contrary to Brown, believe he could turn lead into gold (he would have scoffed at such an idea) or create a life-sustaining potion.
31) Leonardo did not design torture devices as Brown says, though he did design some weapons of war (which by the way, runs against Brown's depiction of him as a peacenik nature worshipper!).
32) The identity of the Mona Lisa as the wife of a local merchant is said to be confirmed now by notes from Leonardo's assistant Caprotti.
33) The youthful and feminine appearance of John in The Last Supper is confirmed by Leonardo's own painting of John the Baptist, in which that John is depicted as an effeminate young man with flowing hair and delicate hands.
34) The note from Abanes about the claim that some "computer study" revealed points of correspondence between Leonardo and the Mona Lisa. There is no evidence of such a study anywhere, and that any finding of correspondence seemed unlikely, since the only depiction of Leonardo we have is a self-portrait drawn when he was an old man -- with a full beard.
35) Contrary to Brown, there was nothing unique about the form of the cross the Templars, and the Priory of Sion used.
36) The Templars were not a "law unto themselves" but were answerable to the papacy.
37) Most of the Templars members were illiterate (and therefore incapable of identifying any of the documents Brown has them unearthing).
38) The Templars were not "master stonemasons" (this Brown picks up from the gossip-piece The Templar Revelation, not from serious historians).
39) Contrary to Brown, the Knights Templar had nothing to do with the building of cathedrals.
40) The Knights Templar were not unique in building round churches and few of the churches they had were circular to begin with.
41) The statues of the London Temple are not Templars but admirers of the Templars.
42) Pope Clement V did not burn any Templars; it was all King Philip's idea.
43) Clement could not have had their ashes tossed in the Tiber River (in Rome) even if he had burned them, because the Popes resided in Avignon (France) at the time; either the Tiber was diverted hundreds of miles, or Clement had a good throwing arm.
44) Silas' gun is a 13 shot model (Heckler and Koch USP 40), but he only fires one shot that is narrated before the gun is empty. He had killed two other men the same night; Shugarts wonders if his poor albino eyesight made it so that it took 12 shots to kill the other two men.
45) The gunshot injury of the sort to the curator's stomach has a mortality rate of less than 5 percent and would take hours to kill someone, not just the few minutes Brown's plot requires.
46) Brown obviously needed a better map of Paris!
47) Mitterand had no say in the matter; Brown is uncritically following a rumor started by a French newspaper in the 1980s.
48) The "drop down" security gates Brown envisages in the Louvre are not really used by any museum, but come from movies.
49) The Louvre does have real security cameras, contrary to Brown.
50) Brown's portrayal of the GPS tracking device placed on Langdon is sheer fantasy: The unit would have to be much larger to work with satellites, and both this and smaller versions that do not use satellites would have to have antennas of at least two inches; and the smallest of these is still "ten times the size of the so-called GPS dot that Sophie describes."
51) Tarot cards do not have only 22 cards per deck; they usually have 78. Brown is confusing a "suit" of cards for a specific classification (Major Arcana).
52) Fiction:Tarot had been devised as a secret means to pass along ideologies banned by the Church” (92). FACT: Not True. They appeared in the 15th century as nothing more than playing cards and did not take on significance related to the occult until the late 18th century.
53) The "Divine Proportion" applied to bees is an absurdity; the population of hives "changes throughout the season" and "seasons change throughout the world," so there is no way all beehives could have this ratio at once. If you make the division Brown describes, the ratio will be more like 50 to 1 on average -- not 1.618 to 1; not even close. Beekeepers say that a hive is usually at least 95% female; one even said that a hive with the proportions Brown describes would be dead within a few days, since females do all the real hive work. Perhaps some species of bee comes close to having the proportions Brown describes at some time, but it is clearly not a bee universal.
54) Paris was not the site of the world's first prime meridian. The first prime meridian was established by Hipparchus of Rhodes in the 2nd century BC. Paris did have a prime meridian but it was only one of eleven that existed together, and only 8 percent of the world used Paris' version (72 percent followed the one in Greenwich).
55) The Mona Lisa was not called by that name by Leonardo, nor that in his lifetime. Brown's "Amon L'isa" anagram is therefore a fraud.
56) The SmartCar may get 19 km (a reader said a range of 17-24), to the liter, but not 100 (!) as Brown claims.
57) Contrary to Brown, (as of April 2005) Architectural Digest has never said a word about Opus Dei's HQ building.
58) There is no 10th knight "missing" in the Temple Church in England. There are only nine carved knights, period.
59) Kings College does not have the sort of sophisticated search capabilities Brown describes; all they have are desktop Macs.
60) Pope did not preside over Newton's funeral. He did write an epitaph as part of an effort by a "number of people" some four years later.
61) Denise Budd, whose doctoral dissertation on da Vinci earned her a Ph. D. from Columbia University, provides a sober counter to Picknett's inane claims (such as that no one knows why there are two versions of Virgin on the Rocks --it was requested by a second party!) in the prior essay.
62) Denise Budd notes more errors by Brown: He has mixed up John the Baptist and Jesus in the painting.
63) Leonardo, despite Brown, would have been given specific working guidelines, not free rein.
64) The commission for the painting was not for "nuns" but for a confraternity, which was only has males.
65) Brown incorrectly refers to the Nag Hammadi documents as scrolls; they are actually codices (ancient books).
66) The "kiss on the mouth" between Jesus and Mary in the Gospel of Philip as evidence for a marriage-type relationship misses the point: From the entirety of the book it is clear that the author of Philip "disdains physical sex as beastly, literally comparing it to animals." The kiss is rather more like a handshake, or a gnostic symbol of spiritual nourishment. In another Gnostic document, The Second Apocalypse of James, Jesus kisses James on the mouth!
67) The claim that Mary was turned into a prostitute by Pope Gregory as a way to "cover up" feminist origins of Christianity (which itself is a detailed rejoinder to the sound bite of McBrien later on; 59). Is a "gross misrepresentation" and it is rather as part of the social need of the era to simplify things and provide the people with an inspiring example of a penitent sinner. (note that Mary Magdalene was held in high regard both before and in this period -- she even had a feast day named after her in the 8th century -- so that Gregory's treatment of her, if anything, was regarded as a positive!)
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68) Starbird reveals her uncritical nature in supposing that Jesus' marriage to Mary Mag (uniting the tribes of David and Benjamin) "would have been perceived as a source of healing to the people of Israel during their time of misery as an occupied nation," yet she also indicates "this marriage would have been kept secret from the Romans and the Herodian tetrarchs"! [20] How does Starbird suppose that these mutually exclusive goals would be accomplished?!?
69) Picknett the conspiracy theorist and UFO maven makes a mistake saying there was no "Magdala" in Judaea in Jesus' day (in service of an idea that Mary Mag was from "Migdol" in Egypt!) this is direcly refuted by other writers in the volume who note "el Mejdel, a prosperous fishing village" on the Sea of Galilee (which fits with Mary being a wealthy benefactor). [30]
70) Picknett claims that John the Baptist lived in Egypt for "several years"! The latter is completely without support anywhere.
71) According to Brown “Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.” This is also simply false. All available evidence indicates that Christianity was honoring Sunday long before Constantine. Brown is perhaps confused because certain New Testament passages, for example, record Paul going to the synagogue on the Sabbath to preach to the Jews. (If one wants to preach to the Jews and the Gentile God-fearers who attended with them, then it is logical to look for them where they are found on the Sabbath—in the synagogue!) It is clear, however, that Christian observations are held on the “first day of the week” (Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:12; cf. Rev. 1:10), and there is also ample evidence of Sunday being observed well before Constantine:
1. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (110 AD), wrote: "If, then, those who walk in the ancient practices attain to newness of hope, no longer observing the Sabbath, but fashioning their lives after the Lord's Day on which our life also arose through Him, that we may be found disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher.” Ignatius specifies the "Lord's Day" as the one on which "our life arises through Him”—the resurrection day, which was a Sunday.
2. Justin Martyr (150 AD) describes Sunday as the day when Christians gather to read the scriptures and hold their assembly because it is both the initial day of creation and the day of the resurrection.
3. The Epistle of Barnabas (120-150) cites Isaiah 1:13 and indicates that the "eighth day" is a new beginning via the resurrection, and is the day to be kept
4. The Didache (70-75) instructs believers: "On the Lord's own day, gather yourselves together and break bread and give thanks."
5. Other later testimonies from Irenaeus, Cyprian, and Pliny the Younger, which pre-date Constantine significantly, testify that Christians worshipped on Sunday.
So once again, Brown’s “historian” receives a failing grade in history.
72) Teabing recommends this The Gospel of Philip as a “good place to start.” Brown quotes a portion of the text in which Jesus is said to often “kiss” Mary Magdalene “on the mouth” and thereby invoke the jealousy of Peter. Teabing goes on to point out that Mary is described as Jesus’s “companion,” and this is supposedly troubling for the canonical Gospel view. Is it? Brown has Teabing say little about this gospel of Philip, and for good reason. Scholarship has utterly rejected this work as having any authentic historical recollections not derived from the canonical Gospels. Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, is our Philip who debunks Teabing’s Philip. In his book Hidden Gospels, Jenkins explodes the myth of the Gospel of Philip as a reliable or contemporary source for the life of Jesus:
* It is not a first century document at all. Scholars date the Gospel of Philip to the third century, about 200 years after Jesus lived. Therefore, it can not be a product of the disciple named Philip in Acts, unless he lived to be at least 310! This would be as far removed from us as the American Revolution, and certainly not to be preferred over the canonical Gospels, which even by later dates assigned by some scholars (80-100 AD) are far closer to their source.
* The Gospel of Philip is a Gnostic text, and Gnostic thought would have no place in first century Palestinian Judaism. A Jesus teaching Gnosticism in this setting would not have been Teabing’s influential person – he would have been ignored and shunned.
73) Teabing also appeals briefly to a second document titled The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.Claiming that “modern historians” have already explored the issue (and implying a positive finding), this gospel also shows Jesus treating Mary as a companion, and depicts Peter’s jealousy after Jesus gives Mary special instructions to carry out to run the Church after his crucifixion. Leading up to the idea of Mary Magdalene as the “female womb that carried Jesus’ royal bloodline,” Teabing comments, “Jesus was the original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene.” This gospel, however, fares no better than Philip under critical analysis. It, too, is a Gnostic document that reflects no reality found among Palestinian Jews of the first century; the earliest fragments, Jenkins notes, are dated to the third century, and most scholars date it no earlier than 180-200 AD, as far from Jesus are we are from the Civil War.
Origin of the Priory of Sion or Introducing Pierre Plantard
Pierre Plantard and Priory of Sion myth: Pierre Plantard, left a French prison in 1953, a convicted embezzler, and four years later attempts to enter politics. As his vehicle to power, Plantard casts his eyes upon a nearby mountain called "Sion" and decides to call his tiny group of followers the "Priory of Sion". Pierre Plantard begins to stake a claim that he is a biological heir of the Messianic throne of Jesus. He changes his name to Pierre Plantard St. Claire and produces an impressive series of forged genealogies to link himself to Jesus and Mary Magdalen. None of it is true, of course. Plantard forges the documents and fabricates the history. He has recruited a couple of people to help him, but the entire thing (except for two 19th-century texts is a hoax, as he will eventually admit under oath in a French court in 1993. Plantard and company spend much of the 1960's forging and planting documents in French libraries. But they have a problem. By now they realize that the public tends not to trust people convicted of fraud and embezzlement. Plantard desperately needs to find someone else to 'front' for him, preferably some naive media figure who can be conned into ignorantly promoting these forgeries. In England, a BBC documentary maker named Henry Lincoln takes the bait and begins asking questions about the mysterious 'Priory of Sion'. Lincoln not only thinks the Priory is centuries old, he even convinces two of his friends, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, to help him prove it to the world. Together the three pawns are led to the location of one fake document after another, like three blind mice sniffing after pieces of cheese dragged by strings through a maze. No journalist would want to be caught in such a trap, of course. But the cheese is Jesus supposedly having children by Mary Magdalen, and that is simply too tempting to ignore, especially for men who take delight in discrediting 'fundamentalist' Christianity. The three mice go scampering around France, as Plantard watches his ruse play out. But something goes wrong. In the 1970's, one of Plantard's co-conspirators begins to divulge the hoax. Plantard himself can hardly contain the secret and begins telling friends how he faked the documents. The whole scheme is in danger of collapsing if Lincoln and his buddies catch on. Astonishingly, even though the hoax begins disintegrating in plain sigh, Lincoln's trio somehow manage to overlook the public collapse of the conspiracy. They go on to publish their own book effectively denoting Plantard as an heir of Jesus and Mary Magdalen. They title it, "THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL" or in America, simply "HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL". In 1997, the BBC finally admits its unintended role in spreading the hoax and seeks to warn the public. But it is too late. Much of a generation has grown up believing in Planatard's grand delusion. And too many people have been profiting from it.
74) Brown's fictional theme that Leonardo da Vinci was involved in hiding some great secret for the Priory of Sion, for there was no such organization at the time because Pierre Plantard did not invent it until the 1950's.
75) Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) could not have been a member of the Priory of Sion.
76) Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) could not have been a member of the Priory of Sion
77) Victor Hugo (1802-1885) could not have been a member of the Priory of Sion
78) The Priory of Sion was not founded in Jerusalem
79) The Priory of Sion was not founded in 1099
80) The Priory of Sion was not founded by a crusading French king named Godefroi de Bouillon.
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81) One of Brown's most fabulous contentions is that about 80 Gospels (try to picture this) were deliberately removed from the Bible by the Church in the 4th century. No scholar, not even those who are considered the harshest critics--those of the 'Jesus Seminar'--have ever identified 80 such Gospels, much less said that they were removed from the text of the Bible [Note that barely a dozen 'other' gospels are included in THE COMPLETE GOSPELS by the 'Jesus Seminar,' ed. by Robert J. Miller. The fact is, not even one single alternative Gospel has ever been found bound into a manuscript of the Bible [NEW TESTAMENT GREEK MANUSCRIPTS: ACTS ed. by Reuben Swanson (William Carey International University Press, Pasadena, 1998) pp.509-513. Hereafter: "NTGM"].
82) The oft-cited quotation in the Gospel of Philip about Jesus kissing Mary on the "mouth" doesn't exist; "mouth" was added by translators, who in one case later removed it [Compare TNHL, 1978 ed., p.138, with TNHL, 1988 ed., p.148]. The original may just as easily have said "cheek" or "hair."
83) Kissing Mary would not have upset the Apostles had she been Jesus' wife [1 Cor 9:5], if indeed this late text even records any actual events at all. The text claims the Apostles were jealous, which can hardly refer to the Apostles wanting Jesus to marry them. Nor were the Apostles demanding Jesus have sex with them, or have children by them, or any of the other silly things some modern writers have tried to infer that Jesus was doing with Mary Magdalene in this passage. The prosaic truth, however, is that this text is about the time and attention that Jesus was supposedly devoting to Mary in public, not any supposed private sexual activity, of which the text says nothing .
84) Opus Dei is a Catholic institution for lay people and diocesan priests, not a monastic order.
85) “Numerary” members of Opus Dei – a minority – choose a vocation of celibacy in order to be available to organize the activities of Opus Dei. They do not, however, take vows, wear robes, sleep on straw mats, spend all their time in prayer and corporal mortification, or in any other way live like The Da Vinci Code’s depiction of its monk character. In contrast to those called to the monastic life, numeraries have regular secular professional work.
86) The Da Vinci Code gets Opus Dei’s nature 180 degrees backwards. Monastic orders are for people who have a vocation to seek holiness by withdrawing from the secular world; Opus Dei is for people who have a vocation to live their Christian faith in the middle of secular society.
87) In The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei members are falsely depicted murdering, lying, drugging people, and otherwise acting unethically, thinking that it is justified for the sake of God, the Church, or Opus Dei (p. 13, 29, 58-9, etc.). Opus Dei is a Catholic institution and adheres to Catholic doctrine, which clearly condemns immoral behavior, including murder, lying, stealing, and generally injuring people. The Catholic Church teaches that one should never do evil, even for a good purpose. Opus Dei’s mission is to help people integrate their faith and the activities of their daily life, and so its spiritual education and counseling help members to be more ethical rather than less so. Opus Dei members, like everyone else, sometimes do things wrong, but this is an aberration from what Opus Dei is promoting rather than a manifestation of it.
88) The Da Vinci Code also falsely depicts Opus Dei as being focused on gaining wealth and power. The reality is that Opus Dei is focused on helping people grow in their faith and integrate it with their ordinary activities, not on gaining power to implement some political agenda. Similarly Opus Dei and its members have great concern for the poor, which is an important element of the Christian faith.
89) The Da Vinci Code makes it appear that Opus Dei members practice bloody mortifications (e.g., pp. 12, 14, 29, 31, 73, 89, 127-28, 195, 276-79, 293). The foundation of the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on mortification is the fact that Jesus Christ, out of love for mankind, voluntarily accepted suffering and death (his “passion”) as the means to redeem the world from sin. Christians are called to emulate Jesus’ great love and, among other things, join him in his redemptive suffering. Thus Christians are called to “die to themselves.” The Roman Catholic Church mandates certain mortifications – fasting and abstinence from meat – as Lenten penances. Some people in the history of the Roman Catholic Church have felt called to undertake greater sacrifices, such as frequent fasting or using a hairshirt, cilice, or discipline, as can be seen in the lives of many of those explicitly recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as models of holiness, e.g., St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Thomas More, St. Francis de Sales, St. John Vianney, St. Therese of Lisieux, and Mother Teresa. In the area of mortification, Opus Dei emphasizes small sacrifices rather than extraordinary ones, in keeping with its spirit of integrating faith with secular life. For example, Opus Dei members try to make small sacrifices such as persevering at their work when tired, occasionally passing up some small pleasure, or giving help to those in need.
In any event, the practice of mortification as lived in Opus Dei gives more emphasis to everyday sacrifices than to these greater sacrifices, and is not like the distorted and exaggerated depiction in The Da Vinci Code. Some Opus Dei members also make limited use of the cilice and discipline, types of mortification that have always had a place in the Catholic tradition because of their symbolic reference to Christ’s Passion. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that people should take reasonable care of their physical health, and anyone with experience in this matter knows that these practices do not injure one’s health in any way. The Da Vinci Code’s description of the cilice and discipline is greatly exaggerated: it is simply not possible to injure oneself with them as it depicts.
90) The Da Vinci Code describes Opus Dei as a “sect” or a “cult” (e.g., pp. 1, 29, 30, 40, and 279). The fact is that Opus Dei is a fully integrated part of the Catholic Church and has no doctrines or practices except those of the Roman Catholic Church. There is no definition or theory – whether academic or popular – that provides a basis for applying the pejorative terms “sect” or “cult” to Opus Dei.
91) The Da Vinci Code says about Opus Dei’s U.S. headquarters: “Men enter the building through the main doors on Lexington Avenue. Women enter through a side street” (p. 28). This is inaccurate. People, whether male or female, use the doors leading to whichever section of the building they are visiting. The building is divided into separate sections, for the straightforward reason that one section includes a residence for celibate women and another for celibate men. But these sections are not sex-restricted, and it is the women’s not the men’s section that fronts on Lexington Avenue, the opposite of what is said in the book.
93) The book calls the building at Lexington Avenue, Opus Dei’s “world headquarters”. Not true.
94) The Da Vinci Code also suggests that women Opus Dei members are “forced to clean the men’s residence halls for no pay” and are otherwise accorded lower status than men (pp. 41, 415-16). This is not true. Opus Dei, like the Roman Catholic Church in general, teaches that women and men are of equal dignity and value, and all of its practices are in accord with that belief. Women members of Opus Dei can be found in all sorts of professions, those which society views as prestigious and those which society today tends to undervalue, such as homemaking or domestic work. Opus Dei teaches that any kind of honest work done with love of God is of equal value. Some women numerary members of Opus Dei have freely chosen to make a profession of taking care of Opus Dei’s centers, both women’s and men’s. They also run conference centers where activities of cultural and spiritual formation are held. These women are professionally trained and are paid for their services, which include interior decorating, catering and other highly skilled work. The millions of people who attend retreats or other spiritual formation activities at Opus Dei centers can attest to their professionalism. The Da Vinci Code’s insinuation that their work lacks dignity and value is demeaning to these women.
95) The Da Vinci Code says that Opus Dei was made a personal prelature as a reward for “bailing out” the Vatican bank (pp. 40-41, 415-416). Neither Opus Dei nor any of its members helped “bail out” the Vatican bank. The Roman Catholic Church’s authorities made Opus Dei a personal prelature in 1982 because they recognized that this new canonical category was a good fit for Opus Dei’s mission and structure. In any event, the personal prelature status is nothing special: it is simply one of several canonical categories the Roman Catholic Church has for designating an institution that carries out special pastoral activities. In contrast to the implication given by the book, personal prelature status in no way implies some special favor of the Pope or that Opus Dei members are not under the authority of their local bishops.
96) The Da Vinci Code suggests that the Church bent its canonization rules to put Opus Dei’s founder on the “fast track” to being named a saint (pp. 40-41). The canonization of St. Josemaría Escrivá in 2002 came 27 years after his death (not 20, as the book says). It was one of the first to be processed after the 1983 Code of Canon Law streamlined the procedures for canonization, and so it moved more quickly than was typical before. Mother Teresa is on pace to be canonized even more quickly, having been beatified just 6 years after her death (Escrivá was beatified in 17 years). Even under the old procedures, the canonizat |
Sophie tells Langdon that if he throws the dot away, the DCPJ officers will see that it is no longer moving and know he's onto them. She comes up with an ingenious plan. She imbeds the receiver in a bar of soap, breaks a restroom window and throws the soap onto the roof of a passing truck. That seems like a good plan, and it works. The officers rush to apprehend the truck, believing that Langdon is on the roof. This buys him and Sophie some time.
FACT: The restrooms of the Louvre have liquid soap, just like most other public restrooms.
FACT: The dots are accurate to somewhere between 13 and 328 feet (4 and 100 meters).
FACT: The Dots don't work well indoors, under dense tree cover or in urban areas with tall buildings.
STORY: Rather than escaping through their newfound window of opportunity, Sophie and Langdon follow another clue to the Salle des Etats. The Salle des Etats, also known as the Salle de la Joconde, is the Mona Lisa's home. Before too long, the DCPJ apprehends them there.
In another burst of quick thinking, Sophie removes Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks" (called "Madonna of the Rocks" in the novel) from the wall opposite the "Mona Lisa." She uses the painting as a shield and threatens to destroy it by pressing her knee through the canvas. Naturally, the apprehending officer allows her to escape in order to prevent the destruction of the priceless artwork.
FACT: "Virgin of the Rocks" hangs in the Grand Gallery, not the Salle des Etats. The painting directly across from the "Mona Lisa" is Caliari's "The Wedding Feast at Cana." This painting is an enormous 32 feet (9.9 meters) wide. To be fair, we have not found a source detailing which painting faced the "Mona Lisa" before the 2001 closure of the Salle des Etats. However, in several older photographs, reflections in the "Mona Lisa"'s protective glass indicate that it wasn't "Virgin of the Rocks."
FACT: Sophie's removal of the painting from the wall does not activate any sort of security system. This contradicts the beginning of the book, in which Saunière removes a painting from the wall to activate a security system that seals off an entire corridor. It also contradicts the Louvre's real security system, which includes proximity and movement detection. For the record, this security system also uses real security cameras, which staff monitor 24 hours a day.
STORY: One of "The Da Vinci Code"'s villains is a man named Silas, who is an albino. He has white skin and hair as well as pink eyes with red pupils. Silas is good with a gun and drives a car at night in pursuit of the heroes.
FACT: Albinism is a real medical condition in which a person's body cannot produce the proper amount of the pigment melanin. Most people with albinism have very pale skin and hair and light-colored eyes. Very few people with the condition have pink eyes, though. Most have light blue eyes. Albinism prevents a perso |
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