Fact or Farce: The Da Vinci Code Revealed
Everybody loves conspiracy and if mixed with a cocktail of mystery, religion, secret society and even romance all compiled in abook, it becomes a page-turning, tantalizing, compelling, exciting, thrilling adventure of discovery into the unknown. I remember reading this book, and it took me 2 days to finish it, and that is like my best personal record. I was quite literally hook to the twists and turns in which Dan brown so cleverly led his readers from one discovery to another embroidered with even more questions.
I would not know whether he is a naturally good writer, but as I said if all the elements are blended together in a harmonious fashion , striking a balance with each other, it would not matter if the author is a darn good writer or just an amateur novelist....AND compunded with what Dan Brown justifies as true, it could even penetrate into your subconscious so that one may even begin to doubt their own beliefs and their own facts. Non Christians may choose to believe what the book says but even now some Christians are beginning to question their faith. This begs the question of how firmly rooted are Christians in our own teachings and own beliefs. Then, we begin to think hmmm. "The truth is out there" so what about the truth we have been taught and brought up with all this while.
SO KUDOS to Dan Brown for sparking a controversy over the Catholic Faith and Christians around the world. But unfortunately your half-baked story and so-called veracious claims and also a tinge of plagiarism has now been unraveled. And though you sold 40 million copies of your silly ass book, I think you should go back to school and understand the MEANING OF THE WORD: FACTS
At the bottom are some clarifications on Mr. Dan Brown's so-called facts. This is taken from an excerpt at the website The Da Vinci Decoder-The Catholic Answer.
by Carl Olsen and Sandra Miesel.
but before that let's quote Dan Brown
"All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."
The Code’s Controversial Claims
The Da Vinci Code begins with a murder in the Louvre in Paris. American Robert Langdon, an expert in religious and esoteric symbolism, is asked to help interpret a cipher left on the victim’s body. Langdon is joined by a cryptologist, Sophie Neveu. They quickly become suspects in the case and must flee from authorities.
While escaping and seeking to solve the murder, they ally themselves with wealthy historian and Holy Grail fanatic Leigh Teabing. Chased by authorities, they travel from Paris to London in search of answers. Woven throughout are lectures by Langdon and Teabing about the identity of the Holy Grail, Leonardo Da Vinci and The Last Supper, and the "truth" about Jesus and the Catholic Church. The novel ends with Langdon having an epiphany at the supposed burial place of Mary Magdalene.
Mary is a central character in the novel—not the Mary Magdalene of the Bible, but the one of feminist mythology. She is depicted as Jesus’ head apostle, His wife, and the mother of His children. She is also, Brown writes, the real "Holy Grail." Readers are informed that all of this has been kept hidden by the Catholic Church, often by force and violence.
Other big claims: No one believed that Jesus was God prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325, Constantine created Christianity out of pagan myths, there are other "gospels" that are just as authentic as the four canonical Gospels, and Leonardo Da Vinci’s artwork contains messages about Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Jesus and Mary Magdalene
The belief in Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene has been popular in feminist circles for several decades. It forms a central part of a strategy to undermine Church teaching about priestly celibacy and women’s ordination.
In The Da Vinci Code, historian Teabing declares: "Jesus was the original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene" (p. 248). He proclaims that this—and Jesus’ supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene—is "the greatest cover-up in human history" (p. 249). He also states that "the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record" (p. 245).
Just exactly which "historical record" is he talking about? The Gospels never even hint that Jesus was married or had a romantic relationship. The "evidence" for this claim is based instead on heretical, Gnostic works written one hundred to three hundred years after the Gospels were written. Those texts are notorious for being unhistorical, spurious, and filled with bizarre beliefs that have little in common with the beliefs of early Christians.
Some feminist scholars are among the few who think those late Gnostic texts are as reliable as the accounts written within thirty to fifty years of Jesus’ ascension, while many of the Apostles still lived. For them, Mary Magdalene represents the "sacred feminine" opposed to chauvinism and male power. "Mary Magdalene," journalist Kenneth Woodward explains, "has become a project for a certain kind of ideologically committed feminist scholarship."
Jesus: Mere Mortal or God-Man?
Teabing insists that until the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, "Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal." He adds: "Jesus’ establishment as "the Son of God" was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea" (p. 233).
This is clearly false. The New Testament and the writings of the early Church fathers show that Jesus’ first followers believed He was somehow divine—not merely mortal. Patristics scholar J.N.D. Kelly sums up this fact, writing that "the all-but-universal Christian conviction in the [centuries prior to Nicaea] had been that Jesus Christ was divine as well as human. The most primitive confession had been "Jesus is Lord" [Rom 10:9; Phil 2:11], and its import had been elaborated and deepened in the apostolic age." [J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978, 138.]
John’s Gospel contains strong statements about the divinity of Jesus, including its famous Prologue (Jn 1:1-3) and this statement: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father" (Jn 1:14). After upsetting authorities because of His activities on the Sabbath, John reports, Jesus was threatened "because He not only broke the sabbath but also called God His Father, making Himself equal with God" (Jn 5:18).
In the eighth chapter Jesus declares, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am" (v. 58), an overt reference to the name by which God had revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush (Ex 3:14). Similar declarations are made by Paul and other New Testament writers (cf., 1 Cor. 12:3; Phil. 2:6; 1 Tim. 3:15-16; Rev. 1:17; 22:13).
In the same way, the early Church fathers wrote often of the divinity of Jesus. St. Ignatius of Antioch (died about 110) described Jesus Christ as "our God" (Letter to the Ephesians,18) and "the Christ God" (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 10). St. Justin Martyr tells his readers: "If you had understood what has been written by the prophets, you would not have denied that He was God, Son of the only, unbegotten, unutterable God" (Dialogue with Trypho,126). Similar statements abound prior to the fourth century.
An influential heretic priest of that period, Arius (c. 250–c. 356) believed that Jesus was the Son of God, but he thought that the Son was not coequal with the Father. So the main issue at Nicaea, which was called to address the Arian heresy, was not whether Jesus is divine. The issue was rather what kind of divinity He is and what His relationship is with the Father. If that’s the case, are we to believe that Christians who had been severely persecuted for holding fast to their faith in Jesus would meekly allow Constantine to change such an essential feature of their doctrine?
Paganism and Catholicism
The Da Vinci Code says that Catholic beliefs in the divinity of Jesus, the Resurrection, and the Eucharist are "vestiges of pagan religion" taken from ancient pagans. This faulty idea first originated in the 1800s, was thoroughly debunked in the early-to-mid-1900s, but lives on in anti-Christian pseudo-scholarship.
Superficial similarities exist between Christianity and some ancient pagan religions. But careful study reveals that there are far more dissimilarities. In addition, pagan beliefs from the third and fourth century A.D. are often read back into pre-Christian religions with little concern for exact dating or what the evidence allows. There are also many cases of falsification and sloppiness in the book’s claims about this subject.
For example, Teabing claims that "the newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh," and that Christians stole this detail for their own use. This "fact" has been around since Kersey Graves’ The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors, published in 1875. Graves makes this assertion, but provides no sources or citations and has been discredited by scholars. In fact, the Bhagavad-Gita, a first-century A.D. Hindu text that is central to the Krishna religious tradition, doesn’t mention Krishna’s childhood. And the stories of Krishna’s childhood recorded in the Harivamsa Purana (c. A.D. 300) and the Bhagavata Purana (c. A.D. 800-900) don’t mention gifts at all. Even if they did, these latter works were written after the first century, making Graves’ claim absurd.
More Irresponsible Fictions
Other fallacies abound in The Da Vinci Code. Brown writes that Leonardo da Vinci was a "flamboyant homosexual" who accepted "hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions." Leonardo may have been homosexual, but not "flamboyant." He produced few pieces of art, and he received just one Vatican commission.
Brown insists that Da Vinci’s The Last Supper depicts Mary Magdalene, not the Apostle John, to the right of Jesus. No reputable art scholar agrees; the teenager John is depicted in the rather effeminate manner of Leonardo’s time. And, if John isn’t in the painting, where is he? As one of the Twelve Apostles, he would certainly not have been left out of such a painting by the artist.
The novel also claims that "the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women" (p. 125). Actually, the number of people (both men and women) executed between 1400-1800 for suspected witchcraft was about 30,000 to 80,000. Not all were women, many were executed by the State, and a large number were killed by Protestants.
The Da Vinci Code packs in many other anti-Catholic fictions. But the novel’s "remarkable revelations" about the Church and historical events are mostly tired cliches borrowed from sources (such as 1982’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent) that no genuine scholar takes seriously. A work of historical revisionism, the Code relies on a clever mixture of paranoia, outlandish story lines, anti-Catholicism, and trendy relativism.
Brown has discovered a winning recipe: Attack the Church, misrepresent history, add mystery and romance, stir up controversy, and produce a half-baked story. Sadly, the truth has been left out of the mix, and the final product is not fit for consumption—either by Catholics or anyone else.
"Facts" about the Priory of Sion.The Da Vinci Code begins with a murder in the Louvre in Paris. American Robert Langdon, an expert in religious and esoteric symbolism, is asked to help interpret a cipher left on the victim’s body. Langdon is joined by a cryptologist, Sophie Neveu. They quickly become suspects in the case and must flee from authorities.
While escaping and seeking to solve the murder, they ally themselves with wealthy historian and Holy Grail fanatic Leigh Teabing. Chased by authorities, they travel from Paris to London in search of answers. Woven throughout are lectures by Langdon and Teabing about the identity of the Holy Grail, Leonardo Da Vinci and The Last Supper, and the "truth" about Jesus and the Catholic Church. The novel ends with Langdon having an epiphany at the supposed burial place of Mary Magdalene.
Mary is a central character in the novel—not the Mary Magdalene of the Bible, but the one of feminist mythology. She is depicted as Jesus’ head apostle, His wife, and the mother of His children. She is also, Brown writes, the real "Holy Grail." Readers are informed that all of this has been kept hidden by the Catholic Church, often by force and violence.
Other big claims: No one believed that Jesus was God prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325, Constantine created Christianity out of pagan myths, there are other "gospels" that are just as authentic as the four canonical Gospels, and Leonardo Da Vinci’s artwork contains messages about Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Jesus and Mary Magdalene
The belief in Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene has been popular in feminist circles for several decades. It forms a central part of a strategy to undermine Church teaching about priestly celibacy and women’s ordination.
In The Da Vinci Code, historian Teabing declares: "Jesus was the original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene" (p. 248). He proclaims that this—and Jesus’ supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene—is "the greatest cover-up in human history" (p. 249). He also states that "the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record" (p. 245).
Just exactly which "historical record" is he talking about? The Gospels never even hint that Jesus was married or had a romantic relationship. The "evidence" for this claim is based instead on heretical, Gnostic works written one hundred to three hundred years after the Gospels were written. Those texts are notorious for being unhistorical, spurious, and filled with bizarre beliefs that have little in common with the beliefs of early Christians.
Some feminist scholars are among the few who think those late Gnostic texts are as reliable as the accounts written within thirty to fifty years of Jesus’ ascension, while many of the Apostles still lived. For them, Mary Magdalene represents the "sacred feminine" opposed to chauvinism and male power. "Mary Magdalene," journalist Kenneth Woodward explains, "has become a project for a certain kind of ideologically committed feminist scholarship."
Jesus: Mere Mortal or God-Man?
Teabing insists that until the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, "Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal." He adds: "Jesus’ establishment as "the Son of God" was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea" (p. 233).
This is clearly false. The New Testament and the writings of the early Church fathers show that Jesus’ first followers believed He was somehow divine—not merely mortal. Patristics scholar J.N.D. Kelly sums up this fact, writing that "the all-but-universal Christian conviction in the [centuries prior to Nicaea] had been that Jesus Christ was divine as well as human. The most primitive confession had been "Jesus is Lord" [Rom 10:9; Phil 2:11], and its import had been elaborated and deepened in the apostolic age." [J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978, 138.]
John’s Gospel contains strong statements about the divinity of Jesus, including its famous Prologue (Jn 1:1-3) and this statement: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father" (Jn 1:14). After upsetting authorities because of His activities on the Sabbath, John reports, Jesus was threatened "because He not only broke the sabbath but also called God His Father, making Himself equal with God" (Jn 5:18).
In the eighth chapter Jesus declares, "Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was born, I am" (v. 58), an overt reference to the name by which God had revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush (Ex 3:14). Similar declarations are made by Paul and other New Testament writers (cf., 1 Cor. 12:3; Phil. 2:6; 1 Tim. 3:15-16; Rev. 1:17; 22:13).
In the same way, the early Church fathers wrote often of the divinity of Jesus. St. Ignatius of Antioch (died about 110) described Jesus Christ as "our God" (Letter to the Ephesians,18) and "the Christ God" (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 10). St. Justin Martyr tells his readers: "If you had understood what has been written by the prophets, you would not have denied that He was God, Son of the only, unbegotten, unutterable God" (Dialogue with Trypho,126). Similar statements abound prior to the fourth century.
An influential heretic priest of that period, Arius (c. 250–c. 356) believed that Jesus was the Son of God, but he thought that the Son was not coequal with the Father. So the main issue at Nicaea, which was called to address the Arian heresy, was not whether Jesus is divine. The issue was rather what kind of divinity He is and what His relationship is with the Father. If that’s the case, are we to believe that Christians who had been severely persecuted for holding fast to their faith in Jesus would meekly allow Constantine to change such an essential feature of their doctrine?
Paganism and Catholicism
The Da Vinci Code says that Catholic beliefs in the divinity of Jesus, the Resurrection, and the Eucharist are "vestiges of pagan religion" taken from ancient pagans. This faulty idea first originated in the 1800s, was thoroughly debunked in the early-to-mid-1900s, but lives on in anti-Christian pseudo-scholarship.
Superficial similarities exist between Christianity and some ancient pagan religions. But careful study reveals that there are far more dissimilarities. In addition, pagan beliefs from the third and fourth century A.D. are often read back into pre-Christian religions with little concern for exact dating or what the evidence allows. There are also many cases of falsification and sloppiness in the book’s claims about this subject.
For example, Teabing claims that "the newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh," and that Christians stole this detail for their own use. This "fact" has been around since Kersey Graves’ The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors, published in 1875. Graves makes this assertion, but provides no sources or citations and has been discredited by scholars. In fact, the Bhagavad-Gita, a first-century A.D. Hindu text that is central to the Krishna religious tradition, doesn’t mention Krishna’s childhood. And the stories of Krishna’s childhood recorded in the Harivamsa Purana (c. A.D. 300) and the Bhagavata Purana (c. A.D. 800-900) don’t mention gifts at all. Even if they did, these latter works were written after the first century, making Graves’ claim absurd.
More Irresponsible Fictions
Other fallacies abound in The Da Vinci Code. Brown writes that Leonardo da Vinci was a "flamboyant homosexual" who accepted "hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions." Leonardo may have been homosexual, but not "flamboyant." He produced few pieces of art, and he received just one Vatican commission.
Brown insists that Da Vinci’s The Last Supper depicts Mary Magdalene, not the Apostle John, to the right of Jesus. No reputable art scholar agrees; the teenager John is depicted in the rather effeminate manner of Leonardo’s time. And, if John isn’t in the painting, where is he? As one of the Twelve Apostles, he would certainly not have been left out of such a painting by the artist.
The novel also claims that "the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women" (p. 125). Actually, the number of people (both men and women) executed between 1400-1800 for suspected witchcraft was about 30,000 to 80,000. Not all were women, many were executed by the State, and a large number were killed by Protestants.
The Da Vinci Code packs in many other anti-Catholic fictions. But the novel’s "remarkable revelations" about the Church and historical events are mostly tired cliches borrowed from sources (such as 1982’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent) that no genuine scholar takes seriously. A work of historical revisionism, the Code relies on a clever mixture of paranoia, outlandish story lines, anti-Catholicism, and trendy relativism.
Brown has discovered a winning recipe: Attack the Church, misrepresent history, add mystery and romance, stir up controversy, and produce a half-baked story. Sadly, the truth has been left out of the mix, and the final product is not fit for consumption—either by Catholics or anyone else.
According to the "fact" page, the Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 is a real organization. In 1975, Paris Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secretes, identifying numerous members of the Priory Of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Boticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci
Facts about the Priory of Sion
The Priory of Sion was a club founded in 1956 by four young Frenchmen. Two of its members were Andre Bonhomme and Pierre Plantard. The group's name is based on a local mountain in France, not Mount Zion in Jerusalem. It has no connection with the Crusader, the Templars, or a previous movements incorporating "Sion" into their names.
The organization broke up after a short time, but in later years, Pierre Plantard revived it, claimed he was the "Grand Master" or leader of the organization, and begin making outrageous claims regarding its antiquity, prior membership and true purposes. It was he who claimed that the organization stemmed form the Crusades, he who composed and salted Les Dossiers in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and he who created the story that the organization was guarding a secret royal bloodline that could one day return to political power.
But after, Pierre's claims came to public attention, his former associates contradicted him. In a 1996 statement mede to the BBc by the Priory of Sion's original president. Andre Bohemme stated,"The Priory of Sion does not exist anymore. we were never involved in any activities of a political nature. It was four friends who came together to have fun. We called ourselves The Priory of Sion because there was a mountain by the same name close-by. I haven't see Pierre Plantard in over twenty years and I don't know what he's up to but he always had a great imagination. I don't know why people try to make such a big thing out of nothing. "
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