THE DA VINCI CODE:  POPULAR HERESY

In 2003, novelist Dan Brown published his sensational and provocative novel, The Da Vinci Code.  The best-selling novel posits an alternative view of Christianity that has caused no small tremor in the literary world and caused ABC to air a program in early November 2004 entitled “Jesus, Mary and da Vinci.”  This May 2006, Hollywood will release a movie based on the novel, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard.  There is little doubt that this movie will be a blockbuster.  On this Easter Sunday weekend, I will devote the entire Issues in Perspective program to analyzing the themes of the novel and the movie.  As Christians, we must know the details of The Da Vinci Code and how to respond to its thesis and major themes.

• First allow me to summarize the thesis of Brown’s novel, which I read two years ago.  The central event of the novel is the murder of a Louvre curator, found in the pose of Leonardo’s celebrated “Vitruvian man”—a figure inscribed in both a circle and a square—which sets in motion an ingenious plot involving numerological symbolism, verbal puzzles and an alternative version of Christianity, wrapped around the legend of the Holy Grail.  Brown posits that Leonardo is at the center of a secret society that has maintained a secret from biblical times, namely that Mary Magdalene, far from being a prostitute, was the rightful wife of Jesus; Mary and Jesus had a child and heirs; and finally, the heirs, whose existence threatened church dogma, were protected by a clandestine priory that counted Leonardo among its members.  The novel also contends that the Holy Grail, contrary to most ideas that it was the chalice Jesus used as He introduced the ordinance of communion, was actually the pregnant Mary Magdalene, the lost vessel of Jesus’ blood.  Thus, the figure sitting on Jesus’ right in Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” generally taken to be the effeminate apostle John, was actually Mary Magdalene, leaning away from Jesus in a telltale “V” that represents an ancient female symbol for a chalice or grail, or the letter “M” representing matrimony or Magdalene.  In addition, Peter, who sits next to “Mary” in the painting, gestures in front of Mary in a menacing manner that could denote jealousy.  Since there is no object on the table that could be a grail or chalice, Brown contends that Mary symbolizes the actual grail, which is a metaphor for the sacred feminine and a form of goddess worship suppressed by Christianity.

• Second, how accurate historically is Brown’s novel?  First, the name da Vinci refers to the fact that Leonardo was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero of Vinci, in the Florentine territory.  Therefore, historians refer to him by his given name Leonardo, not by da Vinci.  Further, as Bruce Boucher argues, Brown’s work suggests a lack of familiarity with the copious bibliography on the painter.  For example, Brown refers to Leonardo’s “enormous output” of Christian art and “hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions” he received.  In fact, Leonardo was known for his notoriously meager production of Christian art and actually spent little time in Rome.  Brown also calls Leonardo a “flamboyant homosexual” when the actual evidence of his sexuality remains inconclusive and most fragmentary.  Finally, how should we view Brown’s interpretation of the “Last Supper” painting?  As Boucher argues, Leonardo’s composition points, in fact, to the traditional Florentine depictions of the Last Supper, stressing the betrayal and sacrifice of Jesus rather than the institution of the Eucharist and the chalice.  At the same time, John was invariably represented as a beautiful young man whose special affinity with Jesus was expressed by his being seated at Jesus’ right.  Leonardo’s John conforms to this type and parallels for the absence of a chalice appear in earlier Italian examples.  In short, Brown’s working of the historical evidence is spurious at best.

• How do we process this as Christians?  The book is well-written and is a form of entertainment drawing on the conspiracy-theory genre, arguing that the Christian church is bent on conspiring to keep the truth about Christianity’s origins suppressed and will even kill to keep it suppressed.  Furthermore, ABC legitimizes the book’s approach to Christianity in its 2004 program, “Jesus, Mary and da Vinci.”  The Hollywood movie will do the same.  This is rather tragic; for any serious scholarly discussion of Brown’s thesis presented as a novel cannot be done in a short TV program, let alone a movie.

• So, where do we go from here?  Several key thoughts:

1.  As Christians we must reaffirm the historicity of the four gospels.  Until German theological liberalism in the 19th century abandoned the historical Jesus and embarked on its proverbial quest, there was no controversy over the historical Jesus.  He was the Jesus depicted in the gospels.  But with no anchor in Scripture, any theory, idea or hypothesis is now regarded as legitimate.  Brown has based his novel on the curious, the strange and the bizarre.  He argues that at the Council of Nicea (325) church leaders consolidated their power base by creating the doctrines of Christ’s deity and the infallibility of Scripture.  In fact, Brown actually sides with Arius, whose belief that Jesus was a created being was condemned as heresy by the church.  But any church historian can easily prove that the early church from the four gospels on clearly proclaimed Jesus as the Lord and God of the universe; that evidence is abundant and compelling.  Brown would not have you believe this and, because of the general ignorance among the laity of church history, he can be convincing.  His work is not history and it is not credible.  Jesus is the incarnate God who came to earth with one express purpose—to pay the price for the redemption of humanity.  The gospel accounts do not support the premise that He was married, that He had children or that Mary Magdalene was in the upper room.  The result of Brown’s novel is that people believe it as a viable option on how to look at Jesus.  It is not!  It is a fabrication, a novel—total fiction!  It is well-written, but it is not fact and bears no resemblance whatsoever to historic, biblical Christianity.

2.  Brown posits that Leonardo is at the center of a clandestine society [the Priory of Sion] that has maintained a secret from biblical times, namely that Mary Magdalene, far from being a prostitute [there is no proof for this incidentally], was the rightful wife of Jesus.  She and her children by Jesus went to the south of France where there was produced a royal line culminating in the Merovingians.  These heirs of Jesus are protected by a secret priory that counted Leonardo amount its members.  [Brown’s book is heavily dependent on a previous book of feminist theology, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.]

3.  The Holy Grail—“grail” means “dish.”  [Legend has it that this was a dish, later a cup that Jesus gave to Joseph of Arimathea that contained the blood of Jesus.  It is supposed to have made its way to Britain and is associated with the legends of King Arthur in the 6th century.]  In the novel, the Grail is actually Mary Magdalene, the symbol for womanhood, the sacred feminine and the goddess lost, the presence of which the church is suppressing.  Thus, women are now depicted as the enemy.  This truth about the Grail, Brown’s novel contends, is buried in detail in the sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene.  Part of the quest for the Grail was to find the location of these documents, which the Catholic Church has worked to suppress through Opus Dei, etc.  For these documents to be made public, Christianity would be exposed as a fraud.

4.  Leonardo placed codes [hence the Da Vinci code] in some of his works, most famously in “The Last Supper”—Brown refers to Leonardo [his real name; he came from the town of Vinci] as a “flamboyant homosexual” who produced an “enormous output of Christian art” and had “hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions”, all of which are spurious at best or blatantly false.  Brown makes much of two facts—there is no chalice in the painting and that there is the letter “V” in the painting off to Jesus’ right, where supposedly the beloved disciple, John, is seated.  Since “V” is the sign of the feminine, the long-haired, almost feminine-looking figure is Mary Magdalene.  Art historian, Patrick Boucher, argues that Leonardo’s composition points, in fact, to the traditional Florentine depictions of the Last Supper, stressing the betrayal and sacrifice of Jesus rather than the institution of the Eucharist and the chalice.  At the same time, John was invariably represented as a beautiful young man whose special affinity with Jesus was expressed by his being seated at Jesus’ right.  Leonardo’s John conforms to this Florentine type and parallels the absence of the chalice in earlier Italian examples.  Finally, on the other side of Jesus is another “V” but no one suggests that there is a second woman on the other side.

5.  How Brown interprets the Council of Nicea (325)—Brown argues that emperor Constantine “commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike.  The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up and burned.”  The modern New Testament was compiled and edited by men who possessed a political agenda—to promote the deity of the man Jesus Christ and use that teaching to solidify their power base.  Before Nicea in 325, Jesus was regarded as a mortal prophet.  “Everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false.”  Christianity as we know it is really a creation of the fourth century, not the first, the novel argues. 

Brown’s entire argument here depends on Gnostic texts, which are clearly heretical.  But these Gnostic texts argue for a special place for Mary Magdalene and the love she and Jesus shared (see the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary for example) and focus more on Jesus’ humanity than his deity. Further, in an outlandish claim, Brown argues that in 325 there were 80 Gospels from which church leaders chose.  In fact, there were probably no more than a dozen that actually were claimed to be gospels.  More misleading is his argument that at that Council, a group of men walked into the council, laid out these 80 Gospels on a table and chose the ones they liked, ending up with the current four gospels.  This is a blatant distortion of history.  By the end of the 2nd century, the collection of Paul’s letters and the four Gospels were well established and accepted as canon.  They circulated widely through the Mediterranean world and were quoted, used and cited as infallible texts.  Brown’s account of the 325 Council at Nicea is intellectually dishonest.

6.  The message of the novel is—do not trust the past or tradition.  What has been passed down to us is not trustworthy, or reliable.  Brown wants us to believe that he is sharing something more reliable and more tantalizing.

• Was Jesus married?  What do we know about Mary Magdalene?  The idea that Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus is not attested in the Gospels.  Eleven passages in the NT address who Mary Magdalene was:  She was a beneficiary of exorcism.  She was present at Jesus’ crucifixion and was there when Jesus was laid in the tomb.  She was present when it was discovered that the tomb was empty.  She was further the beneficiary of one of the first appearances of the Lord after His resurrection. 

It is also unusual that she is identified as Mary of Magdala, because most names of women in the Bible are tied to mates to whom they are related.  She is not connected to anyone.  If she were married, she would have been so identified—e.g., Mary, wife of Jesus.  She is only connected to the place where she lived—Magdala. 

The Scripture assumes Jesus is not married because there is no reason to think otherwise.  One Gnostic text suggests that Mary kissed Jesus on the lips and that the other disciples became jealous (pp. 246-247) and that to be unmarried was to be un-Jewish (p. 245).  There is absolutely no evidence that Jesus was married.  But, even if He were, it would not undermine His deity, or His substitutionary death.

• Can we trust the gospels and the canon of Scripture?  Yes, we can trust the Gospels as historically accurate and trustworthy.  By the end of the 2nd century, the four Gospels had, because of their roots, content and usage, surfaced as the primary source of Jesus’ life and ministry.  (See Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament and R. Laird Harris, The Historicity and Canonicity of Scripture.)  The listing of canonical books goes back to the 2nd century, largely in answer to heresies that were using Gnostic texts as their sources.  The presence of error forced the church to focus on truth.  All of this predates Constantine and the Council of Nicea of 325

Dan Brown’s novel and the movie of the same name give genuine, biblical Christianity an amazing opportunity to proclaim the truth about Jesus Christ.  There is far more evidence that Jesus is the enthroned Son of God and the Savior of the world than there is for Brown’s spurious themes.  We must do our homework and be prepared “to give a defense for the hope that is within us” (1 Peter 3:15).  We are to boldly, with great courage and tenacity, give an apology for our faith.  Dan Brown has given us a fantastic opportunity to do so.

See Boucher’s article in the New York Times (3 August 2003) and Virginia Hefferman in the New York Times (3 November 2003).  Also see Darrell L. Bock, Breaking the Da Vinci Code, (Nelson, 2004).