The Last of Brown's ridiculous historical fallacies to be treated

Fiction

Brown writes that Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal “was a tribute to Mary Magdalene and the bloodline of Jesus Christ, told through the story of a young knight on a quest for truth” (390).

Fact

The young knight in the opera is indeed on a quest for the Holy Grail – the traditional Grail! Not the redefined one portrayed in this novel.

Fiction

Brown claims that the Priory of Sion attached female sexual symbolism to the medieval cathedrals to represent goddess worship, an idea that would have enraged the original architects. According to Brown, the “cathedral’s long hollow nave” is “a secret tribute to a woman’s womb…complete with receding labial ridges and a nice little cinquefoil clitoris above the doorway” (326).

Fact

Neither the Priory nor the Templars had anything to do with the medieval cathedral architecture. The great churches of Europe not only predated them by centuries, but they generally have 3 doors at the main entrances…not one, plus further doors in the side transepts…the woman’s body parallel becomes hard to fathom. Also, their “long hollow nave” was structured from the public basilicas of the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Fiction

Brown writes, “the New Testament is based on fabrications” (341); “the greatest story ever told is, in fact, the greatest story ever sold” (267); and “the Church has two thousand years of experience pressuring those who threaten to unveil its lies” (407). The anti-Christian bias of the author is obvious and blatant. That doesn’t mean that Christendom has been perfect over the years…medieval anti-Semitism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and other persecutions…as well as the evils perpetrated today by the few members of the clergy who inflict on children the horrors of pedophilia. But keeping “Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene” under wraps – the main theme of Brown’s book – is NOT one of the church’s offenses.

Other fabrications and outright lies (Brown’s in bold) and their explanation

“Noah was himself an albino” (166). Absolutely no evidence…and the “albino monk” of Opus Dei seems to have no problem whatever with his eyesight, as would be the case with true albinism.

“The early Jewish tradition involved ritualistic sex. In the Temple, no less. Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple housed not only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah” (309). Nothing was, or is, as basic to Hebrews as their foundational belief in ONE God (not two or more)…the Jews did not even have a term for “goddess.” The term “Shekinah” in Hebrew refers to the glory of God present in his indwelling, not some divine consort.

The Jewish tetragrammation YHWH – the sacred name of God – in fact derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah” (309). False! YHWH, the original name for God, reflects the Hebrew verb “to be.” But since tradition forbade verbal pronunciation of the name, rabbis in the sixteenth century pronounced the consonants from UHWH together with the vowels from the word Adonai (“Lord”) resulting in the word “Jehovah.” This later, synthesized name not only did not predate YHWH, it has absolutely nothing to do with an androgynous union.

“As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her eight-year cycle to organize their Olympic Games” (36). Here Brown shows himself to be an equal-opportunity exploiter in his crusade against the truth, muddling Greek history as well as Jewish and Christian. In reality, the games were dedicated to Zeus. A day-long festival in his honor interrupted the games midway through, which is why they were terminated in the Christian era until their revival in 1896 on a strictly secular basis. They also occurred every four years rather than eight, as Brown implies. As for the five linked rings of the Olympic flag in the modern games, these had nothing to do with the “Ishtar pentagram,” since new rings were supposed to be added with each new set of games. The organizers, however, stopped at five – a nice number to fill Olympic logos, reflecting the five major, inhabited continents.

“The Bible…has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book” (231). To say that the Bible has “evolved” implies a progression of constant change, as in the term evolution. This is totally misleading. The only “changes” to the Bible that have taken place across the centuries have been an ever-more-faithful rendering and translation of the original Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, without any additions to the text. (see Hank Hanegraaff’s section for more details)

“More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion” (231). Brown’s statement implies that there was a general submission of gospels to some sort of early church panel that reduced the field to the familiar four. This was not at all the case. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were foundation documents in what later came to be called the New Testament. Eusebius, the first church historian, tells how they were the core of the canon from the start, and how their authority was determined on the basis of usage in such early Christian centers as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. He also clearly identifies some of the later spurious writings, including the Gnostic gospels, that the church rejected as soon as they surfaced. Today they are known as “New Testament apocrypha.” Brown must have had this group in mind with his “eighty,” which is an exaggerated figure in any case.

(This article and most others have been taken from Dr. Paul Maier's book "The Da Vinci Code: fact or fiction?") You can purchase this book at the following sites:

http://www.equip.org/store/details.asp?SKU=B775

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1414302797/103-7751817-1819867?v=glance&n=283155

Dan Brown's view of Renaissance art

Fiction

Brown claims that it was Leonardo da Vinci himself who, in painting The Last Supper, surfaced the great secret for all who had eyes to see. “The Last Supper practically shouts at the viewer that Jesus and Magdalene were a pair” (244).

Fact

Admittedly, the apostle John, at Jesus’ right hand, does have a feminine look to him in DaVinci’s masterpiece, but that was the master’s habit in painting younger men, as witness his portrayals also of John the Baptist and others. Moreover, the great artist could not possibly have had Mary Magdalene in mind or there would have been fourteen figures in his painting, rather than Jesus and the Twelve. If the figure to Jesus’ right is Mary Magdalene, where’s the missing John?

Fiction

Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (“La Gioconda”) is an androgynous self-portrait with a “secret smile” that derives from her name, which is supposedly an anagram of two Egyptian fertility deities Amon and Isis (121).

Fact

This painting is an actual portrait of a real personality, Madonna Lisa, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo.

Dan Brown's view of sexuality

Fiction

In Brown’s view of life, he determines that there should be, in place of God or beside him, a consort goddess worthy of equal or even superior worship. Radical feminists love this idea and too quickly are urging a reappraisal of Sophia, the supreme goddess of second-century Gnosticism (as defined by Merriam-Webster: the thought and practice especially of various cults of late pre-Christian and early Christian centuries distinguished by the conviction that matter is evil and that emancipation comes through gnosis/knowledge[1]).

Fact

Here we find no lofty idealism to support the female side of divinity, but rather a lusty advocacy of free sexual indulgence as part of a worship unrestrained by Judeo-Christian principles.

Fiction

According to Brown, the church “demonized sex,” whereas those favoring the sacred feminine regard it as a quasi-sacrament. As witness to this, Brown depicts a lurid ritual he painted directly out of the film Eyes Wide Shut. The scene shows a circle of costumed men and women devotees offering up a weird chant in a nocturnal, candlelit cellar as they surround a copulating couple in the center. The ultimate message to the reader is this: it may look bad, but it’s really okay because this is hieros gamos, a “holy marriage” rite associated with the sacred feminine. The endless references in this book to Aphrodite or Venus – for whom Brown finds impossible symbolism everywhere from planetary movements to Walt Disney productions to reinforce his theme.

Fact

Far from “demonizing sex,” Christianity regards sexuality as one of God’s greatest gifts – albeit a gift that should be used responsibly. In this scary era of venereal disease, HIV, herpes, and other sexually transmitted diseases (STD), this view is hardly outdated. The libertinism suggested in The DaVinci Code would only exacerbate the dangers brought about by the Sexual Revolution. Nor has any mainstream religious system ever placed women on a higher plane than Christianity. The target for Brown’s feminist crusade should instead have been those current major religions that have not yet experienced the blessings of women’s liberation.

(These notes have been taken from Dr. Paul Maier's "The DaVinci Code: fact or fiction")

[1]Merriam-Webster, I. 1996, c1993. Merriam-Webster's collegiate dictionary. Includes index. (10th ed.). Merriam-Webster: Springfield, Mass., U.S.A.

The Knights Templar

Fiction

In Brown’s rewrite of history, the Templars were supposedly suppressed by Pope Clement V because they were blackmailing him with the secret of the Holy Grail (which has been anything from the cup Jesus used at the Last Supper to the Shroud of Turin). Borrowing from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Brown divides the term Sangreal (Medieval French for Holy Grail) into Sang (blood) and Real (royal). That royal blood, in Brown’s story, is the bloodline stemming from Jesus and Mary Magdalene through the Merovingian dynasty. Mary herself was the actual Holy Grail, “the chalice that bore the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ” (249). The Templars knew that this formidable secret, if revealed, could undermine both papacy and church, so they used their knowledge for political gain. Rather than submit to blackmail, Pope Clement V devised his “ingeniously planned sting operation” (159), arrested all the Templars, and burned them as heretics.

Fact

The fact was that King Philip IV (“the Fair”) of France who, desperate for the Templars’ wealth, forced the pope to suppress their order, whereupon the French king – not the pope – arrested them and burned some, including Grand Master Jacques de Molay, at the stake in 1314. So, now with the Templars gone, who would guard the secret? The Priory of Sion…of course we know enough about that society already.

Was Jesus Married?

Fiction

Brown claims that Jesus wed Mary Magdalene. He writes: “The early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible. Unfortunately for the early editors, one particularly troubling earthly theme kept recurring in the gospels. Mary Magdalene…More specifically, her marriage to Jesus Christ…It’s a matter of historical record” (244).

Fact

Jesus never wed anyone. The idea that he did is totally absent from Scripture and the early church traditions. No spark of evidence of this possibility exists anywhere…even in the bizarre, second-century apocryphal gospels…there is no evidence or even reference that Jesus ever got married. Brown theorizes that Jesus was expected to get married and must have according to rabbinical traditions. But this is a logical error to claim that Jesus could not have remained single because of a general expectation of marriage. Exceptions for bachelorhood were granted by the rabbis, and there were whole sub-groups in Judaism that practiced celibacy, such as a branch of the Essenes or the Egyptian Therapeutae familiar from Philo. Nor did many of the great prophets, such as Jeremiah, or the wilderness prophet Banus – under whom Josephus studied – or John the Baptist, have wives. Jesus was regularly linked with such as a desert prophet early in his ministry.

Fiction

There are many variations, including Brown’s, on the theme of Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene, and their child (Sarah) or children. In Holy Blood, Holy Grail – the source of many of Brown’s theories in The DaVinci Code – Mary, pregnant with Jesus’ child, fled to France, where she gave birth to a girl named Sarah, who became an ancestress of the Merovingian dynasty in France. Do these allegations come from early, original sources?

Fact

No. This version of Jesus’ family life first surfaced in the ninth century AD!

Fiction

Brown continues with further bizarre claims writing: “Jesus was the first original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene…She was of the House of Benjamin…of Royal descent” (248).

Fact

There is no record whatever of Mary’s Jewish tribal affiliation, nor of a member in the tribe of Benjamin thereby having royal blood. And there is nothing to suggest that Jesus commissioned Mary instead of the apostles as the original church leader.

Fiction

The cornerstone of Brown’s evidence for Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene comes from the apocryphal Gospel of Philip. In one passage Jesus supposedly kisses Mary as his “companion,” which Brown translates as “spouse or wife in Aramaic”: “And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” (246)

Fact

1. If Jesus had a wife, it would have been unthinkable for his disciples to speak out against her, no matter how strong their disapproval.

2. The Gospel of Philip was not written in Aramaic, as Brown claims, but in Greek!

3. The Gospel of Philip is very late among the apocryphal gospels, dating to the third century, at least two centuries removed from Jesus’ time. Scholars dismiss the work as having no genuine historical recollections that are not drawn from the canonical Gospels. The early church rejected this document.

4. It is apocryphal also in the literal understanding of that term today: “not genuine, spurious, counterfeit.”

Fiction

Brown also refers to another document in support of his married-Jesus hypothesis, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Brown’s character Teabing exaggerates, “I shan’t bore you with the countless references to Jesus and Magdalene’s union” (247).

Fact

First, neither of these documents specify that Jesus was married. Both references are late, and even they do not explicitly report any “union” of Jesus and Mary!

Fiction

Why is there no evidence of Jesus’ marriage in all of church history? Dan Brown, echoing other revisionist authors before him, claims that the church suppressed this evidence in a great conspiracy of silence. This, of course, raises the antennae of conspiracy-lovers everywhere, the sorts who thrive on UFO sightings and alien invasions from outer space and who fear the Tri-Lateral Commission. “Everyone loves a conspiracy,” writes Brown, knowingly, and clearly, many do. For this reason he can get away with the outrageous lie that Jesus’ marriage is a “matter of historical record” (244).

Fact

REALITY: No history, No record! While we do not have one wisp of historical evidence that Jesus ever married, we do have powerful evidence that he did not. Even the most radical revisionists agree with sober biblical scholars that the writings of St. Paul constitute our earliest – and therefore most credible – records of Christianity. In 1 Corinthians 9:5, Paul defended his right to have a wife – a prerogative he never implemented: “Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles, and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas [Peter]?” Now if Jesus himself had ever married, Paul would surely have cited that as the greatest precedent of all, after which it would have been unnecessary even to mention such subordinate examples as Peter and the other apostles. Without question, 1 Corinthians 9:5 is the graveyard of the married-Jesus fiction.

But what if there were some real piece of evidence for Jesus’ marriage? One can hardly resist speculating as to whether Jesus’ mission to the world would have been compromised had he, in fact, wed. Certainly, entering into marriage, as ordained by God, is not sinful, so might not Christ have done so? The DaVinci heroine, for example, claims she would “have no problem” with a married Jesus, and many reader might agree. But one of the principal purposes of marriage is to have children, and an enormous – even cosmic – problem would have arisen if Jesus and the Magdalene had produced offspring. Theologians would have argued for centuries as to whether such children did or did not participate in Jesus’ divinity. And what of their children and grandchildren in turn? It would have caused no less than theological bedlam. But no such documents or arguments exist! That Christ remained celibate was very wise indeed!

Fiction

According to Brown, the church suppressed this secret, yet the secret would not die! To guard and convey that secret and to retrieve the Sangreal documents that corroborated it from under the Jerusalem Temple, the Priory of Sion supposedly created the oldest of the church’s military-religious orders: the Knights Templar.

Fact

This group did exist during the Crusades to protect pilgrims on their way to and from the Holy Land, the Knights were indeed founded in 1118 and should have become obsolete when the last Crusader fortress at Acre fell in 1291. But by then they had amassed considerable wealth and had metamorphosed into a medieval banking institution cum travel agency.

Roman Emperor Constantine

Fiction

Constantine is next on the list in Brown’s revisionism. Paul Maier calls Brown’s work on Constantine “the most concerted falsification of a historical personality that I have ever encountered in either fiction or nonfiction.”[1] The first Christian Roman Emperor is depicted as thus in Brown’s work: “The Priory believes that Constantine and his male successors successfully converted the world from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity by waging a campaign of propaganda that demonized the sacred feminine, obliterating the goddess from modern religion forever” (page 124). Brown claims that Constantine eliminated goddess worship in the Roman Empire, collated the Bible, used Christianity for political gain, moved Christian worship from Saturday to Sunday, and decided that Jesus should be made into a deity in order to suit his own purposes.

FACT

The first Christian emperor did many things for church and society in the early fourth century, but not one of these claims is among them. According to Brown’s character Leigh Teabing, 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” (234). This is totally false. Most of the canon was well known and in use nearly two centuries before Constantine, a time when the early church had already dismissed the many apocryphal gospels that arose later in the second century. The rejected gospels, far from containing the real truth about Jesus, were all distortions derived from the first-century canonical Gospels and laced with fanciful aberrations.

For Brown, Constantine “was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest” (232). FALSE. While Constantine was a flawed individual, historians agree that he certainly abjured paganism, became a genuine Christian convert, repaid the church for its terrible losses during the persecutions, favored the clergy, built many churches throughout his empire, convened the first ecumenical council at Nicea – underwriting the expenses of clergy to attend it – and desired baptism near death. As for the last, he was only following the custom at the time (innocent though mistaken) of delaying baptism until the end of life because it wiped your solate clean of preceding sins.

Did Constantine shift worship from Sat. to Sun. “to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the Sun” (232-233)? No. The earliest Christians started worshiping on the first day of the week, Sunday, which they called “the Lord’s Day,” to honor the day on which Christ rose from the dead. This is obvious both from the New Testament (Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2; Revelation 1:10), as well as in the writings of the earliest church fathers like Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, the Didache, and even the pagan author Pliny the Younger.

The Council of Nicea (in Brown’s revisionism) deified Jesus. Before that, “Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nonetherless,” not the Son of God (233). Wrong! Jesus’ deity was attested by many New Testament passages, as well as by the earliest Christians and all the church fathers, even if there was some disagreement as to the precise nature of that deity. The Council of Nicea did not debate over whether Jesus was divine or only mortal, but whether he was coeternal with the Father. Still, Brown says it was by “a relatively close vote” that the Council of Nicea endorsed Jesus’ deity (233). In fact, the vote was 300 to 2…and the 2 dissenters were followers of Arius, the heretic (see sheet from Who’s Who in Christian History regarding Arius).

[1] The Da Vinci Code: fact or fiction?, p. 13.

The Priory of Sion

DaVinci Code: Fiction and Fact explanations:

(following Paul Maier’s explanations in "The DaVinci Code: Fact or Fiction")

“Why is The Passion excoriated and The DaVinci Code extolled? Why are Gibson’s motives denounced and Brown’s dignified? Why is Christ’s passion referred to as a “repulsive, masochistic fantasy” and his supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene touted as a researched material fact? The answer may surprise you. It is not just that in our increasingly secularist culture it has become politically correct to cast aspersions on Christ and the church he founded. It is because of a great reversal of values. Fiction – such as the notion that Christianity was concocted to subjugate women – is being cleverly peddled as fact, while fact – such as the deity of Christ – is being capriciously passed off as fiction.”[1]

(There is nothing new under the sun...see Isaiah 5:13, 20)

So, let’s take a look at the fiction and facts of this story: The DaVinci Code (as understood from historian Dr. Paul Maier's book: "The Da Vinci Code: fact or fiction?")

Fiction #1

The Priory of Sion: supposedly a secret European society founded in Jerusalem in 1099 by a crusading French king named Godefroi de Bouillon. It’s purpose, according to Brown, was to preserve a great secret that had been handed down from generation to generation of Godefroi’s ancestors since the time of Christ. Hidden documents buried beneath the ruins of the Temple in Jerusalem allegedly corroborated this secret. What was the secret? Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene, which resulted in a daughter named Sarah. Jesus’ bloodline supposedly continued through the Merovingian dynasty of French kings and survives even today. They exist to keep a watchful eye over the descendants of Jesus and Mary and wait for the perfect moment to reveal the secret to the world.

FACT

The “Priory of Sion” was actually registered in France in 1956 (google “Priory of Sion” and see site for “Priory of Sion Hoax” for more in depth info). The “Priory’s” first objective is to position itself in the mind of an unknowing public as the supreme Western esoteric organization. It dreams of utilizing that constituency in a synarchy-like fashion to promote its hybrid agenda of right-wing politics and turn-of-the-century esoteric teachings. It does not represent the real teachings of any positive esoteric order. It is materialistic, obsessed with attaining influence, and has fabricated documents without regard for any ethical considerations. It’s program is to manipulate people through lies in order to promote itself. The Priory’s role in this novel is supposedly “proven” by a cache of documents that were discovered in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. These documents really do exist, but they were planted there by a person named Peirre Plantard. In fact, one of Plantard’s henchmen admitted to assisting him in the fabrication of these materials, including the genealogical tables and lists of the Priory’s grand masters – all trumpeted as truth in The DaVinci Code. Plantard’s hoax was actually exposed in a series of French books and a BBC documentary in 1996, but this news – fortunately for Dan Brown – is reaching our shores only at glacial speed. Plantard turned out to be an anti-Semite with a criminal record for fraud, while the real Priory of Sion is a little splinter social group founded half a century ago. The most important strand in the central plot of The DaVinci Code, then, is a total hoax. So much for the “Fact” Brown claims on his first page!

[1] Hanegraaff and Maier, The DaVinci Code: Fact or Fiction?, viii.