(With the DVD being released, I thought it might be a good time to re-release this fact sheet that I did on the book earlier this year. - Bob Pratico, Fides Quaerens Intellectum)

Dan Brown, the author, calls it “historical fiction” – meaning that while the characters and plot are fiction, “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” (p. 1)

Thesis: A secret society (“Priory of Sion”) was established around 900 years ago. The “Secret” they closely guard is that Mary Magdalene was really the wife of Jesus Christ and was chosen by Jesus to lead His church. She had a child by Jesus and fled to France. The descendants of Christ lived secretly protected by Priory of Sion. The Roman Catholic Church is destroyed if this “secret” is revealed and has thus covered it up for 2000 years. The emperor Constantine manipulated early Christianity to secure & remain in power. Leonardo da Vinci was secretly a leader of Priory of Sion and passed the “secret” in various art works (e.g., “The Last Supper”). Orthodox Christianity is a lie that has been created and perpetuated by the Roman Catholic Church in order to remain in power.

Key Allegations: 1) Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had children. 2) Our Bible is the construct of Constantine’s political whims. 3) Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false. 4) The church demeans women - God should be worshipped as god and goddess. 5) Jesus was “voted” divine at the Council of Nicea.

Facts: The book contains literally hundreds of historical errors. A few examples: The glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre does not have 666 panes in it; it has 673 panes. * Tarot cards were not a secret means of passing along ideologies banned by the Church; they were originally a game invented in the 15th century and were not associated with the occult until the 18th century. * The Romans did not originate the practice of crucifixion; Greek historians tell us the Persians first used it some 3-4 centuries before Christ. * Brown wrongly quotes Job 38:11 with 7 words - that verse has 17 words. * The Mona Lisa was not referred to by that name by Leonardo Da Vinci; it was first called that 31 years after his death. * The “divine proportion” of male bees to females is not the number Phi (1.618) but closer to 50x that. * There was no find of “trunks” of documents under Solomon’s Temple. * “Shekinah” is not the female equal of God in Judaism. * The derivation of the tetragrammaton (name of God) Brown gives is entirely wrong. etc., etc.

The documents attesting to the existence of the “Priory Of Sion” were proven fraudulent in a French court of law in 1993. There is absolutely no historical evidence for the assertions regarding Mary Magdalene being married to Jesus or having children by Him. Recognized authorities in the art world universally believe that the “hidden clues” to Leonardo’s secret faith exist only in the imagination of those looking to make a conspiracy theory plausible. The “Holy Grail” is a literary invention of the 12th century with no connection to Mary Magdalene. One of Brown’s primary sources demeans women in the worst possible way - the Gnostic “Gospel of Thomas”, to which the book refers, records Jesus as wanting to transform Mary Magdalene into a man to make her acceptable to enter heaven! Brown’s primary sources, the (Gnostic) Nag Hammadi documents are not “the earliest Christian records”; every book in the New Testament is earlier. The New Testament documents were all written in the first century A.D.; by contrast, the dates for the Nag Hammadi texts range from the 2nd to the 3rd century A.D.

Analysis: Brown’s theory about the origins of Christianity draws on Gnosticism, goddess worship and early heresies which he presents as the “true” Christian faith suppressed by the Church. The Da Vinci Code is a contemporary resurgence of ancient Gnosticism that has been effectively and repeatedly repudiated several times throughout church history.

The Council of Nicea met in A.D. 325. By then, Jesus’ followers had been proclaiming His deity for nearly three centuries. We have copies of the four Gospels that are significantly earlier than Constantine and the Council of Nicea. Although none of the copies are complete, we do have nearly complete copies of both Luke and John in a codex dated between A.D. 175 and 225—at least a hundred years before Nicea. Another manuscript, dating from about A.D. 200 or earlier, contains most of John’s Gospel. But why is this important? First, we can compare these pre-Nicene manuscripts with those that followed Nicaea to see if any embellishment occurred. None did. Second, the pre-Nicene versions of John’s Gospel include some of the strongest declarations of Jesus’ deity on record (e.g. 1:1-3; 8:58; 10:30-33). That is, the most explicit declarations of Jesus’ deity in any of our Gospels are already found in manuscripts that pre-date Constantine by more than a hundred years. Jesus’ original followers were routinely martyred for their belief that Jesus was God - a belief they would not recant even unto death. The New Testament canon did not result from a decision by Constantine. While the earliest listing of all the books in our New Testament comes from Athanasius in A.D. 367, there was widespread agreement on most of these books (including the four Gospels) by the end of the second century. Not until the heretic Marcion published his expurgated version of the New Testament in about A.D. 144 did church leaders seek to define the canon more specifically.

Summary: “Detailing all the errors, misinterpretations, deceptions, distortions, and outright falsehoods in The Da Vinci Code makes one wonder whether Brown’s manuscript ever underwent editorial scrutiny or fact-checking.” Paul L. Maier
Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History, Ph.D., University of Basel (1957), Ancient Near East; Ancient Greece; Ancient Rome; Christianity and the Roman Empire; Reformation Era.

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Bob Pratico
Fides Quaerens Intellectum
(my Sojourn blog)