W. Ward Gasque
THE
DA VINCI CODE
Harmless Thriller or Dangerous Hoax?
(Page 4 of 7)
Finally, 11 months after its release, Laura Miller wrote an article for the New York Times Book Review entitled “The Da Vinci Con,” in which she pointed out the author’s dependence on the notorious Holy Blood, Holy Grail and that the so-called Priory of Sion, was a hoax invented by a man who had pretensions to the French throne. Since Laura Miller’s essay we have seen a spate of new books critiquing DVC (see below).
Why should Christians be concerned with a book like The Da Vinci Code, which has no credibility with scholars?
(1) The book has been read by millions of individuals, many of whom have been duped by its fraudulent historical pretensions. It is likely to be read by many, many more during the next couple of years and perhaps for a decade to come. It’s only fiction, of course, even though the author’s prologue and his interviews with the media claim that the book’s historical allusions are accurate. To a historian, the claims are ludicrous. But to many people they seem as credible as any other claims they are exposed to on soap operas or talk radio.
(2) DVC reflects the Zeitgeist of the time in which we live. The part of the USA that stretches from the northwest Canadian border down to a hundred miles or so south of where Radix is published is the part of North America where people are least likely to be regular churchgoers. It is also a region where neo-paganism and new age spiritualities are flourishing, That’s why our unchurched friends are enthusiastic about DVC: it rings true to what they already believe. If we are to be effective in sharing the Good News with our neighbors, we need to know the culture in which they live and breathe.
(3) Dan Brown’s pretensions to careful research and the historical claims he makes are easily answered by historians:
—Contrary to what is suggested by DVC, the church from the earliest days nearly universally recognized Jesus’ divinity, as the New Testament bears witness. It was his humanity that was more frequently questioned. The Council of Nicaea was concerned about clarifying exactly what that implied.
—No one prior to the mid-20th century (Kazantzákis’s Last Temptation of Christ , 1955 and William Phipps, Was Jesus Married? , 1970) ever suggested that Jesus may have had a sexual relationship with or been married to Mary Magdalene. Neither the traditions and legends about Mary Magdalene in Ephesus (the earliest) or France (medieval) nor the Gnostic texts quoted in DVC say such a thing.
—Brown repeats the familiar factoid that during the Inquisition “the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.” Historians would put the number closer to 25 to 50 thousand women and men, most of whom were tried and executed by the state rather than the church. In some countries (e.g., Switzerland ) more men than women were condemned. There is also a lot of evidence that in some countries both church and state resisted such attacks. (See Ronald Hatton, The Triumph of the Moon: The History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, 2000.) It’s also worth noting that the neo-pagan assumption of a historical link between ancient and modern paganisms is also without basis in fact.
—Some feminist scholars claim that both pagan and Gnostic Christian traditions held women in higher esteem than did/or does orthodox Christianity, but that is questionable. Evidence suggests that ancient and modern non-Christian religions, particularly those dominated by a mother goddess figure (often served by thousands of temple prostitutes), have been much less liberating for women than virtually any form of Christianity.