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REEDINGS . . .
Notes on Books by Gerard Reed
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DECONSTRUCTING THE DA
VINCI CODE
In an era when large numbers of people take
seriously the propaganda promoted by filmmakers such as Oliver Stone and
Michael Moore, I guess it’s inevitable that spurious works of fiction, such as Dan
Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (New York:
Doubleday, c. 2003) could be pawned off as a source for historical
information about Christianity. For
over a year the book has remained at the top of best-seller lists, selling some
7 million copies in a year. Rave
reviews in the New York Times and Library Journal provided a
cover of credibility for it, and many critics applauded its “impeccable”
research and historical accuracy. It’s
been translated into dozens of languages, and it’s increasingly evident that its
popularity resides in its appeal to people’s religious hungers as well as their
thirst for an entertaining mystery.
As a story, The Da Vinci Code
includes murder, mystery, romance, and action—necessary ingredients for a
best-selling novel. The book begins
with the murder of a curator at the Louvre in Paris, Jacques Sauniere, who
leaves clues regarding his killer for his granddaughter (Sophie Neveu, a police
cryptologist) and a friend (Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of religious
symbology) to pursue. In time they
discover revelations in Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” and hidden “truths” in the
legend of the Holy Grail and traditions preserved by the Priory of Sion. They learn that Jesus married Mary
Magdalene, and their offspring have preserved and transmitted the great truths
that will infuse the new wisdom (Sophie means wisdom; Neveu means new)
proclaimed by the Mother Earth paganism Brown promotes.
Were it merely a mystery story, it
would not deserve careful scrutiny.
Indeed, many works of fiction begin with a disclaimer, indicating that
all characters and incidents are sheer fictions. But the first page of The Da Vinci Code asserts: “Fact:
The Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a
real organization. In 1975 Paris’s
Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets,
identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton,
Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci. The Vatican prelature known as Opus Dei is a deeply devout
Catholic sect that has been the topic of recent controversy due to reports of
brainwashing, coercion, and a dangerous practice known as ‘corporal
mortification.’ Opus Dei has just
completed construction of a $47 million National Headquarters at 243 Lexington
Avenue in New York City. All
descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this
novel are accurate.”
Dan Brown obviously invites readers to take his
novel as a depository of historical truth.
He reinforced this in several interviews, such as the one he gave on
NBC’s Today Show, where he asserted that “absolutely all” of the book’s
historical data are true. “Obviously,”
he said, “Robert Langdon is fictional, but all of the art, architecture, secret
rituals, secret societies—all of that is historical fact.” On ABC’s 20/20 Brown explained his
breakthrough to a new understanding about Christianity and acknowledged his
sense of mission to share it with the world.
He’s a propagandist for a new faith—one that replaces “patriarchal
Christianity” with an ancient “matriarchal paganism.” Enamored with “The Age of Aquarius,” he speaks for ‘60s generation, which has promoted
anti-traditional views of sex and marriage, education, ethics, religion, and
Reality.
Inasmuch as it is a work of
propaganda, one should preface any reading of Brown’s work with a warning: Reader Beware! The book is riddled with inaccuracies,
fraudulent claims, subtle misrepresentations, and blatant lies. We should heed Paxton Hood’s ancient warning: “Be as careful of the books you read as of
the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced
by the former as the latter.” So
beware: The Da Vinci Code is a
propaganda piece, written by a man seeking to destroy Christianity and replace
it with a religion more attuned to the feminist fantasies and postmodern
prejudices he favors. It’s a
popularization of esoteric notions found in books such as Elaine Pagel’s The
Gnostic Gospels, Lynn Picknettt and Clive Prince’s The Templar
Revelation, and Margaret StarBird’s The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine. Brown longs for the reestablishment of a
pagan cult devoted to Mother Earth, a sexually libertine and morally permissive
autonomous individualism.
***********************************
Taking seriously the claims set forth
in The Da Vinci Code, several critiques have been published by
first-rate Christian scholars. Of those
I’ve read, perhaps the most thoroughly-researched and blow-by-blow factual
refutation is The Da Vinci Hoax:
Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code, by two Catholic scholars,
Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, c. 2004).
Brown virtually equates Christianity with Roman Catholicism and errs
egregiously in many of his denigrations of that body. For example, he often refers to the Early Church as “the
Vatican,” long before that administrative center even existed! As committed Catholics, Olson and Miesel are
particularly adept at providing accurate and appropriate responses to his
“central concerns, which are ideological” (p. 33).
Brown clearly promotes the revival of
Gnosticism, a perennial ideology that promises an individualistic, generally
antinomian autonomy in discerning religious truth and following one’s inner
light. Gnostics, ancient and modern,
often envision God as androgynous--an amorphous blend of masculine and feminine
traits, who is frequently addressed as “Mother.” Modern Gnostics, like Elaine Pagels, celebrate some “hidden
gospels,” such as the Gospel of Thomas, which they insist was embraced by
significant sectors of the Early Church.
They further argue (with virtually no documentary evidence) that the
Early Church was fully egalitarian, led by female as well as male bishops,
until patriarchal “orthodoxy” imposed its fetters upon all claiming the name
Christian. In accord with Pagels and
her cadre of disciples, Dan Brown denounces the Christian Church for
suppressing the “sacred feminine” and hopes for its recovery.
This is most evident, Brown says, in
the Catholic Church’s “smear campaign” against Mary Magdalene, who, according
to his novel, is the Holy Grail.
According to Brown, Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ first and most important
apostle. They married and had
children. Following Jesus’ death, she
went to France, and her descendents clandestinely transmitted the message of
the real Jesus. But as Olson and Miesel
make clear, all Brown’s “facts” about Mary Magdalene are sheer fabrications,
largely dreamed up by a small group of feminists chatting with each other at
the Harvard Divinity School. Throughout
Church history, Mary Magdalene has in fact enjoyed high standing as a loyal
disciple of Jesus, but Brown’s portrayal of her derives from a few references
in apocryphal works and spurious speculations that have emerged only in recent
centuries.
Brown misrepresents Jesus as well as
Mary. He asserts, for instance, that
Christ was never considered divine until the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.)
declared Him such by a “relatively close vote.” In fact, New Testament documents amply indicate a confidence that
Jesus, the Incarnate Christ, was God’s Son.
The earliest Christian records we have, subsequent to the NT, shared the
view of Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 50-117 A.D.), who wrote: “There is one Physician who is possessed
both of flesh and spirit; both made and not made; God existing in flesh; true
life in death; both of Mary and of God; first possible and then impossible,
even Jesus Christ our Lord” (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 10). The bishops at the Council of Nicaea, by an
overwhelming majority (only two of more than 200 bishops dissented, which is
hardly the “relatively close” vote
Brown claims) simply affirmed the deeply embedded faith of the Church. Still more:
just as Brown misleads readers regarding the Council of Nicaea, so he
maligns Constantine, the emperor who called for it. According to the novel’s “historian,” Teabing, Constantine was a
lifelong pagan who manipulated the Church to attain his own ends. In the process he made Sunday the Christian
holy day, established the NT canon to exclude rival “gospels,” and imposed the
new notion that Jesus was fully divine.
Few of Brown’s assertions regarding Christ have historical merit, though
many naïve readers apparently take them as true.
Olson and Miesel carefully investigate
one of the book’s main themes, the secret messages of the Priory of Sion,
obviously based upon a 1982 book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, “co-authored
by Michael Baignent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. So fundamental is this book to The Da
Vinci Code that Dan Brown borrowed two of the author’s names for his
character Leigh Teabing” (p. 223). Two
of the authors are Masonic historians, and they promote the story of Mary
Magdalene, whose alleged descendents became part of France’s Merovingian
dynasty and then the Knights Templar, whose secretive operations have continued
over the centuries. Much of this
material depends upon Les Dossiers Secrets, a collection of documents in
the Bibliotheque Nationale purporting to establish the existence of the Priory
of Sion. In fact, Olson and Miesel
show, the Priory of Sion is “a modern hoax conjured up by a Frenchman named
Pierre Plantard and his associates” (p. 234).
Plantard wrote some books and appeared on major TV networks as an
alleged Templar expert. Holy Blood,
Holy Grail relies extensively upon his works. In time, however, Plantard was exposed and forced to admit that
his “history” was a bundle of lies. Dan
Brown, of course, knows this. But he
perpetuates the lies because they serve his cause.
Olson and Miesel carefully,
persuasively document their refutations of The Da Vinci Code. Footnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an
index make this a most useful critique of Dan Brown’s hoax.
*******************************
A more engaging and philosophically
astute critique of Brown is provided by James L. Garlow and Peter Jones in Cracking
Da Vinci’s Code (Colorado Springs:
Victor, c. 2004). Garlow earned
a Ph.D. in historical theology from Drew University, and Jones has a Th.M. from
Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. They are fully qualified to dissect the
historical and theological claims set forth in Brown’s novel. (By way of full disclosure, I know the
authors and was part of a team that helped them prepare to write the
book). They understand that The Da
Vinci Code, on a deeply spiritual level, is a cunning attack upon
Christianity. It’s designed to destroy
the very foundations—Scripture, Tradition, Christ’s historical Incarnation and
Resurrection—that have supported the Faith for two millennia. Responding to fiction with some fiction of
their own, Garlow and Jones skillfully involve the reader by beginning each
chapter with an episode involving a modern university student struggling with
some of Brown’s allegations, taught as fact in her women’s studies
classes.
The authors particularly address “the
sacred feminine,” embedded in the worship of Mother Nature, one of The Da
Vinci Code’s central themes, in a chapter entitled “God’s Second Best
Idea.” Brown’s novel is, in fact,
deeply sexual in its message, for it “is ultimately—when pressed to its
not-so-logical conclusion—an appeal for free sex, separate from the parameters
established by God” (p. 35). The
novel’s popularity, one suspects, relates to its rationalization of sex under
the guise of “spirituality.” Indeed, one of Brown’s main criticisms of
the Christian Church involves her historic opposition to sexual sins. Shamelessly misrepresenting the Church, he
says she equates sex with “original sin” and thereby renders all sexual
behavior shameful. On the contrary,
Garlow and Jones argue that sex is “God’s Second Best Idea” and defend the view
that the very best sex is monogamous and heterosexual, gloriously in accord
with the ways of creation.
They further argue that it is the very
pagan religions celebrated by The Da Vinci Code, not biblical
Christianity, that have devalued women.
The matriarchal pagan cultures Brown celebrates never existed. They’re sheer figments of feminist
fantasies. And pagan religions, for all
their goddesses and priestesses, were marked by temple prostitution,
sex-selection infanticide, foot binding in China, and suttee (burning
widows in India). The alleged
authorities cited by Brown when, for example, he makes wild assertions
concerning the number of witches burned by the Inquisition, have been totally
disproved by careful research. Brown
parrots the radical feminist claim that the Catholic Church killed five million
female witches—a monstrous “gendercide.”
In fact, perhaps 50,000 witches (one-fourth of them male) were executed
in 300 years. Christianity, Garlow and
Jones insist, has done more for women’s rights and dignity than any other
religion, and both Scripture and Church history reveal how women have
flourished in Christian cultures.
Years ago Peter Jones attended a
graduate seminar at Harvard that included Elaine Pagels, and he understands her
real agenda: to reconfigure
Christianity in accord with Gnostic thought.
What Harvard professors were saying 30 years ago now informs a novel
read by millions! They, as well as
Pagels and Dan Brown, consider the Bible a purely human construct, not the
inspired Word of God. Thus Cracking
Da Vinci’s Code contains some careful apologetics in defense of the
traditional canon. Jones and Garlow
point out the remarkable similarities between the ancient heretic, Marcion, and
modern thinkers like Robert Langdon in Brown’s novel. Marcion discarded the Old Testament as well as “legalistic”
sections of the New Testament and promoted a lawless spirituality that
permitted the sexual license he personally relished. In response, Tertullian denounced him as “the Pontic mouse who
nibbled away the Gospels . . . abolished marriage . . . and tore God almighty
to bits with [his] blasphemies” (Against Marcion).
Whether or not Marcion was a Gnostic
we’ll never know for sure, but he certainly shared many Gnostic views. Peter Jones has written a fine monograph on
Gnosticism, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back, and this book’s chapter
comparing the Gnostic and New Testament Gospels is quite illuminating. Jones remembers how Elaine Pagels at Harvard
immersed herself in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts, whose most common message
“is the rejection of the Genesis creation account” (p. 166). She then published The Gnostic Gospels
and vaulted into an academic super-star status as a professor at Princeton
University. She considers Gnostic
Christianity a viable alternative to orthodoxy, and she portrays the Gnostics
as victims of a power play by the patriarchal bigots who established the
Catholic Church and insisted on doctrinal conformity.
Though once an evangelical, Pagels has recently
“found a spiritual home in the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, led by
a ‘woman priest,’ where she was able to reject the notion that being Christian
was ‘synonymous with accepting a set of beliefs’ such as the Apostles’
Creed. Pagels is also interested in the
blending of Christianity and Buddhism” (p. 169). Sharing her stance, influential feminists have celebrated the
“sacred feminine” and find solace in occult texts, women’s diaries and communal
experiences. They—and Dan
Brown—celebrate the ecstatic pagan mysticism featured in various Goddess
cults. Many radical feminists hunger
for “’the Neolithic, pagan, matriarchal perception of the sacred universe
itself’” (p. 203). Ancient goddesses
such as Isis, Asherah, and Cybele illustrate the perennial allure of the “Great
Mother.”
“The religious worldview of The Da Vinci Code
celebrates the soft, inclusive womb of the Goddess, from which everything
emerges and to which it all returns” (p. 224).
The Goddess cults have recently proliferated in America, making
incursions into allegedly Christian circles.
One of Hillary Clinton’s advisors in the 1990s, Jean Houston, “believes
our society needs to be rebuilt through the myth of the goddess Isis and her
consort Osiris” (pp. 204-205). The
Pilgrim Press, the publishing arm of the United Church of Christ, published (in
1999) a book by a “theologian/pagan priestess, Wendy Hunter Roberts, Celebrating
Her: Feminist Ritualizing Comes of Age,
which says: “’Deep within the womb of
the earth lies a memory of sacredness nearly buried under the weight of
patriarchy. … More and more women—especially those with Christian
backgrounds—are being drawn to this empowering, goddess-centered worship’” (p.
208). Mary Daly, longtime professor of
theology at Boston College and one of the founders of “Christian feminism,” has
lately abandoned Christianity, but as early as 1973 she revealed her true faith
by declaring, in Beyond God the Father:
“’The antichrist and the
Second Coming are synonymous. This
Second Coming is not the return of Christ but a new arrival of female presence.
… The Second Coming, then, means that
the prophetic dimension in the symbol of the Great Goddess . . . is the key to
salvation from servitude’” (p. 209).
The choice we must make is simple and profound: either pagan monism or biblical theism. “Is God just Nature or is He the Creator of
Nature? Your answer to that question
changes everything you think and do” (p. 230).
To monists, everything is ultimately the same thing. To theists, as C.S. Lewis so wisely
declared, “God is a particular Thing.”
There is an otherness to God, the Creator of heaven and earth. He cannot be reduced to a “cosmic womb”
forever spawning small segments of itself.
Cracking Da Vinci’s Code is a most engaging and
analytically successful of the critique.
**********************************
Ben Witherington III, an incredibly prolific
professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, has published The
Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus,
Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, c. 2004).
He acknowledges: “We are facing
a serious revolution regarding some of the long-held truths about Jesus, early
Christianity and the Bible” (p. 11). He
also demonstrates the affinity between Brown’s novel and two previously
published works—Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982), and Margaret Starbird’s The
Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary
Magdalen and the Holy Grail (1993)—reminding readers “we’ve been down this
road before—twice! (p. 17).
He then selects some errors in Brown’s
novel—aspersions on the N.T. canon, claims regarding Constantine’s role in the
Early Church, celebrations of Mary Magdalene, denials of Jesus’ deity—and
provides scholarly refutations. For
Brown to suggest that Constantine played a role in establishing the New Testament
Canon ignores the fact that the New Testament’s four Gospels “were recognized
as sacred and authoritative tradition by A.D. 130” (p. 23), fully two centuries
before the emperor ruled! Brown’s
allegation that the Council of Nicaea “proclaimed” the divinity of Jesus “is
patently false” (p. 22). To allege, as
does The Da Vinci Code, that the earliest Christian records are
contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi documents “is so false
it’s what the British would call a howler,” says Witherington (p. 24).
What Brown “fails to grasp,” Witherington
notes, is “that early Christianity, like early Judaism, is not primarily about
symbols and metaphors but is deeply rooted in history, including events like
the exodus, the reign of King David and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus”
(p. 25). Careful reading of ancient
history reveals that the four Gospels are written in the historical and
biographical style of that era.
Comparing the Gospel of Thomas (a favorite source for contemporary
Gnostics) with the biblical Gospels reveals a world of difference! It’s the difference between a collage of
speculative notions and an integrated, factual position.
Though Witherignton’s treatise has value, it appears
as if he simply plugged in some previously written essays dealing with the
topics, since it seems curiously detached from The Da Vinci Code
itself. If one’s interested in
Witherington’s position on issues such as The Jesus Seminar (a highly
publicized Gnostic enterprise) this book is quite good. But it’s not really a meaningful discussion
of Brown’s novel!