Nov/Dec 2005

Deconstructing Da Vinci

By Robert Liparulo

There are those who say The Da Vinci Code is only a novel. Others point fingers and call the book blasphemous. Our proper response should fall somewhere in between.

“Did you know that Jesus Christ was considered a great teacher, but not God, until a group of fourth-century theologians said he was, and they did so only to protect the power structure of the church? Did you realize Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, who bore his child? And that the early, patriarchal church covered up this fact to minimize the importance and role of women in the church and society?”

A good friend presented me with these statements-more declarations than questions-after reading Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code. I wanted to laugh. After all, the book is a work of fiction, and as a novelist myself (my thriller Comes a Horseman releases November 3), I understand that reality is often distorted for the sake of story. Stephen King said it best: “Just give me enough research to lie well.” But then three facts occurred to me that made me bite my tongue: (1) Not everyone realizes that fiction is not fact; (2) the first page of The Da Vinci Code claims that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate;” and (3) the subject matter in which Brown chose to couch his mystery-the divinity of Christ-is too precious, too sacred to treat lightly.

If you've just emerged from hibernation, here's what CLIFFSNOTES® might say about The Da Vinci Code: Harvard “symbology” professor Robert Langdon teams up with Sophie Neveu, a Parisian police cryptographer, to decipher a trail of clues left behind by Sophie's murdered grandfather. (His death scene occurs in the Grand Gallery in the Louvre, near the Mona Lisa, where he pens a coded message on the floor with an invisible-ink pen, strips naked and positions his body as da Vinci's Vitruvian Man-all of which sets the brain-teasing tone for everything that follows.) Turns out the grandfather was the head of a secret society called the Priory of Sion, whose members included Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci. By solving a series of increasingly difficult puzzles, Langdon and Neveu discover that the Priory guards the Holy Grail, which is not a chalice, but is instead the proof of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's conjugal relationship. They also learn the Catholic Church has suppressed 80 Gospels that denied the divinity of Jesus, claimed that Mary Magdalene was a leader among the apostles, and celebrated the worship of female wisdom and sexuality.

Da Vinci Dernier Cri

Calling The Da Vinci Code a cultural phenomenon is no exaggeration. Sales have spiraled to more than 36 million copies. To put that figure into perspective, earlier this year total sales of the 11 books by popular Christian novelist Ted Dekker hit 1 million copies-a spectacular feat and one most authors would be happy to achieve over the course of an entire career. The Da Vinci Code has been translated into 42 languages and has spawned its own cottage industry of publications, including guides on how to read the book, rebuttals and counter claims. A movie based on the book opens in May of 2006, reuniting Hollywood heavy hitters Ron Howard behind the camera and Tom Hanks in front (the two made Splash and Apollo 13 together). Wanna bet it'll spark even more interest in Brown's wacky version of church history?

What attraction does The Da Vinci Code possess for all these people? “Religion and spirituality,” says Darrell Bock, a well-regarded Bible scholar at Dallas Theological Seminary and author of The New York Times best-seller Breaking the Da Vinci Code. “To average readers, it doesn't matter if Dan Brown has his facts wrong. They like that he makes Jesus into a great religious teacher, but not unique, not divine. He's like Buddha, like Muhammad. That makes the world safe and all religions similar. Then there are the people who want to know more about Christianity, the seekers. They think they are learning facts, and they don't know enough to realize that the novel is full of falsehoods.”

Confronted with the claims of the book, Christians who do know better typically respond in one of two ways. There are those who say, “It's only a novel.” That was me, which doesn't make sense, given that I've long believed that Christian publishers should take fiction more seriously. Hey, Jesus understood the power of story. Through parables, He conveyed godly wisdom that the people of His day could grasp, just as we can 2,000 years later. Something about lessons threaded through stories reaches us in ways sermons can't. Most of the ideas laid out in The Da Vinci Code (such as the “revelation” that the Holy Grail is really a holy and surviving bloodline) can be found in the nonfiction book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. The book was a best-seller in 1982 but came nowhere near the popularity of The Da Vinci Code, a testament to fiction's influence. So, if fiction can put ideas-good or bad, right or wrong-in readers' heads at least as well as nonfiction can, shouldn't we be as up-in-arms over offensive stories as we are over abusive propaganda?

Other defenders of the faith point fingers and call the book blasphemous. It's the way we responded to Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, a film that also addresses Jesus' relationship with Mary Magdalene. Not much came of that standoff other than some empty theater seats.

I suspect our proper response should fall somewhere in between. “Shrugging it off as fiction dismisses its impact, while name-calling only turns people off,” Bock says. “We need to use opportunities like this to engage the curious, to correct The Da Vinci Code's misinformation and to encourage people to think about Christ, the real Christ of the Bible.”

Da Vinci Doozies

As an action-suspense story, The Da Vinci Code is engaging and entertaining, if at times implausible. Brown's craftsmanship isn't on par with, say, Saul Bellow or even Dean Koontz, but he does know how to set high stakes, make the resolution time-critical and keep the reader moving from one chapter to the next. But Brown's storytelling skills are not what made the book a success, nor so controversial-except on one level: Brown is exceptionally good at giving his characters an authoritative voice. So when the book's Holy Grail expert says on page 234, “The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s [and] in addition to telling the true Grail story, these documents speak of Christ's ministry in very human terms,” readers are inclined to believe him. Never mind that the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, that they do not mention the Grail story and that they never speak of Christ or Christianity at all.

Good authors write with authoritative voices, whether their topic is handguns or lunar colonies of little green men. Brown's talent for this-along with his proclamations in the book, in interviews and on his Web site that the plot of The Da Vinci Code is based on meticulous research and facts-is what ignited both the sales and the furor. For this reason, the key to correcting the misconceptions of people who buy into Brown's revisionist ideas is to, first, know the truth and, next, point out where Brown went astray.

“Brown tries to establish himself as an art expert,” says Amy Welborn, author of De-Coding Da Vinci. “I think his strategy was to get readers thinking, 'Well, he did so much research there, he knows so much about art' that when they get to the church history stuff, they'll think, 'He must know what he's talking about here, as well.' Problem is, there's a lot of information about Leonardo da Vinci he got wrong, too.”

“In fact, Brown gets almost nothing correct about the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci,” says Carl Olsen, co-author, with Sandra Miesel, of The Da Vinci Hoax. “He misstates the size of one of the artist's paintings by a full 18 inches and has his characters referring to him as 'da Vinci,' when true experts always say 'Leonardo.' 'Da Vinci' simply means 'of Vinci.'”

In addition, Brown makes a big deal out of the soft features of St. John, seated beside Jesus in The Last Supper. Brown suggests that John is really Mary-proof of Jesus and Mary's relationship. In Leonardo's own Treatise on Painting, he explains that each figure should be painted according to his station and age. John was the “disciple Jesus loved,” and so was depicted as the “student” or “protégé,” commonly rendered by Renaissance painters as youthful, longhaired and clean-shaven.

Brown's game of playing bait-and-switch with his topics' veracity can work, then, not to support his theories, but to discredit them. If his Leonardo da Vinci research is so shoddy, what's to say his religious fact-finding was any better?

Of course, at the heart of The Da Vinci Code controversy is Brown's rewriting of Christian history. Here are three of the more egregious claims his characters espouse, apparently based on “facts” from Brown's exhaustive research:

Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered a child. Imagining Jesus as husband and father is not in itself sacrilegious. As Bock notes: “It would have merely reflected His engagement with His humanity. But there is no evidence that He did marry or have children. When Paul was defending his right to have a wife [as in 1 Cor. 9:5-6], he mentioned that Cephas [Peter] and Barnabas had wives. Had Jesus been married, Paul would have certainly mentioned such an important detail; it would have clinched his argument.” Still, Brown's premise required Jesus' parenthood, so that's what he included.

Nobody, not even Jesus' followers, believed He was divine until Emperor Constantine declared Him “Son of God” at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. The four canonical Gospels, Paul's epistles and extra-biblical testimony all indicate that Jesus was considered divine centuries before Nicaea. “The Council did nothing more than confirm a belief that was already predominant, that of Christ's divinity,” Welborn says.

For inclusion in the New Testament, the Council of Nicaea picked the four Gospels that best advanced their agenda of deception out of 80 available Gospels. “There were only a dozen to a dozen-and-a-half Gospels-that is, writings that tell Christ's story,” Bock says. “By the end of the second century, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had surfaced to the top of the ones used and accepted as accurate. The others had fallen to secondary use, if they were ever used at all.” So, again, the Council merely confirmed what had already been decided by worshipers many years earlier.

While explaining how the Bible as we know it came to be, a character from the novel named Teabing pulls out one of his favorite quotes, one he claims is from Napoleon: “The winners in history are usually the ones who write the history we read.” The Da Vinci Code is Brown's lunge for the brass ring of church history, and 36 million readers are cheering him on. For Christians to protect the truth of our heritage, we need to engage in serious conversations and make sure Brown's fans understand the difference between fact and make believe.

Robert Liparulo is a regular contributor to New Man.

CLIFFSNOTES® is a registered trademark of Wiley Publishing, Inc.

The Da Vinci Code Movie:

An Enigma Wrapped in a Riddle

Figuring out what The Da Vinci Code movie is all about is like deciphering one of the clues in the book. Very early in the film-adaptation process, producer Brian Grazer wanted to turn the book into the third season of his hit TV series 24. Dan Brown didn't want his book reduced to a mere TV show, so that idea was scraped. A few months later Sony paid $6 million for the movie rights-and hired Grazer as the producer for what Hollywood was calling “the biggest film adaptation since Harry Potter.”

For over a year, some of the silver screen's top names were tossed around for the starring role of Robert Langdon-Harrison Ford, Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman. In the end, director Ron Howard convinced his friend Tom Hanks to take the part. French actress Audrey Tautou (Amelie) plays cryptographer Sophie Neveu. Despite rumors that screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) would tone down some of the book's more controversial themes, fans know better. These concepts are so integral to the story, the movie would not be The Da Vinci Code without them.

Confirmation comes from Amy Pascal, head of motion pictures for Sony: “When you are lucky enough to acquire such a coveted property, job one is to be as faithful as possible to the book.”

Aside from speculation and an occasional official word that sounds like The Da Vinci Code party line, details about the movie are as rare as fragments of the True Cross. Will the movie make the Catholic Church look as dictatorial as the book does? Will Christ's place in the Trinity be challenged? Will Christians feel betrayed by an industry that tends anyway to treat our faith like it's a backwoods superstition? Stay tuned ...

Realms of the Supernatural

The Da Vinci Code can open the door to discussions about eternal truths and provide opportunities to suggest Christian alternatives.

Christians who are in an uproar over The Da Vinci Code may be missing an opportunity to share Christ and offer alternatives to seeking souls, says Bert Ghezzi, editorial director for the Strang Book Group, which recently launched a new Christian fiction line called Realms.

“The Da Vinci Code has upset a lot of Christians because of its false teachings. The ironic thing is that many of the folks who are outraged have also been praying for opportunities to witness to the non-Christians in their lives. They simply don't see that this scandalous entertainment title is providing them with the very opening they've been asking for,” Ghezzi says.

He suggests using The Da Vinci Code as a springboard. “The trick is to not be threatened by the falseness of a book or a movie but to go past that and get straight to the truth of Jesus Christ,” Ghezzi explains.

The mainstream and Christian market has been hungry for Christian fiction alternatives, one of the fastest growing sectors in the American publishing industry. In 1990, there were 500 faith-based fiction titles, but last year Christian fiction mushroomed to 2,500 books. In 2004, total sales of Christian fiction nationwide topped $2 billion.

Ghezzi says that Realms is unlike any other Christian fiction imprint and “radically out of the box: science fiction, supernatural thrillers, fantasy, time travel, spiritual warfare and pure speculative fiction,” he explains.

New titles from Realms include The Personifid Project, by R.E. Bartlett, a futuristic story of an artificial intelligence corporation that has developed the technology to allow people to transfer their conscienceless and their minds into an artificial body; and The Fall of Lucifer, by Wendy Alec, that chronicles the story of the three great archangels of heaven and how jealousy against the creation of man resulted in Lucifer choosing to rebel.

“It's thoughtful fiction that's more than just a fun read,” says Ghezzi, noting that the novels do not have foul language, graphic sexual content and gratuitous violence. “Realms will appeal to non-Christians as well as Christians. All of our novels, though, are founded on the Christian worldview.”

Learn more about Realms titles at realmsfic tion.com or by calling 1-800-599-5750.