I. GETTING TO KNOW THE DA VINCI CODE

What is the Da Vinci Code?
It is a best-selling novel written by American author Dan Brown in 2003, and now produced into a film.

What is controversial about the novel?
Through the use of fictional plot and characters, the author makes bold claims of revealing the true story about the origin of Christianity, suggesting that this is a story that the Catholic Church has been conspiring to cover up and suppress all these years. Brown's boldest assertion regarding the history of Christianity is that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and had children with her.

If the novel is fictional, what is so dangerous about it?
The danger lies in the blending of fiction and purported facts. In addition to the fictional plot that Brown develops, he claims to give accurate and well-researched information about history, art, and other fields. He parades the following claim before the story begins, so that the reader gets the impression that his assertions are true and reliable. At the beginning of the book he states:

FACT: All descrip-tions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." Brown sounds so convincing that many of his readers simply believe his assertions, due to insufficient knowledge of the Christian faith and a solid background in history and other fields.

Synthesis of the Novel:
The story opens with the murder of Jacques Sauni?, the curator of the Louvre Museum in France. The attempt to solve the crime brings together the main characters?Robert Langdon, an American symbologist and Sophie Neveu, a French cryptographer and granddaughter of the murdered curator. Langdon and Neveu are led through a series of clues, which Sauni? himself painstakingly plants before he expires. The clues point to the existence of a secret society, the Priory of Sion, which is the guardian of a well-kept secret. This secret is something that the Catholic Church is very keen on getting hold of, with the intention of destroying it. The events leading to the murder of Sauni?, who turns out to be the last Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion, are instigated by the Vatican in its attempt to get hold of the secret. The murder is carried out by a monk of the Opus Dei, orchestrated by no less than the bishop who is head of the personal prelature. What is this secret being guarded by the Priory of Sion and which the Catholic Church is seeking to destroy? It is this: Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene and had a line of descendants that could be found in the French royal Merovingian family.

        The Italian artist Leonardo Da Vinci gets dragged into the plot of the novel because Brown names him as one of the Grandmasters of the Priory of Sion, together with Isaac Newton, Boticelli, Victor Hugo, and other great names in history. Brown claims that Leonardo Da Vinci subtly inscribed in his paintings clues to the well-guarded secret. He cites in particular Leonardo's famous mural painting of the Last Supper, and suggests that the young and beardless apostle, who has always been identified as John, is actually a woman, that is, Mary Magdalene. Through another character in Brown's story, the English historian Leigh Teabing, Mary Magdalene is identified as the legendary "Holy Grail," that has been thought to be the chalice that held the blood of Christ. Teabing concludes that the "Holy Grail" referred to the womb of Mary Magdalene that carried the royal bloodline of Jesus Christ. It turns out that Sophie Nevue is among the last surviving descendants of that royal bloodline.

        The rest of the story tells of the Catholic Church's frustrated effort to get hold of the secret, and the protagonists' exciting quest for the tomb of Mary Magdalene through a series of clues carefully devised by Jacques Sauni? when he was still alive.

II. GETTING EQUIPPED TO ANSWER QUESTIONS
ON THE DA VINCI CODE

How accurate and reliable is Dan Brown's research?
Dan Brown's sources for his supposedly extensive research include such books as Holy Blood, Holy Grail; the Messianic Legacy; Templar Revelation; The Woman with the Alabaster Jar; and the Goddess in the Gospels. Scholars who have assessed these materials say that they DO NOT REFLECT SERIOUS SCHOLARSHIP and no history department in any decent university would include them in its syllabus. On the other hand, Brown HAS IGNORED MATERIAL THAT SCHOLARS RECOGNIZE AS RELIABLE SOURCES of information about what early Christians believed. Brown disregarded, for example, the witness of the 4 Canonical Gospels and instead relied heavily on the Gnostic gospels (e.g. The Gospel of Philip; the Gospel of Mary Magdalene) that written two centuries after the Canonical Gospels.

Exposing Dan Brown's Errors: When discussing the factuality of the Da Vinci Code, the word to keep in mind is "evidence." In the next pages, you will find a table where carefully researched evidence to disprove Dan Brown's claim to accuracy are pitted against his own statements. This shall guide us in giving our response to questions raised by the Da Vinci Code and in challenging those who have uncritically subscribed to Brown's ideas.

Dan Brown's claim/Our Response

1) ABOUT JESUS CHRIST
Brown says that the first followers of Jesus and the Christians of the first three centuries did not believe that he was more than "a mortal prophet" and "a great and powerful man."

Brown says that it was only in the Council of Nicea in A.D. 325 that the divinity of Jesus was first proposed and voted into existence by a "relatively close vote" among the bishops in the Council. Emperor Constantine endorsed the decision for the purpose of solidifying his power and the "new Vatican power base" of the Catholic Church.

Our Response
• The most primitive confession was "JESUS IS LORD" (Rom 10:9, Phil 2:11). Explicit and implicit evidence can be found in the Canonical Gospels to show that Jesus and his followers were aware that he was more than mere mortal (Mt 3:16-7, Jn1:1-3, 20:28, Mk 2:5-12, Lk 24:45-47 are just a few examples). We also have the testimony of many Christian writers between A.D. 100-300 (before Nicea) to the belief in Jesus' divinity (e.g., Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria).

• The Council of Nicea was not convened by Emperor Constantine to pursue his political agenda. It was a response to the Arian heresy that was causing disunity in the empire. Arius taught that Jesus was not fully divine but was less than the Father. As already explained above, the belief in Jesus' divinity goes back to the earliest days of Christianity. The Council of Nicea definitively declared the unique relationship between the Father and the Son and condemned the ideas of Arius.

        The "relatively close vote" of the bishops in the Council is purely a figment of Brown's imagination. Only 2 out of about 220-250 bishops voted in favor of Arius' position. Over 99% of the bishops upheld the belief that the Son was equal with the Father and of the same divine substance as the Father.

        Constantine, while actively involved in the Council, knew that his place was not to be a theologian or scholar, but merely to help facilitate a structured and productive theological gathering.

2) ABOUT MARY MAGDALENE
• According to Brown, Jesus taught that Mary Magdalene, not an inanimate chalice, is the 'Holy Grail'. Leonardo Da Vinci depicted her as such in The Last Supper. The quest for the Holy Grail is the search, not for the chalice used at the Last Supper, but for the tomb of Mary Magdalene.

• Brown further claims that at a very early date the Church launched a "smear campaign" against Mary Magdalene, slandered her name by labeling her a 'prostitute' in order to erase the evidence of her powerful family ties. The Church suppressed her name and memory for hundreds of centuries.

• Drawing from some feminist writings, Brown says that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and had children with her. After Jesus' death, Mary fled to France, a woman persecuted by the Catholic Church.

• Brown claims that Mary Magdalene was of royal lineage, having hailed from the tribe of Benjamin. By marrying, Jesus and Mary Magdalene established themselves as heirs to Solomon's kingship.

Our Response
The idea of the 'Holy Grail' first appeared in medieval literature in the second half of the 12th century, in the poem by Chretien de Troyes titled Perceval or Conte del Graal. It referred to a large jeweled dish, which a later poet named Robert de Boron turned into the cup of the Last Supper. For Brown to say that Christ himself claimed that Mary Magdalene was the 'Holy Grail' entails an error in chronology by projecting back to the time of Christ an idea that was conceived much later - in the 12th century.

• Brown is obviously not aware that there are two Church traditions concerning Mary Magdalene. In the Eastern Church, she is distinguished from Mary of Bethany and the sinful woman in Luke's Gospel, each of them having her own feast. However, in the Western Church, the three figures have been harmonized in the person of Mary of Magdala without any slanderous intent. If the early Church leaders were truly determined to discredit Mary Magdalene or suppress her role in Christian history, they obviously did not succeed. She is mentioned a dozen times in the Gospels and hailed as the first witness of the empty tomb. By the 8th century her feast had been established. After the Blessed Virgin, Mary Magdalene was the most widely revered saint of the Middle Ages, having been honored with the title "Apostle to the Apostles".

• Ironically, many who argue that Jesus was a radical feminist who had no qualms about subverting conventional notions of gender and sexuality also argue that Jesus would not dare to stay unmarried because it would be against the custom and would set him in a bad light.

        The Church offers a far better explanation: Jesus was not married to Mary Magdalene, but he is the Bridegroom (cf. Mt 9:15; Mk 2:19) who has taken as his bride the Church. The theme of Christ as Bridegroom of the Church was prepared for by the prophets and announced by John the Baptist (Jn 3;29).

        The mythical marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene does not advance a deeper appreciation for the feminine, but destroys the truth about the covenantal union between God and humanity that has taken place in the marriage between Jesus and his true Bride, the Church.

        This assertion has no historical basis. It is unlikely that Mary Magdalene was of the tribe of Benjamin. Magdala was located on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, whereas the tribes of Benjamin and Judah resided in the south, on the west side of the Dead Sea.

        Not only is there lack of evidence for the political alliance resulting from the alleged marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, there would have been no reason for such an alliance. Jesus made it known that he had not come to establish an earthly kingdom or to overthrow the local Roman government. He came to conquer sin and death, not governments and emperors.

        Brown's argument seeks to undermine a key Christian belief about the nature of Jesus' mission and Kingdom. If Jesus were just a mortal prophet who married to re-establish an earthly, political kingdom, then he failed and Christianity is a lie.

3) ABOUT THE BIBLE AND CONSTANTINE
• Brown tells us that more than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, but only four were chosen, supposedly because they presented a more "godlike" Jesus. Emperor Constantine commissioned and financed a "new Bible" that left out "those gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits."

Our Response
• Brown's figure is an exaggeration. A scholarly research on the Lost Scriptures by Bart Ehrman mentions only a total of seventeen "non-canonical gospels" including the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Thomas. Contrary to Brown's claim, few of these works provide any concrete details about the "mortal prophet" Jesus. They instead portray a Gnostic Jesus who has little to do with the concrete world and who possesses few discernible "human traits." Again, Brown has it upside down: the four Gospels of the Bible are full of details about the human qualities of the incarnate Word, while the writings of the various Gnostic groups are mostly devoid of such descriptions.

4) ABOUT THE PRIORY OF SION
• Brown says that this is one of the oldest surviving secret societies on earth, with a well-documented history of reverence for the 'sacred feminine'. The society guards the "Grail Secret" of the Holy Blood, which refers to the bloodline or surviving descendants of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, as well as the precious bones of the Magdalene. The Priory is based in France and attracts powerful members from all over Europe, including prominent scientists, artists and writers. Leonardo Da Vinci presided over the Priory between 1510 and 1519 as its Grand Master.

Our Response
The Priory of Sion, as Brown describes it, did not exist. Brown borrows most of the ideas about the Priory from the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail. But the Priory of Sion that the book talks about is a modern hoax conjured up in 1956 by a Frenchman, Pierre Plantard and his tiny group of discontented right-wing, anti-Semitic monarchists. They forged the documents called Dossier secrets and planted them in French libraries to deceive people regarding the authenticity of the Priory. The fraud was widely exposed in the early 1970's in France. Therefore, there was no Priory of Sion for Leonardo Da Vinci to belong to or to hide secrets.

5) ABOUT LEONARDO DA VINCI AND HIS PAINTINGS
Brown makes the following statements about Leonardo Da Vinci:

• He was a "flamboyant homosexual"
• Leonardo was a "worshipper of Nature's divine order."

        The following are some of Brown's assertions regarding Leonardo's artworks:

        The Virgin of the Rocks ? Brown states that "the nuns" of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception gave Leonardo specific dimensions and themes for the painting.

        The painting is "a five-foot tall canvas." The novel describes Sophie pulling the painting from the wall and moving it with relative ease.

• The Mona Lisa ? Brown asserts that this is a portrait of Leonardo as a woman. He invokes here and Gnostic ideal of "androgyny", suggesting that the Mona Lisa is not male or female but is a fusion of both. Brown proposes that Mona Lisa's name is "an anagram of the divine union of male and female" ?the gods Amon and Isis.

• The Last Supper - Brown's insights into the painting come from the book The Templar Revelation. He asserts:

1) The "missing" chalice indicates that Leonardo is sending a hidden message about the true Holy Grail.

2) The figure to the right of Christ is Mary Magdalene, not the apostle John. This is evident due to the feminine appearance of the figure, as well as a V shape (the Grail, the chalice, and the female womb) and an M shape (Magdalene) in the composition.

Our Response
In a New York Times article titled "Does the Da Vinci Code Crack Leonardo?" art historian Bruce Boucher points out that most of Brown's statements are either dubious or incorrect.

• This statement is an exaggeration of a single episode of homosexual activity, which was only hinted at, but could not be proven. Leonardo's students believed it never happened.

• Leonardo undoubtedly had a fascination, even love, for nature, evidenced by his numerous sketches of landscapes, plants, and animals. But his fascination seems to have been devoid of a supernatural or religious element. Art scholar D.M. Field says that "Leonardo was not a very religious man, but he was not antagonistic to religion or even to the Church. And he was certainly no atheist." Alessandro Vezzosi, an expert on Leonardo says that, "Leonardo was severely critical of pseudo-sciences and the occult?astrology, necromancy, chiromancy, and alchemy," quite the opposite of Brown's portrayal of the artist.

• The truth is there were no nuns in the Confraternity. It was an all-male group, consisting either of brothers or laymen or a combination of both.

        The painting's actual dimensions are 1.99 meters X 1.22 meters wide. Sophie's action would have been a remarkable feat, for the painting at six-and-a-half feet high and in a wooden frame, is undoubtedly heavy and awkward.

• Vezzosi writes that it is "absurd" to think that the Mona Lisa depicts Leonardo as a woman. Most of the theories advanced by experts on the Mona Lisa rely far more on historical data than on unsubstantiated appeals to gnosticism, goddess worship, and a longing for an androgynous identity. The painting represents the ideal female portrait, according to most scholars. "Mona Lisa" comes from Mona, or "M'lady"?a common title of respect in Florence, Italy in the 16th century; and "Lisa," the wife of a merchant, named Francesco del Giocondo (hence the painting's alternate name La Gioconda).

1) Why should we assume that Leonardo would depict Jesus' cup as being different from that used by the apostles? In fact, an examination of the painting reveals that each of the figures, including Jesus, has a cup and a piece of bread before him. Jesus' cup is next to his left hand, his right hand raised over the bread. The Last Supper is a depiction of Jn 13:21-30. The passage focuses on Judas' betrayal of Jesus. Leonardo depicts the very moment following Jesus' statement. "Truly, truly I say to you, one of you will betray me." The scene is a brilliant and multi-layered portrayal of the apostles' reactions.

2) The identity of the three apostles to Jesus' right has never been in doubt. Art critic Leo Steinberg says that, St. Andrew (from left to right) "is followed by Peter, Judas and John, the three whose identity in the mural was never doubted." The grouping of John, Judas, and Peter is purposeful. Leonardo "clusters the three who are destined to play roles in the Passion. Judas betrays Jesus; Peter denies Jesus; John, traditionally identified as the "the disciple whom Jesus loved," was the only apostle to stand at Jesus' cross. There is no suggestion in Leonardo's sketches or writings that the young, beardless figure is Mary Magdalene. There is, however, evidence that it is the apostle John.

SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Olson, Carl and Sandra Miesel. The Da Vinci Hoax.
San Francisco, CA:
Ignatius Press, 2004
Video Production The Da Vinci Code Deception.
Grizzly Adams Production, Inc.
Internet site: www.jesusdecoded.com