Writers of fiction write best from personal experience. The more successful ones articulate their ideas, philosophies, advocacies, ideologies and yes, fantasies, through their main characters. They are often beguiled by their own phantasms.

        Author Dan Brown is no exception. He has perfected the formula that Truman Capote popularized in “In Cold Blood;” which explains why “The Da Vinci Code” has sold more than 60 million copies and counting, has been in the New York Times best-seller list for over two years now; and is in the process of being translated into German, French and Spanish. It rivals Harry Potter as a commercial success.

        Brown used to make his living as a teacher. Like all teachers, it seems that he is an advocate of the maxim: a healthy mind in a healthy body. The heroes in his books, Dr. Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor (“The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons”), and Dr. David Becker (“Digital Fortress”) are teachers with very high IQs, who are physical fitness buffs; with a low-profile but in unspoken ways, monumental egos.

        Christians who are outraged by Brown’s skyscraper tale about the alleged encoding by Leonardo da Vinci of Mary Magdalene as the “wife” of Jesus in the “Last Supper” must know that the story is a complete fabrication, what we Filipinos call, in deprecating, purposefully awkward English, as a “story telling lie.”

        I have a reproduction of the Last Supper (El Cenacolo) that I bought in Italy some years back. After I have read Brown’s Da Vinci Code two years ago, I immediately examined it closely. The face of the apostle John looks feminine because he was the youngest in a group of long-haired, bearded adults. If you consider that Jesus was 33 at that time, his apostles must be in the same age range, except John who looked like a teenager. But the matter is a non-issue because Da Vinci, who made preliminary sketches of his painting, clearly identified the apostle John in his drawing, which among hundreds of other drawings, was recently auctioned off in London by Soethby’s. In John 13:21-25 the apostle leaning on Jesus’ bosom was identified as John. Da Vinci’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is said to be a self-portrait of Da Vinci because he was gay, although the woman was also identified as the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, that is why the painting is also known as La Gioconda.

        The Priory of Sion, said to be a secret underground organization “founded in 1099” for the purpose of protecting Jesus’ “marriage” to Mary Magdalene and their bloodline through daughter Sarah, from whom the Merovingian dynasty in France supposedly sprung, did not exist until these very modern times (June 25, 1956) when a French con-man by the very apt name of Pierre Plantard registered (akin to SEC?) the organization in Annemasse, France for the main purpose of low-cost housing! Plantard, who “planted” forged documents known as Le Dossiers Secret de Henri Lobineau with Paris’ Bibliotheque Nationale, claimed to be descended from the Merovingian dynasty. He later admitted the forgery. He was also jailed for fraud. Well, so much for his “divine” pretensions.

        The Holy Grail being Mary Magdalene and not a chalice is a more imaginative take off from the book, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” by Henry Lincoln, Mechael Baigent and Richard Leigh. They sued Brown for plagiarism of their idea, which Brown admitted was only one of the books from which he drew the storyline. A British Judge, enamored of Brown’s anagram he concocted one of his own in his decision, dismissed the case. Immediately the trio’s otherwise ho-hum book jumped up in sales. One suspects that that was the fallback strategy of the suit all along.

        Against such a backdrop one must approach the Da Vinci Code, book and movie, with a sense of pleasure and humor. It also pays to have a strong faith if you are Christian and at least basic knowledge of the Bible and Catechism if you are Catholic. But if you are a nominal Christian, you are vulnerable.

        Just to give you a glimpse of how clever and ingenious a writer Dan Brown is, I will take you to his other super-thriller, “Digital Fortress,” and show you how Brown can whip up a little known fact into a whale of a tale. In it the hero, Dr. David Becker, a professor of languages, wrote his girlfriend, Dr. Susan Fletcher, the following innocuous note:

        Dearest Susan,

                I love you.

                        Without wax, David.

        Susan, a brilliant cryptologist with a doctorate in mathematics, was never able to decode “without wax,” hard as she tried. She pressed David to tell her, to no avail.

        Here is how Brown explains it on page 427 of “Digital Fortress” (St. Martin’s paperback edition, Feb. 2004):

        “But David knew he could never tell. The secret behind ‘without wax’ was too sweet. Its origins were ancient. During the Rennaisance, Spanish sculptors who made mistakes while carving expensive marble often patched up their flaws with sera – ‘wax.’ A statue that had no flaws and required no patching was hailed as a ‘Sculpture sin cera’ or ‘sculpture without wax.’ The phrase eventually came to mean anything honest or true. The English word ‘sincere’ evolved from the Spanish sin cera – ‘without wax.’ David’s secret code was no great mystery – he was merely signing his letters ‘Sincerely.’ (The Tagalog word sirá must have come from the Spanish cera too).

        So there’s your clue. Brown in The Da Vinci Code merely sculpted a statue of Jesus’ alleged “marriage” to Mary Magdalene. If you are a Christian, you should look at Brown’s statue as just that, a statue with or without wax. Even if you are a non-believer, you need only a small candle of enlightenment to melt down the wax in Da Vinci’s alleged code. The only marriage in the book that is authentic is the union of fact and fiction, of which Brown is an acknowledged master. The only fruit of that marriage is a revival of 2000 years of calumny against Christianity. The fact that there are now almost 2 billion Christians in this planet and only a handful of Gnostics speaks volumes about the greatest true story ever told by actual witnesses: that of the Son of God crucified to save man from original sin, and His Resurrection. The truth shall set you free.

        And as for the Holy Grail, haven’t you heard? Indiana Jones got it!