Thursday, May 18, 2006
"The Da Vinci Code" is fiction. It says so right on the cover of the murder-mystery thriller. That means the author, Dan Brown, made stuff up. But critics have at least 46 million reasons to want to set the record straight. That's the number of copies Brown has sold worldwide. The movie may play to an even larger audience.
The plot: The curator of the Louvre, Paris' famous art museum, has been killed. The investigation pulls in a Harvard professor who's an expert in religious symbols, and the murdered man's granddaughter, a cryptologist for the French equivalent of the FBI. As they elude a series of attackers, the pair learns the murder is tied up with an ancient conspiracy: Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child. And that a society exists to protect the descendants of that union. The conspirators included Sir Isaac Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci, who cleverly hid clues to the secret in his paintings. (Hence the title.) The plot is propelled by a series of clever puzzles based on famous works of art.
Inaccuracies: Books debunking "The Da Vinci Code" list many factual errors. They include: The glass pyramid at the Louvre has 673 glass panes, not 666. The Dead Sea Scrolls were written by Jews and say nothing about Jesus. They were discovered in 1947, not the 1950s. If the figure to the left of Jesus in "The Last Supper" is really Mary Magdalene, as the book claims, then Leonardo left out an apostle. If it's really John, as most art historians claim, Leonardo was neither the first nor the only artist to paint him as a beardless, long-haired young man. Brown's best "proof" of a romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene comes from the Gospel of Philip, one of the Gnostic gospels. But the only manuscript of that gospel is full of holes. The Priory of Sion, supposedly a European secret society founded in 1099, was "created" by a Frenchman, an anti-Semite with a history of criminal fraud, as a hoax.
On the Net: Some Web sites to visit include the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Web site, www.jesusdecoded.com; Opus Dei, the Catholic organization portrayed in the book, offers www.opusdei.org self-punishment; Christianity Today magazine, ChristianityToday.com; the Catholic Information Network, www.cin.org/; Science and Theology News at www.stnews.org/index.php; and Decent Films Guide, www.decentfilms.com.