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Question 108 from TLJ, United Kingdom
Is the Christian response to the Da Vinci Code actually detrimental in that it’s giving extra publicity to it?

Question 109, from JG, United Kingdom
In The Da Vinci Code the author says that Jesus married Mary Magdalene. My question is not did he marry, but if he had, would it theologically have affected our salvation. I was wondering what you think about this question. My church is up in arms about this. Please help.

Whatever one’s views on The Da Vinci Code, it seems as if the controversy around it will not die down, despite the poor critical reception for the film version released this summer. Further controversy has been stirred by the court case in which the author, Dan Brown, was accused of plagiarising a number of ideas (Brown was later acquitted).

Opinion within Christian circles seems to be mixed. There are those who dismiss the whole controversy as irrelevant, others who regard it as a positive sign of ‘spiritual hunger’, and still others who condemn it outright as ‘blasphemous’. Previous articles on freelance theology have highlighted the numerous historical inaccuracies as well as other significant plot omissions. But certainly, as with the campaign by some Christian groups against Jerry Springer – the Opera, it would seem that the more extreme reaction to The Da Vinci Code have increased its notoriety and given it more free publicity than its really due.

In a way, perhaps Christians do have something to be worried about in the success of The Da Vinci Code. Certainly, the National Secular Society thought so, when it publicised an opinion poll conducted by the Roman Catholic Church. Obviously, the NSS take a particular stance on religion, hence the way the following quote is phrased, but it does make interesting reading:

“But does the Catholic Church have cause to be concerned that its own fantasies are being superseded by someone else’s? Yes it does, according to a new poll published by the Church this week. The poll shows that people who have read Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code believe its version of events rather than the official Christian version. Two thirds of Britons who have read the book believe that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene, a claim rejected as “baseless” by religious historians.

Fans of the book are also four times as likely to think that Opus Dei, whose members include the Cabinet minister Ruth Kelly, is a murderous sect. Seventeen per cent of readers are convinced that the lay group, whose founder was canonised by the late Pope John Paul II, has ordered or carried out a murder, compared with four per cent of those who have not read the book.

The poll found that more than one in five British adults have read the book, which has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, and that a large proportion believe its central claims. Sixty per cent of the adults polled said after reading the book that they believed there was truth in the suggestion that Jesus had children and that his bloodline survives, compared with 30 per cent of those who have not read it.

Just under a third, 27 per cent, think that the Catholic Church is covering up the truth about Jesus, and the figure rises to 36 per cent among those who have read Brown’s novel.”

[Taken from the National Secular Society’s email newsletter Newsline in June 2006 – for more information see www.secularism.org.uk]

In the USA, the Barna research group have also been assessing the impoact of The Da Vinci Code. According to their research, roughly 45 million adults in the U.S. – that’s one out of every five adults (20%) – have read the book “cover to cover”. Barna claim: “That makes it the most widely read book with a spiritual theme, other than the Bible, to have penetrated American homes.”

Barna also note that critical responses form church leaders seem to have the opposite effect to that intended:

“The audience profile of the book is intriguing. Despite critical comments and warnings from the Catholic hierarchy, American Catholics are more likely than Protestants to have read it (24% versus 15%, respectively). Among Protestants, those associated with a mainline church are almost three times more likely than those associated with non-mainline Protestant congregations to have read the book.”

Additionally, Barna asked people about the perceived spiritual value of the book:

“Among the adults who have read the entire book, one out of every four (24%) said the book was either “extremely,” “very,” or “somewhat” helpful in relation to their “personal spiritual growth or understanding.” That translates to about 11 million adults who consider The Da Vinci Code to have been a helpful spiritual document.”

So, does that have an impact on what people actually believe? Among the 45 million who have read The Da Vinci Code , only 5% – about two million adults – said that they changed any of the beliefs or religious perspectives because of the book’s content.

“Before reading The Da Vinci Code people had a full complement of beliefs already in place, some firmly held and others loosely held,” explained George Barna, the author of numerous books about faith and culture. “Upon reading the book, many people encountered information that confirmed what they already believed. Many readers found information that served to connect some of their beliefs in new ways. But few people changed their pre-existing beliefs because of what they read in the novel. And even fewer people approached the book with a truly open mind regarding the controversial matters in question, and emerged with a new theological perspective. The book generates controversy and discussions, but it has not revolutionized the way that Americans think about Jesus, the Church or the Bible.”

But George Barna does add the following salient point: “On the other hand, any book that alters one or more theological views among two million people is not to be dismissed lightly. That’s more people than will change any of their beliefs as a result of exposure to the teaching offered at all of the nation’s Christian churches combined during a typical week.” [All quotes and research taken from www.barna.org]

The big question that Christians need to address is why a novel would have any effect on what people believe. One explanation, for which credit must go to Brother Bruno Clifton OP, is that books, by their very nature, carry a certain authoritative weight. There is a power in the written word, which isn’t present in cinema or television. It may be that the recent big screen version proves to be the book’s undoing, as the film was generally held to be unconvincing nonsense.

However, something that is written down is deemed to be more important and trustworthy. Dan Brown plays on this, as Stephen Tomkins pointed out in Third Way magazine: “…the very first word of the book is ‘FACT’, and Brown explicitly claims that the historical background is true.” No wonder then, that Tomkins goes on to say: “I have heard an appalling number of people talk about what they have learnt about the history of Christianity from The Da Vinci Code.” His explanation is that: “In truth, we know that all fiction contains fact, and we learn from it. Our knowledge of Victorian London is Dickensian (and less happily so is our version of the French revolution); we know about heroin from Irvine Welsh, Asperger’s from Mark Haddon, regency manners from Jane Austen, police procedure from The Bill. It is perfectly possible for fiction to tell the truth and for fiction to lie.” [Third Way, Summer 2006, p.30]

That last comment of Tomkins’ is crucial. While it does not benefit Christians to be ‘outraged’ by a fictional work that borders on ‘blasphemy’, it is also important that Christians stand up for truth, even in fiction. The Constantinian era of church history is well-documented. The canons of of the Council of Nicaea have been preserved, not just in ‘official’ records, but by opponents of the Nicene Creed as well. The central premise of The Da Vinci Code – that Jesus’ divinity was decided at a vote at Nicaea – is either unfathomable ignorance or a deliberate lie. Perhaps Christians should give Dan Brown the benefit of the doubt, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be corrected for his mistakes.

However, moving on to the question regarding the theological significance of Jesus being married, this is one of those ‘if’ questions that is interesting as a ‘thought experiment’, even if it has little practical value. One would assume that if Jesus had been married, then that would have been part of God’s pre-ordained plan of salvation and our theology would be slightly different accordingly. Certainly there wouldn’t have been the emphasis on celibacy in the early church, which then influenced the adoption of celibacy by the medieval catholic priesthood.

Alternatively if Jesus’ life, death and resurrection were not predestined, then maybe marriage was a possibility. Again, how much of a difference it would make is a bit of a moot point. It would be interesting, if Jesus truly did experience every human experience, to know how he would have reacted to possible domestic disharmony and marital conflict. The gospel accounts do record at least one instance of Jesus resolving a domestic dispute (see Luke chapter 10, verses 38-42) – so presumably, he knew how to handle familial arguments.

One other knock-on effect would be that, if Jesus had been married, it would eliminate the ‘church is the bride of Christ’ metaphor that seems very popular in some churches at the moment. It’s up to the individual Christian to decide whether that would be a bad thing, or not.

Thanks for your questions TLJ and JG.

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Hello, I came across your site and I found it very useful. But, I couldn’t find one answer, I searched all over the internet but didn’t find any luck. Could you please tell me how the Da Vinci Code affected/influenced Western thought? I hope you can help me.

There is already an item on freelance theology about The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (click on the Books category). In terms of this question, the book has had very little impact on Western academic thought because it is a poorly researched detective novel that repackages some old, unproven and historically dubious ideas as part of its storyline.

The Da Vinci Code has of course proved very popular in terms of book sales and, with a film dramatisation being released next year, that popularity is probably set to continue. However, while it has sparked interest in the history of Christianity, a cursory glance at the contemporary features of the book indicates that this is a work of fiction. For example, the Catholic organisation Opus Dei, cast as villains in the novel, do not have monks, and the real Westminster Abbey does not have metal detectors at the doors.

Given the lack of contemporary accuracy, it is telling that the author shies away from questions about the accuracy of his research. Despite an assertion of truth on the introductory page, most of the ‘revelations’ concerning Jesus and Mary Magdalene are old ideas borrowed straight from a book published in 1982 called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The authors of that book are now reportedly suing Brown for borrowing their ‘research’ without asking permission. Incidentally, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was dismissed as fringe nonsense back in the 1980s. Other parts of The Da Vinci Code, including the description of the discussions at the Council of Nicea and the assertion that the Emperor Constantine rewrote the Bible to ‘prove’ Jesus was divine are laughable in the extreme and betray a complete lack of historical knowledge.

The success of The Da Vinci Code is undoubtedly because it challenges conventional religious norms and established religion. As such, its popularity is telling, revealing that despite centuries of scholarship the sensational and novel (i.e. new) grabs the imagination of people, who are willing to accept fiction as fact for no other reason than that they want to.

Thanks for your question, KR.

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, if you believe the hype, is a publishing phenomenon. It has ruffled a few feathers in the Christian publishing trade as well –the religious section of Borders Bookshop in Union Square, San Francisco has six books disproving The Da Vinci Code on display. So, why all the fuss about a work of fiction?

Well, for one thing, Dan Brown states rather a lot of the fiction as absolute fact. Scholars have been quick to pick up on the obvious discrepancies in his book (lumping the Dead Sea Scrolls in with early Christian non-canonical ‘gospels’ on page 317 being a good example). But the real outcry has come over the central theme of the story – that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and belonged to a fertility-cult that worshipped the ‘sacred feminine’ or fertility-goddess, that they had a child and subsequent generations of the Messiah’s blood-line, coded as the ‘holy grail’, have been protected by secret society ever since.

What Brown has done quite well is take some of the frankly wacky ideas from the fringes of scholarly research and try and work them into a coherent whole. He dresses much of it up in ‘symbology’ – revolving around imagery in Leonardo Da Vinci’s paintings, much of which has been covered in quasi-historical New Age literature before. What he has not done is critique the ‘hidden meanings’, disregarding the fact that, as in Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code, if you look hard enough for something that you know must be there, then you will probably find it.

The Da Vinci Code could be dismissed as nothing more than a poorly-researched thriller, but the fact remains that there are people who will use this book as a basis from which to critique Christianity. By selectively promoting a fringe view and by omitting key aspects of the ‘mainstream’ story, Brown cleverly manipulates any readers without an understanding of early Christianity into thinking that somehow they have been misled.

Some errors and omissions
[This is not a complete list, just the most annoying and obvious ones]

Error #1
Brown repeats throughout the book that the Emperor Constantine’s new official church wanted to excise Mary Magdalene from the story. He alleges that a deliberate campaign was waged against proponents of the ‘truth’, so the followers of Magdalene went underground. The real truth can be found in the books that Constantine tried to ban: the ‘Gnostic’ gospels.

In fact, there are virtually no references to Mary Magdalene in the writings of the earliest Christians, Gnostic or not. Constantine only declared Christianity to be the official religion in 313, by which time there were several types of Christianity around, many sects outside the Roman Empire (e.g. Armenia, outside the Imperial borders was the first official ‘Christian country’). If Brown’s hypothesis about Mary Magdalene had ever been regarded as true, then it would have survived somewhere. For Christianity to be heterodox, yet there be no reference anywhere to the belief that Jesus and Mary produced a Messianic heir, is an indicator that it did not happen. It is not even listed as a heresy in ancient texts that list all the ‘false’ beliefs doing the rounds. Contrary to the exaggerated claim on page 316 there simply were not “thousands of books chronicling His life as a mortal man”.

Most of the ‘gospels’ that Brown quotes from are of doubtful provenance. Some even date from after the time of Constantine. Most of these Gnostic texts relate to hugely complicated belief-systems, whereby the divine spark that exists in all humans can be liberated from its fleshly material prison through secret knowledge ‘gnosis’. Very few of them have any concrete information about Jesus’ life.

On page 331, the best ‘alternative history’ that Brown can find, the ‘Gospel of Philip’, is introduced. In this ‘lost gospel’, Mary Magdalene is described as “the companion of the Saviour”, whom he kissed on the mouth. But what Brown leaves out is that the ‘Gospel of Philip’ was found in fragments. The word translated as ‘mouth’ is one that is missing and has been guessed at by interpreters – it might also be ‘head’. Brown’s characters go on to explain the text by saying that the Aramaic for ‘companion’ often meant ‘spouse’. That may be true but it is an utterly irrelevant point. The ‘Gospel of Philip’ was found in Nag Hammadi in Egypt and was written in Coptic, not Aramaic. There is no evidence that it was ever translated from an Aramaic original.

‘Several other passages’ are alluded to, but conveniently not quoted, before the ‘Gospel of Mary Magdalene’ is quoted on page 333. In this section Peter is criticising Mary and Levi sticks up for her, saying that Jesus might have told her secret stuff ‘because he loved her more than us.’ Two things need to be said about this. Firstly this passage has nothing to do with the ‘sacred feminine’; the complete passage is about complicated Gnostic cosmology that ‘Mary’ is presenting to the other disciples. Secondly, the conflict with ‘Peter’ may be an allusion to conflict with the Petrine tradition centred on Rome, but Levi vouching for Mary is about the authority of this gospel against the accepted canon, not about the real Mary Magdalene’s authority or otherwise in the post-resurrection Christian community.

Error #2
On page 315 of The Da Vinci Code, Brown has one of his characters reveal that it was only at the Council of Nicea in 325AD, that Jesus was declared “Son of God” and that his divine status was the result solely of the vote. Before that he was considered human.

Anybody who has ever studied the formation of the Christian creeds will know that the statements found on page 315 are ignorant in the extreme. The debate at Nicea was not about Jesus’ divinity compared to humanity at all. It was a debate between those who viewed Jesus as being the very same nature as God (‘homoousios’/ consubstantial/ literally: ‘of the same stuff’) and those who wanted to identify Jesus as the first created being, the ‘Logos’ or ‘Wisdom’, who in turn created the world. This slightly lesser form of divinity has been identified with Arius, and is thus called Arianism, although really it is a Christianising of Greek philosophical thought, merged with Gnostic ideas.

Jesus divinity was never questioned at Nicea. The debate was over the level of divinity that should be ascribed to him.

Error #3
In a couple of places, Brown hints that ‘Jehovah’, the Old Testament name of God, was formed by merging the names of pre-OT male and female deities (‘Jah’ and ‘Huvah’). Elsewhere, he refers to ‘Shekinah’ as a possible female consort of Jehovah, who was later edited out as the Jewish religion became monotheist.

‘Jehovah’ as a name for God was formed by merging two words, but not in the way Brown suggests. The four-letter name of God revealed to Moses, known as the Tetragrammaton, transliterates into English as YHWH (often referred to as Yahweh). Because the earliest Hebrew texts contain no vowel sounds the exact pronunciation is unknown. The revealed name of God was considered holy and saying it aloud was blasphemy under Jewish law (an over-literal interpretation of the third of the Ten Commandments). So a person reading out the Torah or other holy scriptures would say the word ‘adonai’ meaning ‘lord’. When vowel sounds were added to the Hebrew alphabet, in the form of dotted markings above the letters, the vowels for adonai (a,o,a) were added to YHWH, giving the word YaHoWaH. Because J and V are interchangeable with the Hebrew Yodh and Waw respectively, this became Jehovah in the early English translations of the Bible. ‘Jehovah’ does not exist as a word in the original Hebrew and it certainly did not come into existence by merging the names of two other Gods.

‘Shekinah’ is the Hebrew word for ‘Glory’, which does have an almost tangible nature to it in the Old Testament. ‘The Glory of the Lord’ affects people, is visible, overwhelms those who see it etc. Like the feminine-gendered Wisdom found in the book of Proverbs, ‘Shekinah’ is something that emanates from God. Referring to it as ‘she’ would be a mistake, because as in many languages, just because a thing has feminine gender does not mean it has personal status.

Omission #1
The central thrust of The Da Vinci Code is to assert the loss of the original ‘sacred feminine’. There is much truth in the list of pagan symbols and activities that were taken over and Christianised. However, the idea that Jesus was somehow actively promoting the religion of the Goddess is un-provable nonsense.

Jesus, as a first-century Jew, would have had nothing to do with paganism. What Brown fails to tell the reader is that Judaism was unflinching in its avoidance of syncretism and pagan notions of Goddess-worship would not be tolerated among Jews in first century Palestine. The reason there were moneychangers in the Temple courts was because the graven image of Caesar’s head on the reverse of Roman coins was considered idolatrously offensive to Yahweh and so could not be allowed in the Temple vaults. Worshippers had to excahnge their idolatrous coinage for ‘holy’ money – at inflated rates. The Old Testament history of Israel is one of Yahweh-worship in conflict with fertility cults (that’s why Baal had altars, but the goddess Asherah had ‘poles’ – think about it!). The suggestion that Yahweh worship was originally one of these fertility cults has no basis.

Omission #2
Given that The Da Vinci Code is about the survival of Goddess-worship/the ‘sacred feminine’, despite the persecutory attention of the Church, it seems very strange that no mention is made at all of the Roman Catholic cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Extreme proponents of Mariolotry as it’s sometimes called, refer to her as the Queen of Heaven (which, incidentally, is an ancient pagan term) and want to see her officially declared as co-redemptrix with Christ. So far the Pope has refused to do this. For Brown to fail to include even a passing reference to the Blessed Virgin indicates that whatever does not fit with the story has been conveniently placed to one side.

Conclusions
This sort of thing is not new. Every so often a different version of this idea will come out. It’s the theological version of the JFK conspiaracy theory. But now they say there were no shots fired from the grassy knoll and the official version of events may have been true after all. It seems that despite the weight of scholarship – from all wings of the church and even from people with no faith at all – there will still be those who believe ‘the truth’, even when it’s so obviously made up.