Dan Brown: The Da Vinci Code

Written: 2003
Read: April 2006

I just finished reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. It is a real page turner. Just when you think you have it figured out, Brown throws you yet another surprise. You find yourself saying, “What!!???” every ten or twenty pages. I did not like the ending, the last page or two, but the rest of the book was marvellous.

It comes out as a movie next month starring Tom Hanks. It should be excellent: it is a good book and Hanks is a good actor. But I doubt I will see it: very few films are any good after you have read the book. Too much is left out and you know how it ends. That is why I have never seen the Lord of the Ring films, as great as they seem to be.

The book is about the search for the Holy Grail. Most suppose that the Holy Grail is the cup that Jesus drank out of at the Last Supper, but in this book it is not something that ordinary. It is a secret that has been buried for two thousand years and that, if it came to light, would destroy the Church.

It is hard to read this book and not wonder how much of it is true?

I know next to nothing about the Templars, the Priory of Sion or French kings, but where I do have some knowledge – like about the fourth century – I can see that Brown is making things up or, at best, twisting the facts of history to fit his fiction.

Key to his story is the idea that in the fourth century Constantine and the Church, in a play for power, made up the story that Jesus was divine. Before then Jesus was regarded simply as a great prophet, not God. But this is easy to disprove.

Paul’s letters and the gospel of John, which everyone agrees were written before 150, are very clear on Christ’s divinity. There are many other writings from before the fourth century that make the same point.

Regardless of whether Jesus was really God, it is clear that many believed it long before Constantine. And if you do not trust ancient writings, you can trust the martyrs, who certainly were not eaten by lions for the Historical Jesus.

Brown is right that in the fourth century there was a dispute about Christ’s divinity that Constantine helped to settle: The Catholics said Christ was both God and man, the Arians that he was something between God and man. But even the Arians – and the Gnostics! – did not regard him as a mere prophet.

Part of the attraction of the Code is the idea of a secret history that the Church is covering up. More on that anon.

See also:

• secret history
• Da Vinci Code movie’s first weekend
• Leonardo da Vinci