"Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?"
  – 1 John 5:5

Well, I've been putting it off as long as I could... but, with the heavily-hyped, blockbuster movie coming out this weekend, I just couldn't wait any longer.  I finally got myself a copy of The Da Vinci Code, and read it.

Some of you read the book a long time ago – I know, because we've talked about it.  Others may have seen the film already, or intend to see it.  Still others may have no intention of doing either one.  Yet, The Da Vinci Code is such a huge bestseller, and has provoked so much debate about the origins of Christianity, I figure it's high time I talked about it in a sermon.  If you haven't read the book, don't worry – I'm not going to give away any cliffhanger plot twists; and, if you have no interest in the book or the movie, I hope there's still something here for you, as well.

Even if there were no movie, the Da Vinci Code book itself is such a phenomenon, it's worthy of comment.  More than 60 million copies have been sold; worldwide: which makes it one of the biggest bestsellers in history.  The New York Times estimates the Da Vinci Code "brand" – meaning the original novel, plus a host of spin-off books, as well as merchandise – has raked in over one billion dollars in sales.  (That's more than the gross national product of some countries.)  Because the book itself is based on early Christian history – or, at least, on one interpretation of it – that in itself makes it something we all ought to pay attention to.

The only problem is, a great deal of the church history in The Da Vinci Code is flat-out wrong.  Dan Brown, who wrote it, says nobody should be upset by this, because the book is, after all, fiction.  Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and others associated with the film have said similar things.  Defending the movie, Tom Hanks told a London newspaper it's "loaded with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger-hunt-type nonsense.  If you are going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a huge-budget motion picture like this, you'd be making a very big mistake." ["Hanks blasts Da Vinci critics," by Tom Teodorczuk & Mike Goodridge, London Evening Standard, 11 May 2006.]

Of course The Da Vinci Code is fiction – but it's historical fiction.  One of the things most of us have come to expect, when we pick up a book of historical fiction, is that the background of the novel is more or less true – even if the story in the foreground is completely made-up.  Nobody who picks up Gone With the Wind, for example, thinks there really was such a person as Scarlett O'Hara: but every reader believes the author, Margaret Mitchell, when she tells us General Sherman burned the city of Atlanta.   A lot of the historical background in The Da Vinci Code is accurate, but there are also some real howlers in there, that Dan Brown presents as though they were absolutely true.  Brown's a wonderful storyteller.  He certainly knows how to keep the suspense level high – but he's built it all on a very questionable historical foundation (which I think is a terrible shame).  How much better his novel would have been if he'd done his homework!

Let me share with you a few examples.

First and foremost is the matter of Mary Magdalene.  Brown's got it absolutely right when he says that – contrary to church tradition – there's no evidence Mary was a prostitute before she was healed by Jesus and became one of his followers.  Mary Magdalene was the victim of a nasty cover-up by certain male church leaders, a century or two after she died.  These men just couldn't stomach the idea that Jesus had selected a woman to be one of his close associates – and not only that, it infuriated them that he showed himself to her before anyone else that Easter morning, as he rose from the dead.

Where Brown gets onto shaky historical ground is when he claims that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, and had children together.  There's absolutely no evidence for this, in any of the biblical documents.  Yes, there is a non-canonical gospel, called The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, that claims Jesus shared all kinds of secret teachings with Mary.  You'd think, though, that, if Jesus and Mary were married, such a book would not fail to mention that fact – but it says not a word about it.  Another discredited manuscript, The Gospel of Philip, claims Jesus and Mary had an especially close relationship, and that he used to "kiss her on the mouth" – but neither of these two books came remotely close to being considered one of the books of the Bible.

Brown would have us believe that these books – along with dozens of other non-canonical gospels that were circulating in the early church – fell victim to a conspiracy, led by the Roman Emperor, Constantine, who singlehandedly decreed which books would make it into the New Testament and which would be excluded.  That shows how little history he really knows: Constantine, in fact, had almost nothing to do with the selection of the books of the Bible.  It's true that the final decision to "close the canon" – to set the boundaries around the biblical collection – was made while Constantine was emperor, but in fact most of that work had been done before he was even born.

So what evidence does Brown present for a special relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene?  He looks at Leonardo Da Vinci's famous fresco, The Last Supper.   Brown imagines that the figure seated at Jesus' right hand, in that painting, is a woman.  While it's true that this figure, if you look at it close-up, is rather androgenous in appearance, it's quite a stretch to use a painting completed more than a thousand years after the Last Supper to trump any other historical record – and besides, countless generations of monks ate their dinner directly below this famous fresco, without any of them leaving a word of speculation behind that the person in the painting is anyone other than one of Jesus' male disciples.

Brown is also terribly confused when it comes to the Dead Sea Scrolls – that collection of ancient manuscripts discovered in 1947 in a remote cave in Palestine.  Brown claims, in the novel, they were discovered "in the 1950s" (wrong decade), and that – together with another set of ancient manuscripts, the Gnostic documents found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt – they "speak of Christ's ministry in very human terms."  In fact, the Dead Sea Scrolls never mention Christ at all: most of them are books of the Old Testament, and the majority of them were written before Jesus was even born.

Another glaring error has to do with the divinity of Jesus.  Brown claims that few people in the church considered Jesus to be the son of God – until Constantine and company forced that doctrine on the church in the fourth century A.D.  In fact, there are numerous references to Jesus' divinity in the Bible, not to mention in the writings of church leaders in the century or two before Constantine.  Brown pulls that claim out of thin air.

The hero of the novel, Robert Langdon – the character played by Tom Hanks in the movie – is supposed to be a professor of "symbology" at Harvard.  He's supposed to be an expert in symbols, religious and otherwise.  In fact, there's no such academic discipline as symbology.  Neither Harvard, nor any other major university, has such a chair on its faculty.  Yet a great deal of the book's argument hangs on the linking of various visual symbols, from art and literature, to form a set of logical stepping-stones.  These stepping-stones take the readers back, through the centuries, to uncover conspiracies and secret societies.  Yet the thing about visual symbols is that they afford a variety of interpretations.  Symbols suggest all kinds of meanings: and you can make them say pretty much whatever you want them to say – which is pretty much what Dan Brown does in his novel.

***

I've probably more than made my point by now, that The Da Vinci Code is historical fiction based on appallingly bad historical scholarship.  Tom Hanks had it right when he said it's "loaded with all sorts of hooey."  Granted, it's a real page-turner – lightweight, escapist fiction at its best – but that still doesn't account for its remarkable appeal.  Something about this book has touched a chord in the hearts of many.  That chord we can call "truthiness."

Anybody who, like me, is a fan of Stephen Colbert's show on Comedy Central, The Colbert Report, has heard that word "truthiness" before.  Colbert claims to have invented it (though in fact, it's been around a bit longer than his show has been on the air).  The American Dialect Society named "truthiness" its Word of the Year in 2005, and the New York Times recognized it as one of nine words defining the spirit of our age.

So what is truthiness?  It's something that sounds true – that, often, we desperately want to believe is true – but isn't.  Many so-called urban legends are examples of truthiness in action.  They sound so plausible, but they have barely a shred of evidence to back them up.

Truthiness can be dangerous.  One example is the statement many Americans were making after the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11, that Saddam Hussein was somehow responsible for those attacks.  Such claims flew in the face of all evidence: Saddam was a secular ruler, who was despised by Islamic fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden.  While our government may have toyed briefly with a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, they quickly dropped it as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq – there was just no evidence for it.  Our government stressed, instead, the possible presence of weapons of mass destruction and the sheer brutality of Saddam's dictatorship.  Yet, poll after poll of Americans – even years after the invasion — revealed a widespread belief that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks.  The idea was patently false, but it had that air of truthiness about it.

It's not only our side that falls victim to truthiness.  There's a persistent myth in the Muslim world – voiced most recently by the president of Iran – that the 9/11 attacks could not have happened without the active cooperation of the CIA.  Osama bin Laden may have planned the attacks, but the CIA sat by and watched as 3,000 Americans died – all in order to stir up bloodlust in the American people, so we would support the second Gulf War.  This, of course, is ridiculous – but, in the Muslim world, it has that air of truthiness about it.  Millions of people believe it.

There's a spirit of truthiness about The Da Vinci Code as well.  We all know there are plenty of people out there who love nothing better than a good conspiracy theory.  And – sadly – there are plenty of people out there, as well, who hold a grudge against the Roman Catholic Church.

Anti-Catholicism, in fact, has a long pedigree in American history.  In his book, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote, "I have been educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic, and sometimes, in consequence of this, I find it much easier to discover Catholic faults than Catholic virtues."  Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., once remarked to a Catholic colleague, "I regard the prejudice against your church as the deepest bias in the history of the American people."  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to describe anti-Catholicism as the last socially-acceptable form of bigotry in the United States.  Add to this deep-seated prejudice the current frustration about the role of women in the church, the inflexibility about remarriage after divorce, and anger over recent sexual-abuse scandals, and the conditions are just right for a publishing phenomenon.

Along comes Dan Brown, with his poorly-researched but gripping thriller about ecclesiastical cover-ups and conspiracies, about murderous monks and secret societies, and there are all too many people out there saying, "Way to go, Dan – bring it on!  I like your truthiness."  If only The Da Vinci Code were true – but even its author is frank in saying that the greater part of it is fiction.

***

In case you've been wondering when I would finally get around to citing some scripture, here it comes.  1 John 5:5 asks, "Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?"  Dan Brown would have us believe that the divinity of Christ is the creation of some vast conspiracy, headed up by a Roman Emperor – that Jesus was just an ordinary man, who was not raised from the dead at all, but was instead raised up, long after his death, by powerful men who needed to use his fame as a stepping-stone to their own power and glory.  As much as The Da Vinci Code talks about Jesus, it's not the real Jesus who appears in its pages at all.  It's not the Jesus of the New Testament, that's for sure.  It's the Jesus who inhabits Dan Brown's imagination – and the imaginations of the third- and fourth-rate historians he cites as his sources.

The Da Vinci Code would have us believe that cunning and treachery, stealth and secrecy, money and power are the things that conquer the world.  The New Testament teaches otherwise.  The one who conquers the world is Jesus Christ – but he accomplishes his conquest not at the head of a mighty army, but alone, on a cross.

It is said of the real Emperor Constantine – not the caricature in Dan Brown's book, but the real man – that, on the eve of an important battle in the year 312, he looked up at the sky and saw a cross.  Below it was the Latin inscription, in hoc signo vinces – "in this sign shall you conquer."  And conquer Constantine did, consolidating his power over all the Mediterranean world.  The next year, he promulgated the Edict of Milan, which ended the persecution of Christians and returned confiscated property to the church.

The sign by which Constantine conquered was not the imperial eagle – that bloodthirsty raptor – but rather an instrument of capital punishment, a symbol of weakness, failure and miserable death.  It was not the sort of symbol a military man would typically choose: but, if there's any truth at all to Constantine's legend, he didn't choose it at all.  It was chosen for him, by God.  Now that's symbology!

As far as The Da Vinci Code is concerned, I would not advise you to stay away from the movie, or avoid reading the book.  It's a gripping story, as a work of fiction – and, if nothing else, it's become a cultural phenomenon.  Yet, as you're enjoying the suspense, and trying to figure out the mystery, be very careful indeed about anything The Da Vinci Code presents as history – for much of this so-called historical background is just as fictitious as the characters who play out their lives at the front of the stage.  Historical fiction, it's not.  Rather, it's fiction through and through.

Just remember what our faith teaches: the one who truly conquers does so not by power but by weakness, not by cunning but by faith, not by hatred but by world-conquering love.

Copyright 2006, by Carlos E. Wilton.  All rights reserved.