Since it hit the bookstalls Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has been nothing short of a publishing sensation. The film has now been released (cert. 12A) bringing the tale of murder, intrigue and conspiracy to an even wider audience. (A 12A certificate puts it on a par with the latest Harry Potter film.) As a book it is a page turner, even if rather far fetched at times. But it also makes claims about the Christian faith, alluded to as being fact (though cleverly Dan Brown skirts round actually saying this), that need answering because they are being believed.

Some of the claims are put into the words of characters, one being Leigh Teabing, said to be an expert on the Holy Grail. Some are woven into the plot.

Holy Grail

The central claim is that the Holy Grail is not the chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper, but the descendents of his child with Mary Magdalene. The claim is that Mary was pregnant when Jesus died on the cross. This it is claimed has been covered up by what would amount to the most brilliant piece of secrecy the world has ever seen. Suppressing something like that just beggars belief. It is just so implausible, though historically unprovable either way.

This raises a fundamental question about how we do history. We don’t just dream up some wild fantasy and proclaim it to be true until someone can disprove it. History requires positive evidence and there is none for the claim that there are descendents of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. What is more the primary sources, even the secondary ones for that matter, are completely silent on it. So it is a claim based on nothing at all.

Dead Sea Scrolls

There are claims that the Dead Sea Scrolls provide evidence. Firstly the Dead Sea Scrolls are not “the earliest Christian records”, as Leigh Teabing states, but Jewish ones. They say absolutely nothing about Jesus and Mary Magdalene!

Q

Leigh Teabing also talks about a document called Q as being a secret source hidden by the Vatican. No it isn’t, it is a hypothetical idea that biblical scholars have invented to provide an answer for the similarities between the gospels of Luke and Matthew. There are passages in Matthew, Mark and Luke that are almost identical. The theory is that Luke and Matthew used Mark, thus making Mark the first gospel to be written. There are other passages that are common only to Matthew and Luke. This led scholars to decide that they had access to a source that either wasn’t used by Mark or he didn’t know about. They used the German word for source, Quelle, to stand for this: ‘Q’ for short. ‘Q’ therefore has absolutely nothing to say about a love child between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It doesn’t even exist as such, so can’t be a secret document hidden in the Vatican.

Council of Nicea and Nature of Jesus

Another claim concerns the Roman Emperor Constantine commissioning a new bible that omitted reference to Jesus’ human traits. He is said to have done this at the Council of Nicea in AD 325. Well the Council of Nicea did take place and from it we get the Nicene Creed, which is recited regularly in our churches today. However, far from commissioning a new bible, the bible already existed. Also it didn’t remove references to Jesus’ human traits to make Jesus more divine. The Council of Nicea was called to discuss how we hold together a belief that Jesus was both human and divine.

Jesus was proclaimed as being divine and human from the earliest days after his resurrection. References to this are contained in the writings of Paul, which are the ‘earliest Christian records’. The problem was how to hold the two together. Some documents flying around made wild claims, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Far from emphasising the humanity of Jesus, as the character Leigh Teabing claims, they did precisely the opposite and were resoundly rejected as being far fetched and unhelpful by the early church! Not exactly the stuff of conspiracy.

The Council of Nicea was called to sort out conflicting views and bring some kind of doctrinal order to what we proclaim about Jesus. Some of the Nicene Creed is difficult to understand today because it gets into the minutiae of it all. But the result of it is a statement that says Jesus is very human and also divine. He is of the same substance with God and also fully human. That is the profound mystery at the heart of the Christian faith.

The New Testament holds this together. Jesus laughs, cries, experiences pain and gets hungry. He also does incredible things and rises from the dead. After the resurrection the disciples met and came to see his divinity. But this all happened very early indeed, within days, weeks, even a few years, not centuries and certainly not as a result of a conspiracy.

Gospels or Eye Witness Chronicles?

The Da Vinci Code also claims that Jesus had an entourage of chroniclers following him around writing the official biography as he went. This is not how the New Testament gospels came about. The evidence is that they were put together by his followers later as they remembered and reflected on what had happened. Some of this was passed on through an oral tradition - word of mouth. Later these traditions were written down. Mark’s gospel is often dated around AD 70. The earliest of Paul’s letters is dated around AD 50.

Entertaining story, lousy history

The Da Vinci Code is based on historical inaccuracies and wild conspiracy claims that do not stand up to historical scrutiny. These spoil what is otherwise a compelling story. Enjoy the book, the film, the DVD, even the t-shirt, but don’t be taken in by it.

© Ian Black 2006

Further Reading

If you want to go into all of this in more detail, I recommend Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code by Bart D Ehrman Oxford University Press 2004

There is also an interesting exploration of the claims at

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