Holy Code, Bloody Grail
by David V Barrett
[ opinion | bookreviews ]
Like many other people, as I first read The Da Vinci Code (DVC) I was mentally ticking off all the ideas taken from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (published in the USA as Holy Blood, Holy Grail) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, from The Templar Revelation by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, and from other sources - but mainly from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (HBHG).
In February and March 2006 Baigent and Leigh went to the magnificent Victorian Gothic buildings of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London to sue Random House, publishers of DVC under the Doubleday and Bantam/Corgi imprints, for infringing their copyright. I was at the court case (disappointingly held in a modern courtroom), which had some fascinating revelations we shall come to later. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Dan Brown below are from my own court notes.
The Da Vinci Code is one of the most remarkable publishing phenomena ever. It's sold multiple millions of copies in hardback; it's had a host of books written about it, plus DVDs, and several TV documentaries, nearly all of them critical; it's had bishops and cardinals speaking out against it; its author has been in court accused of plagiarising other novels and speculative history books; it's spawned possibly the dullest film of the decade - and yet its fans are still raving about it.
* Why has The Da Vinci Code caught the popular imagination so much?
* What is its religious significance?
* Why are the Churches so antagonistic towards it?
* Just how factual is it?
* How was the novel researched and written?
* What happened when Dan Brown faced Baigent and Leigh in court?
* What else is strange about the DVC phenomenon?
This article explores these questions and more.
The Da Vinci Code's historical accuracy
The books criticising DVC all spend a great deal of time pointing out the factual errors in the novel. There's a huge number of them.
During the court case, when Dan Brown was being questioned on the many lectures by Robert Langdon and Leigh Teabing in his novel, he said: "The novelist is not a historian, but I try very hard to get it right." This prompted gasps of suppressed laughter and some incredulous head-shaking by a number of people in the courtroom who had clearly taken the trouble to check the facts that Brown clearly hadn't.
Here is just a small selection of some of Brown's historical screw-ups.
* Art scholars always call the famous artist "Leonardo", which was his name, and never "Da Vinci", which is the town he came from. Brown's wife, supposedly an art historian, really should have pointed this out to him.
In Chapter 8 Brown says:
* Leonardo was "a flamboyant homosexual". Wrong. In his 20s he and four other artists were anonymously accused of sodomy with an artist's model, but they were all acquitted. There is no other evidence that he was homosexual - and being flamboyantly homosexual in strongly religious 15th and 16th century Europe would not have been a bright idea.
* "Da Vinci's enormous output of breathtaking Christian art". In reality he produced fewer than twenty paintings, and many of those were unfinished.
* "Accepting hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions" - in fact, we know of one, and he didn't even complete that.
In Chapter 55 Brown says:
* "More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament." In fact there were only a handful of other gospels, and few if any of them were ever considered for the New Testament.
* "The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by... Constantine" in 325 CE. In fact, the first list of the New Testament canon as we now have it was written by Bishop Athanasius in 367 CE, and the canon was not fixed until a synod in Hippo, North Africa, in 393 CE.
* Until the Council of Nicaea, called by Constantine in 325 CE, "Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet". In fact, most Christians viewed him as divine well over a century before that.
* "Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible", editing out certain material. Completely incorrect.
* Leigh Teabing tells Sophie that two quotations from Leonardo's Notebooks are about the Bible. In fact "Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude" is from his attack on necromancy or black magic, while "Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!" is actually criticising people who don't study mathematics!
In Chapter 60 Brown says:
* "There exists a family tree of Jesus Christ" from Mary Magdalene and her daughter Sarah. There is no such thing, outside the creative imaginings of certain speculative historians.
* "The Sangreal documents include tens of thousands of pages of information. Eyewitness accounts of the Sangreal treasure describe it being carried in four enormous trunks." This is complete invention.
* "the legendary 'Q' Document - a manuscript that even the Vatican admits they believe exists... possibly written in [Jesus'] own hand... a chronicle of his ministry." In fact, Q is a hypothetical document, believed by scholars to have been one of the sources of Matthew's and Luke's Gospels; it contained teachings of Jesus, but no scholar suggests it was written by him.
* "The Merovingians founded Paris." In fact the Merovingians, who were a branch of a Germanic Frankish tribe, date to the late 5th century CE; Paris was founded by a tribe called the Parisii between 250 and 200 BCE, at least 600 years earlier. And there is absolutely no genuine historical link between Jesus and the Merovingians.
* In Chapter 23 Brown says the Priory of Sion is "one of the oldest surviving secret societies on earth". In fact it was founded in 1956, by a handful of Frenchmen including Pierre Plantard.
* In Chapter 28 Brown repeats the myth that five million women were burned at the stake during the Inquisition. Current scholarly thinking puts the total number of deaths at around 40,000, of whom 20-25 per cent were men, and many of them were executed in other ways than burning.
* In Chapter 37 Brown says the true goal of the Knights Templar was "to retrieve a collection of secret documents" from under the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem: "the one thing on which all academics agree is this: The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins". In fact there is no evidence whatsoever that they even looked for anything, let alone found anything, and no academics claim they did.
* In Chapter 58 Brown calls "the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea Scrolls... the earliest Christian records", which is wrong on three counts: the Nag Hammadi texts are not scrolls, and are considerably later than the New Testament texts, while the Dead Sea Scrolls aren't Christian at all.
* In Chapter 74 Brown says that the tetragrammaton YHWH, the sacred name of God, was "derived from Jehovah", then gives a derivation for Jehovah. This is complete twaddle. The Jews never spoke the name of God, saying Adonai (Lord) instead. The "name" Jehovah is a probably 16th century English invention, when a not-very-good scholar added the vowels from Adonai to the consonants YHWH, producing a hybrid and totally spurious name for God: Jehovah.
All of these from the novelist who says, "I try very hard to get it right"! And most of these errors could have been checked and corrected in five minutes. It's just sloppy research.
How The Da Vinci Code was researched
Since the novel first appeared all the critics, including myself, have lambasted Dan Brown for his appalling quality of research. But we were wrong. The great revelation of the DVC vs. HBHG case at the Royal Courts of Justice was that Dan Brown didn't research The Da Vinci Code at all - his wife Blythe did. We learned quite a lot about how they worked.
Dan and Blythe Brown work in separate offices in their house. While he's busy writing one novel, she's busy researching the next. And often he doesn't even know what she's looking into; he told the court: "Blythe will be researching something which she will dump on me at some point for another book." That's real teamwork...
...but it might explain something about the trial. Over and over again, when asked questions, Brown would reply that he didn't know when something had occurred - everything from buying a book for research to completing stages of his novel. He couldn't remember; it was quite a while ago.
In fact, it was three or four years ago. When Baigent and Leigh were on the stand they were questioned about events of over twenty years ago, and the Random House barrister grew quite tetchy if they didn't have every answer at their fingertips, even criticising Baigent for the slowness of his replies. In contrast, Baigent and Leigh's barrister showed patience and courtesy to Brown, despite his persistent forgetfulness. Several times, for instance, Brown complained that he wasn't sure what a particular document said because there was such a large number of them. True - exactly the same number that everyone else in the case had to wade through: Baigent, Leigh, both legal teams, the judge...
He also rarely answered Yes or No in reply to a simple Yes/No question, giving non-committal responses. When asked, for example, "The markings in HBHG: do you accept they are heavy on the pages we're looking at?" he non-replied, "There are certainly markings on that page, yes."
Throughout, it was his general level of ignorance, in the sense of not-knowing, that was astounding. At one point the barrister pointed out that he had copied down his wife's mis-spelling of Botticelli, to which Brown replied, "I don't remember precisely how to spell Botticelli." Then only a few minutes later he told the court, "My wife and I both studied art. Botticelli is a pretty famous painter." In which case, one wonders, how did they both manage to spell his name wrong?
He also showed quite astonishing confusion at times. I would never have believed the following exchange if I hadn't been sitting just a few feet from him. Baigent and Leigh's barrister was making the point that when other authors use someone else's work they say so; for example, when Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince quoted words and ideas from HBHG in their book The Templar Revelation they always correctly attributed them to Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln. Brown responded, "If you look in HBHG you'll see points referring back to The Templar Revelation". As HBHG was published fifteen years before The Templar Revelation, that seems just a little unlikely! The barrister, no doubt as surprised as everyone else, challenged Brown on this - and Brown replied, "Not in that particular case, okay, but I'm sure there are many others."
The reason for all this evasion and forgetfulness and not-knowing and confusion became clear when Brown explained in more detail how his books get written. Blythe Brown does all the research for her husband, copy-typing masses of material from books and the internet, which he then incorporates into his novels. Sometimes she takes information from several places and writes her own summary, which she gives him. But unless it happens to say something in the text itself, she rarely sources the material she gives him, or says which book or books or websites she copied it from.
The first rule of research, to identify your sources, ignored.
With no sources and no context for Brown to assess the accuracy, validity or significance of all this material, it's small wonder (a) that his novel is so full of errors, and (b) that he was so vague about it all in court.
Why was Blythe Brown not on the witness stand? According to Brown he wanted to protect her from the glare of publicity, and in any case he would be able to speak on her behalf. Perhaps; but it was she who did the research. I find it incomprehensible that she wasn't a major witness in the case.
On the matter of just when in the research process Blythe Brown started taking material from HBHG the judge said, damningly: "At the end of the day her failure to give evidence without any reasonable excuse is determinative on this issue."
Having touched briefly on some of the court proceedings, let's move on to the outcome.
The Judgment
Although Dan Brown himself wasn't on trial, the case at the Royal Courts of Justice hinged on whether (or how much) he had plagiarised HBHG. (For those who say that you can't copyright history, Baigent and Leigh's skeleton argument at the beginning of the case made this point about HBHG: "It is a book of historical conjecture setting out the authors' hypotheses. It is not, however, an historical account of facts and it does not purport to be such.")
Without going into too much detail, it wasn't a straightforward question of Brown copying chunks of text, which is easy to prove; instead, Baigent and Leigh claimed that Brown had substantially copied the architecture of their book. By this they meant the specific combination or pattern of different ideas that they had creatively brought together in their own book over twenty years earlier. Their lawyers argued that there were fifteen Central Theme Points where there was too much similarity to be acceptable between the two books.
My own opinion is that one of the most crucial points was the HBHG theory that the purpose of the Priory of Sion, supposedly a secret organisation set up in the Middle Ages, was to protect the sacred bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This idea was created by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, and it lies at the very heart of the plot of DVC. But the judge, Mr Justice Peter Smith, dismissed its importance. In his Judgment he said of the idea "that the Priory of Sion were the protectors of the bloodline and equally the Holy Grail", "I am not sure that [this] is much of a point because it is merely a consequence of linking the bloodline with the Merovingian line which would then have the consequential effect of the Priory of Sion protecting both."
The judge missing the crucial significance of this point is especially strange, because throughout the court case he seemed more on top of the complex arguments than anyone else, including Baigent, Leigh, Brown, or their respective barristers - who were, incidentally, the top men in their field of intellectual property rights. Several times I watched him cut through a morass of argument to state clearly the point at its centre. Several times I heard him correct the witnesses and the barristers when they made a mistake. He knew what he was doing.
In his 71-page Judgment he states clearly that Dan Brown copied from HBHG when he was writing DVC, and that "HBHG was the essential tool for the Langdon/Teabing Lectures" in the novel. He rules that ten of the fifteen Central Theme Points were drawn from HBHG, saying: "I conclude that, in the main, the majority of the Central Themes were drawn from HBHG."
He states that "when the character of Teabing was created the US copy of HBHG possessed by Mr Brown and Blythe Brown was used as the primary vehicle for those lectures almost exclusively," and that "I regard the suggestion that Mr Brown and Blythe Brown created the Langdon/Teabing lectures from the other sources as completely unsustainable. It flies in the face of logic... The conclusion is irresistible. Blythe Brown provided the material for the lectures with HBHG in her hands." And the judge says bluntly: "Language copying occurred and Mr Brown admitted it."
You'd think that would be clear enough. But after all this the judge ruled against Baigent and Leigh, and in favour of Brown. I've discussed this with a lot of people. I don't know anyone who followed the case and read the Judgment who understands it. In the judge's words, "it flies in the face of logic". And indeed, a couple of months later the Court of Appeal granted permission for Baigent and Leigh to appeal this Judgment. Although they lost the Appeal in March 2007, they are said to be considering their legal options in other countries, including the US.
And yet more questions...
With Dan Brown's credibility as a serious writer shot to hell, and with the much-hyped film simply an embarrassment, why is The Da Vinci Code still so prominent? When the Emperor's underwear is in such grubby tatters, why are so many people still taken in by his dress sense?
Just possibly, because DVC is one of the most successful marketing operations ever in publishing.
The judge says in his Judgment that nearly two years before publication an exchange of internal emails at Doubleday about the Synopsis of the planned novel "showed that internally the publishers clearly linked the Synopsis to many of the books that had in effect sprung from HBHG". The publishers understood the pedigree of DVC, even if its author didn't.
It emerged in the court case that when Dan Brown had written only 190 pages of manuscript of the novel he sent these to his editor at Doubleday. These were edited down to 128 pages; they were printed out and put together in a package which was shown to Doubleday's sales, marketing and publicity staff, the people responsible for persuading shops to take the book. This is sometimes done for important non-fiction books, but how often is it done for a quarter-written novel, especially by an almost unknown author? Very, very rarely. The reps were given a product to push.
So were the publicity departments. About the time The Da Vinci Code was published I was at a launch party for a non-fiction book by a friend of mine, from the same publishing group. I was talking to the publicity person, who should have been hyping his book. Instead she was gushing about this new novel, a sensation, a religious sensation, which I really must read, I must review, she'd send me a copy immediately. That doesn't usually happen either. For one thing, with publishers and imprints as large as Bantam/Corgi, who published DVC in the UK, different publicists handle fiction and non-fiction books. For another, it was discourteous to the author of the book actually being launched.
Dan Brown himself refers to this astounding publicity effort in his Witness Statement before the High Court proceedings began: "It is impossible to ignore the fact that The Da Vinci Code launch was one of the best orchestrated in history. It is still talked about in the industry. Articles have been written specifically on The Da Vinci Code launch." And he noted: "There were more Advance Reader Copies given away for free of The Da Vinci Code than the whole print run for Angels & Demons."
It's almost as if DVC was deliberately created as a publishing sensation by its publishers, and that its explosive impact actually had little to do with the author himself.
One could very nearly feel sorry for Dan Brown, this third-rate thriller writer suddenly flung into the limelight. He'd written three previous novels, none of them selling particularly well, then he changed publishers and suddenly had all the might of a huge publishing company hyping a novel with an almost identical plot to one of his previous ones, before he'd even finished writing it. Then there were the phenomenal sales, which he wouldn't object to, but then the virulent opposition from the Churches, from Evangelical ministers and professors of religion and even a cardinal or two; and all the articles and books written tearing his own to shreds - an absolutely unheard-of reaction to any novel.
And then he's accused of plagiarism, not once but twice, and nearly three times. First, Lewis Perdue accused him of swiping bits of his books The Da Vinci Legacy and The Daughter of God. (Perdue didn't sue Brown; again strangely, Random House sued Perdue, to obtain a declaratory judgment that no copyright infringement had occurred.) And then along come Baigent and Leigh, claiming that Brown had lifted the "architecture" of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I know another author who began preparing a plagiarism case against Brown, but gave up when he saw the size of Baigent and Leigh's legal bill.
In his initial Witness Statement in the case, Brown said of Baigent and Leigh and their claim against him: "I have been shocked at their reaction: Furthermore I do not really understand it." That came over very clearly during his three days in the witness box. In conversation with me many of the journalists in the packed courtroom commented on how completely out of his depth Brown appeared. He rarely answered a simple question with a straight Yes or No, and his memory of the sequence of events while he was writing the novel was decidedly poor. He seemed bewildered by the entire proceedings. In fact the brevity and tone of most of his replies gave the impression to those of us sitting on the Press benches of an odd mixture of boredom, detachment and irritation. It was as if he was affronted by the very situation of his having to sit in this witness box in this courtroom in wintry England having to answer such impertinent questions from this barrister who was clearly trying to tie him in knots. Why was he even there?
That answer seemed obvious to some of us. The bigger question was, why had a poorly-written hack thriller taken the world by storm? What was it in The Da Vinci Code that struck such a chord with its readers? And why were the Churches so vehemently against it?
The religious questions
At the height of the DVC furore in Britain (which was mild compared to some countries) I interviewed the press secretary of an English Catholic archbishop about his reaction to the book. He was urging Catholics to stand up and fight for the truth of their beliefs against this "blasphemous", "scurrilous" and "grossly offensive" book. Well, that's his right. A few months later the Christian Council of Korea asked Sony to cancel their planned release of the DVC film in that country, accusing the filmmakers of disparaging the divinity of Jesus Christ. Film censors in Singapore barred people under 16 from watching the film because they were afraid some children might see it as a factual movie. And a Catholic group in India called on Christians to starve themselves to death in protest at the release of the film there. They hoped for thousands to attend a protest where they would burn effigies of Dan Brown. As I said, the British reaction was mild.
By now we all know that the idea in the novel that most upset Christians, especially Catholics, was that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (or, presumably even worse, not married to her!) and had a child by her. Though many Christians find that idea distasteful, if not shocking or even blasphemous, if Jesus was fully man as well as fully God then why shouldn't he have had a normal human relationship? He performed other natural bodily functions such as eating and sleeping, so why not sex? Theologically there's no real argument against it, though Bible scholars say there is absolutely no evidence that he was married, and that as a messianic prophet he probably wasn't.
The mass reaction to DVC, both positive and negative, surpasses anything previously seen in modern publishing. There have been cases where there has been religious reaction against a book, a play or a film: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the stage play Jerry Springer: The Opera, the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ based on Nikos Kazantzakis's novel. And there was the furore by Muslims against the publication of some cartoons of Muhammad. But in each case these were orchestrated campaigns, a few voices inciting many, protesting about blasphemy.
Blasphemy's a strange thing. If there is a One Creator God, then I'd have thought he'd be big enough to be able to cope with a bit of disrespectful barracking; he must be used to it by now. And surely, if he loves humanity, he'd be rather more upset by things like murder, rape, ethnic cleansing and the destruction of our planet. Blasphemy is nothing to do with upsetting God; it's about upsetting other people, hurting their feelings by mocking something that's important to them. But people's feelings get hurt every day, for a thousand and one reasons. We learn to cope with it without punching the perpetrator in the face; that's part of growing up. But not, it seems, for religious believers.
The Catholic Church, rather foolishly, tried to get the film's makers to include a "health warning" about it being fiction, or to remove or water down its "heretical" aspects. Foolishly, because this just made the Church look as if it was running scared. The Christian Churches have controlled what people believe for centuries, but in the 21st century it's no longer possible to stop people having enquiring minds. Of course there are questions about the beginnings of Christianity; there always have been, and Dan Brown was right in one thing, that the Church has never been prepared to discuss them openly. Now it is having to, and that can surely only be a good thing.
So we have two linked questions.
Why has there been such a huge interest in DVC? In the last few decades we've moved into a more questioning, pluralistic world. Except for fundamentalists, we're less inclined than we once were to believe what we're told, to passively accept dogmatic authority, teachings set in stone by other people; we're better educated and better informed than past generations, and we want the opportunity to make up our own minds about everything - including religion. The Spirit of the Sixties is still alive; we want to kick back against authority. With the growth in Pagan and other alternative beliefs of recent years, the thought of overturning the patriarchal rigidity of conventional religion has a strong appeal.
Why have there been so many Christian attacks on DVC? First, because deeply believing Christians, both Catholics and Evangelicals, are genuinely affronted by what they see as a blasphemous attack on the Truth. But second, I suspect that, consciously or not, they are aware of the very real threat to traditional mainstream Christianity today from both pluralism and Paganism (and other new religions). Although the United States is currently still a church-going country, it's a generation behind Britain and the rest of the Western world, which have almost become post-Christian societies. In most of the developed world Christianity is becoming just one of many minority faiths, with all religions being seen as equally valid, rather than one being true and all the others false. So when Christian Churches see such a massive popular interest in a book that, however clumsily, challenges conventional Christianity, they panic. Hence the over-reaction of most of the Christian criticisms of DVC.
Over twenty books have been written in the English language alone, criticising DVC and its author. The majority are from Christian writers and publishers; Dan Brown has managed to unite both Catholics and Evangelical Protestants against him. One of the better-written ones, The Da Vinci Hoax by Carl E Olson & Sandra Miesel, castigates the novel as "custom-made fiction for our time: pretentious, posturing, self-serving, arrogant, self-congratulatory, condescending, glib, illogical, superficial, and deviant". (I don't think they liked it much...)
What a lot of these books miss in their affronted reaction is that it's actually very healthy to challenge "received wisdom". In fact there are some ideas in DVC which are well worth examining. Whatever the faults of his novel, Dan Brown has achieved something quite remarkable in finally bringing to the attention of the ordinary Christian-in-the-pew things which every trainee priest in theological college, and every university student on a biblical criticism or Early Christianity course, has been taught for decades: that the origins and early development of Christianity, including the eventual compilation of the New Testament, were nothing at all how we have been led to believe by priests and preachers in church. The creation of what became mainstream Christianity was a messy, untidy, argumentative and very hit-and-miss affair. Very different early versions of Christianity slammed each other as heretical. Early theologians slugged it out at councils, sometimes almost literally. The exact balance of humanity and divinity in Jesus was argued exhaustively for centuries; so was the precise makeup of God, resulting in the compromise doctrine of the Trinity, a concept that would have been both incomprehensible and offensive to Jesus and his Jewish disciples. The New Testament was cobbled together with books written in other people's names (about half the Epistles are forgeries), with texts rewritten and verses inserted to "prove" certain doctrines, and with disagreement about its exact content, let alone its meaning, for several centuries after Jesus' life and death.
All of this is vital, but most of the Christian critics of DVC ignore it or even dismiss it. In their eagerness to highlight Dan Brown's poor scholarship, some of them make equally fallacious statements. In Cracking Da Vinci's Code Evangelical Protestant writers James L Garlow and Peter Jones say "Orthodoxy follows a straight line from the teaching of Jesus in the thirties to the writings of Paul and the other apostles in the latter half of the first century, to the final decrees of the ecumenical synods in the fifth century", which is blatantly untrue. Catholic writer Steven Kellmeyer claims in Fact and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code that "the four Gospels... were all known to have been written by the people to whom they are attributed" and that Matthew was the first gospel to be written, both of which any first-year undergraduate knows are utter tosh. Both of these books, and many of the other Christian attacks on DVC, are led more by faith than fact. There's an old saying: "There's none so blind as them that will not see."
But there are also some critical assessments from biblical scholars such as Bart D Ehrman in his excellent Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, which offers a readily comprehensible introduction to biblical criticism, and in the process provides a much more devastating critique of DVC than any of the Christian books. Similarly, historical novelist Sharan Newman takes Brown to task very comprehensively for his poor research in The Real History Behind The Da Vinci Code.
What was it that annoyed the critics so much, both the Christians and the academics? Mainly, it seems, Brown's assertion of historical factuality at the front of the book, tied in with the huge number of basic historical errors he made throughout it, a handful of which I listed above. The novel claims as fact much that is mere speculation, and it plays fast and loose with known history, as we've seen.
The ideas in the novel are well worth exploring, but the arguments Brown uses to put forward those ideas are so error-ridden that in places they're laughable. Ultimately, I think it's a great shame that DVC wasn't written by a better novelist, who would have researched it properly and made it a worthwhile novel - a well-thought-out challenge to traditional Christianity, instead of the mix-and-match smorgasbord of mistakes and misconceptions that is The Da Vinci Code.
