Debating 'Da Vinci'
With the arrival of the movie, criticism of the Dan Brown blockbuster heats up
For the Rev. John Skirtich, the revelatory moment came on a Sunday morning late last fall. He had just concluded mass at St. Maurice Roman Catholic Church in Forest Hills, a tree-lined, middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh. One of his parishioners, an elderly woman, met him at the door, carrying a copy of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's phenomenally successful cloak-and-dagger novel, and she was visibly distraught.
"Father John," she said. "It says in here that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child together. Is that true?" The priest was startled by the question, coming from a lifelong Catholic and a pillar of the parish. He calmly assured the woman that it was not true, that the book was pure fiction. She seemed mildly comforted. "That's when it struck me," Skirtich recalled, "that ordinary believers--people in my own parish who are not theologically trained--were being deceived by the pseudo history presented in that book, and I knew I had to do something about it." Several months later, he began teaching a three-part course on The Da Vinci Code, attempting to sort out fact from fiction and highlighting the early history of the church and the origins of the Bible. Left unchallenged, he explained, "the fiction passed off as history in The Da Vinci Code undermines what Christianity is all about."
With the movie version of the novel set to debut this week, the Pennsylvania priest's concern is being echoed and amplified throughout the Roman Catholic Church. Some church officials consider The Da Vinci Code an attack on Christianity and on the Catholic Church in particular. The book's plot revolves around the premise that Mary Magdalene was pregnant with Jesus's baby at the time of the Crucifixion and thus was the true "Holy Grail"--the vessel of Christ's blood--that his bloodline has survived, and that evil forces within the Roman Catholic Church have killed to protect these secrets for centuries. With the movie's release imminent, the church's resistance has intensified:
-- In late April, a high-ranking Vatican official urged Catholic communications directors to boycott the film. If "such lies and errors had been directed at the Koran or the Holocaust," said the official, Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "they would have justly provoked a world uprising."
-- Cardinal Francis Arinze, head of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, hinted at possible legal action against the film because it offends Christ and the church. "Christians must not just sit back and say it is enough for us to forgive and to forget," Arinze, who was considered a contender to become pope last year, told an Italian TV documentary team.
-- Meanwhile, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has produced a one-hour television documentary and launched an elaborate website to counter the movie's sensational historical claims.
-- And Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic organization that is portrayed in the book, and presumably in the movie, as a clandestine cabal and the villain in the plot, has quietly demanded a disclaimer clearly labeling the film as fiction. Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio behind the film, has refused.
Why all the fuss over a movie and a novel? "This is a work of fiction," Ron Howard, the movie's Academy Award-winning director, told the Los Angeles Times. "It's not theology. It's not history ... Spy thrillers don't start off with disclaimers." Brown, the book's reclusive author, has sent mixed messages regarding the proportions of history and make-believe in his book. Although he declines interviews now, he told National Public Radio during a 2003 publicity tour that the book's characters and action are fictional but that "the ancient history, the secret documents, the rituals, all of this is factual. "He also told CNN at that time that "the background is all true."
Historical facts. What the church finds so potentially damaging in The Da Vinci Code is precisely the impression it leaves that the historical background woven into the fictional story is true. Some of the supposed historical facts contradict central tenets of the Christian faith, such as the divinity of Jesus and the authority and authenticity of Scripture. At one point, Brown has a leading character in the book say, "Almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false."
Enter an army of Christian apologists--to set the record straight. Since the book's debut in 2003, dozens of books, tracts, and Internet sites have appeared, aiming to debunk The Da Vinci Code and its perceived assault on Christian doctrine and tradition. Chief among their targets:
The divinity of Christ. In Brown's version of history, the early Christians thought of Jesus as "a great and powerful man but a man nonetheless"--a mere mortal. It was the Roman Emperor Constantine, according to Brown's fictional scholars, who imposed the doctrine of Christ's divinity on the church at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. And the emperor did so largely for political purposes: He wanted to unify the empire around the Christian faith, which he recently had come to embrace.
But as Catholic writers Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel point out in their book The Da Vinci Hoax, "any historian, whether Christian or not, knows that the early Christians most definitely believed that Jesus of Nazareth was somehow divine." The central issue at the Council of Nicaea, they note, "was not whether Jesus was merely human or something more but how exactly his divinity ... was to be understood."
Biblical scholars cite an abundance of explicit and implicit evidence of early Christian belief in Christ's divinity in the writings of the New Testament--in the primitive confession "Jesus is Lord," for example, which appears in the apostle Paul's letters from the middle of the first century, and in the prologue to John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God ... and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." The conviction that Jesus was both human and divine, concludes Oxford University scholar J. N. D. Kelly in his seminal study Early Christian Doctrines, was "all but universal" in the centuries prior to the Council of Nicaea.
New Testament origins. The secrets and lies perpetuated by the church, according to The Da Vinci Code characters, were transmitted through the least reliable of sources: the New Testament. Brown's British historian, Leigh Teabing, asserts midway through the book that "more than 80 Gospels were considered for the New Testament," but Constantine selected only four. The emperor "omitted those Gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those Gospels that made him godlike." Teabing concludes that the Dead Sea Scrolls and Gnostic manuscripts from Nag Hammadi, Egypt, were "the earliest Christian records"--not the four Gospels.
Brown's critics have had a field day with those assertions. Writings from early church leaders, they observe, suggest that by the early second century--long before Constantine's time--a consensus was forming around the four Gospels and the writings of Paul as normative and authoritative Christian Scripture. Although unofficial lists of "accepted" writings began circulating among the churches by the late second century, a formal decree recognizing the Christian canon would not come until A.D. 405--long after Constantine's time. Constantine, in other words, had nothing to do with it.
Meanwhile, Gnostic writings that portrayed Jesus as a "spirit person"--not truly human and, therefore, not capable of being crucified--found relatively few takers. Even though they had names like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Mary, according to most scholars, those texts date from the middle of the second century to the late third century--well past the lifetime of Jesus's disciples. What of the Dead Sea Scrolls? They are exclusively Jewish writings, scholars say. Not a single Christian text was found among them.
The marriage of Jesus. That Jesus was married and sired a child is easily the most sensational of The Da Vinci Code's claims. "It's a matter of historical record," Teabing baldly asserts at one point, "and Da Vinci was certainly aware of that fact." He goes on to argue that "social decorum" in Jesus's time "virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried," and he cites passages in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip that call Mary Magdalene "the companion" of Jesus--which "literally meant spouse," according to Teabing--and that say Jesus "used to kiss her often on her mouth."
The dubious authenticity of the Gospel of Philip aside, authors Olson and Miesel note that the Greek word for companion is the same used to denote a coworker, a business associate, or "a companion in faith." And in another Philip passage, they observe, "the risen Jesus imparts his secret mysteries to James by kissing him on the mouth ... It is a nonsexual, symbolic act."
As for Jewish marital customs ruling out Jesus's singleness, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus wrote that while most men at the time did marry, certain holy men were known to remain celibate. And there are biblical precedents in both the Old and New testaments, among them: the prophet Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and the apostle Paul. Far from being a "matter of historical record," as Brown's fictional Professor Teabing describes it, scholars say the marriage of Jesus has no support in history or in Scripture.
The debunkers have gone after other "howlers" in the book's historical representations. On the opening page, for example, Brown declares as "fact" that the Priory of Sion, depicted in the book as a European secret society founded in 1099 and the prime keeper of the Da Vinci Code secrets, "is a real organization" and that "parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets" and listing its members were discovered in Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale in 1975. Among the Priory of Sion's members: Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In fact, the Priory of Sion's documents were conclusively proven in the 1990s to have been part of an elaborate hoax. The society itself, as Brown described it, never existed.
"Good information." So after all of the educating and debating, can a movie and a novel--no matter how popular or provocative--do serious damage to a church of a billion believers? "In the long run--no," says Msgr. Francis Maniscalco, communications director for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "But in the short run, a number of people will be confused. And if only one person were to come away with a distorted impression of Jesus Christ or his church, our concern would be for that person as if he or she were the whole world."
The better way of countering the potential impact of The Da Vinci Code on Christian believers, says Maniscalco, "is to give good information to refute the bad." It is what the bishops are attempting to achieve on their website. It is the same course that Father Skirtich is pursuing in his Pennsylvania parish. "We've been given an opportunity to teach our people what we probably should have been doing a better job of teaching them all along," he says. "Some good can come out of a bad situation, and for that I am thankful. Still, all things considered, I would just as soon it hadn't happened this way."
This story appears in the May 22, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.