The Last of Brown's ridiculous historical fallacies to be treated

Fiction

Brown writes that Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal “was a tribute to Mary Magdalene and the bloodline of Jesus Christ, told through the story of a young knight on a quest for truth” (390).

Fact

The young knight in the opera is indeed on a quest for the Holy Grail – the traditional Grail! Not the redefined one portrayed in this novel.

Fiction

Brown claims that the Priory of Sion attached female sexual symbolism to the medieval cathedrals to represent goddess worship, an idea that would have enraged the original architects. According to Brown, the “cathedral’s long hollow nave” is “a secret tribute to a woman’s womb…complete with receding labial ridges and a nice little cinquefoil clitoris above the doorway” (326).

Fact

Neither the Priory nor the Templars had anything to do with the medieval cathedral architecture. The great churches of Europe not only predated them by centuries, but they generally have 3 doors at the main entrances…not one, plus further doors in the side transepts…the woman’s body parallel becomes hard to fathom. Also, their “long hollow nave” was structured from the public basilicas of the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Fiction

Brown writes, “the New Testament is based on fabrications” (341); “the greatest story ever told is, in fact, the greatest story ever sold” (267); and “the Church has two thousand years of experience pressuring those who threaten to unveil its lies” (407). The anti-Christian bias of the author is obvious and blatant. That doesn’t mean that Christendom has been perfect over the years…medieval anti-Semitism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and other persecutions…as well as the evils perpetrated today by the few members of the clergy who inflict on children the horrors of pedophilia. But keeping “Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene” under wraps – the main theme of Brown’s book – is NOT one of the church’s offenses.

Other fabrications and outright lies (Brown’s in bold) and their explanation

“Noah was himself an albino” (166). Absolutely no evidence…and the “albino monk” of Opus Dei seems to have no problem whatever with his eyesight, as would be the case with true albinism.

“The early Jewish tradition involved ritualistic sex. In the Temple, no less. Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s Temple housed not only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah” (309). Nothing was, or is, as basic to Hebrews as their foundational belief in ONE God (not two or more)…the Jews did not even have a term for “goddess.” The term “Shekinah” in Hebrew refers to the glory of God present in his indwelling, not some divine consort.

The Jewish tetragrammation YHWH – the sacred name of God – in fact derived from Jehovah, an androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah” (309). False! YHWH, the original name for God, reflects the Hebrew verb “to be.” But since tradition forbade verbal pronunciation of the name, rabbis in the sixteenth century pronounced the consonants from UHWH together with the vowels from the word Adonai (“Lord”) resulting in the word “Jehovah.” This later, synthesized name not only did not predate YHWH, it has absolutely nothing to do with an androgynous union.

“As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her eight-year cycle to organize their Olympic Games” (36). Here Brown shows himself to be an equal-opportunity exploiter in his crusade against the truth, muddling Greek history as well as Jewish and Christian. In reality, the games were dedicated to Zeus. A day-long festival in his honor interrupted the games midway through, which is why they were terminated in the Christian era until their revival in 1896 on a strictly secular basis. They also occurred every four years rather than eight, as Brown implies. As for the five linked rings of the Olympic flag in the modern games, these had nothing to do with the “Ishtar pentagram,” since new rings were supposed to be added with each new set of games. The organizers, however, stopped at five – a nice number to fill Olympic logos, reflecting the five major, inhabited continents.

“The Bible…has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book” (231). To say that the Bible has “evolved” implies a progression of constant change, as in the term evolution. This is totally misleading. The only “changes” to the Bible that have taken place across the centuries have been an ever-more-faithful rendering and translation of the original Hebrew of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New Testament, without any additions to the text. (see Hank Hanegraaff’s section for more details)

“More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion” (231). Brown’s statement implies that there was a general submission of gospels to some sort of early church panel that reduced the field to the familiar four. This was not at all the case. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were foundation documents in what later came to be called the New Testament. Eusebius, the first church historian, tells how they were the core of the canon from the start, and how their authority was determined on the basis of usage in such early Christian centers as Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. He also clearly identifies some of the later spurious writings, including the Gnostic gospels, that the church rejected as soon as they surfaced. Today they are known as “New Testament apocrypha.” Brown must have had this group in mind with his “eighty,” which is an exaggerated figure in any case.

(This article and most others have been taken from Dr. Paul Maier's book "The Da Vinci Code: fact or fiction?") You can purchase this book at the following sites:

http://www.equip.org/store/details.asp?SKU=B775

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1414302797/103-7751817-1819867?v=glance&n=283155