Making things happen

... with integrity

Monday February 16, 2004 Volume VI Number 7

eople are talking about Jesus.  His life remains, in the Western world at least, the most poignant of all stories.  The significance of his appearance, his teachings, his demeanor, his ascendance to the world stage, the flat rejection by his own society, the subsequent embrace by believers from every nation, every culture, every language group, all of this triggers every sort of speculation. 

And to this day, this man Jesus provokes thoughtful consideration and cynical caricature on the movie screen and on the New York Times bestseller list.

Dan Brown’s father won a Presidential award for his original work as a mathematics professor.  His mother made a career of sacred music.  Dinner conversation wandered somewhere along the Mason Dixon Line of the science vs. religion debate, and while his parents fell somewhere short of familial civil war, Brown cultivated a keen curiosity over the complex formulas of mathematics and the wonderful magic of belief.  Dan’s dad never really understood his mom, and the other way around, too.  But their good-natured bantering, quick wit and clever repartee cultivated in Dan a love for language.  No one was surprised when he announced English as his major at Amherst College.

He taught English at the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy, posturing himself as Robin Willams in Dead Poet Society.  He quickly determined that he preferred sitting alone in his room at the keyboard to standing before a room full of antsy teenagers attempting to capture the attention of distracted minds and sell them on the far-away idea of intelligence.  So he became a writer.

He was not ashamed to confess that he wanted to be a bestselling author.  He wanted his stories to make it to the big screen.  He chose the thriller novel as his genre – creating fast paced, intricate story lines with twists and turns and surprises, employing literary methods to keep the reader eager for the next page – all the way through.  He started with a book about the clandestine world of spies and international intrigue, intertwining the story line with research on modern communication technology.  With his wife, painter and historian Blythe, he moved to the world of religion and a book about the battle between religion and science, a thriller that takes place in a Swiss physics lab and Vatican City.

But his most recent novel builds on a similar theme, and has become a monster New York Times bestseller.  Its high acclaim comes mainly from other authors of thriller books – and from them Brown enjoys high praise.  As of last month, Brown sold four and a half million hardcover copies, and the book is already in the works to become a major motion picture.

It’s called The Da Vinci Code.

* * * * * *

On the surface, the book seems innocent enough.  It is constructed in short chapters, each peeling back another layer of secrecy, informing the reader of another clue in a murder mystery with epic consequence.  The victim of a deliberate gunshot wound is the curator of the great museum of art, The Musée du Louvre  in Paris.  He is left on the stone floor to suffer a slow, agonizing death deep in the bowels of his own museum.  In his final desperate moments, he leaves a mysterious series of clues that will lead his grand-daughter to the motive of the crime, and perhaps to a discovery that will shatter the foundation of all Christendom – particularly the Roman Catholic version.

As a page turner, particularly for a reader with a keen interest in religious symbols and archetypes and history and the institutions and politics of religion, and some of the great thinkers and artists whose books and inventions and works of art changed the course of history, well, The Da Vinci Code is irresistible and consuming.  And there is little doubt that the book will inspire an equally entertaining romp of a movie.

But as history – while the book claims to be carefully researched and accurate - it just isn’t.  A casual, uncritical reading will well leave the reader with some notions about Jesus that are far from substantiated.

The protagonist of The Da Vinci Code is Dr. Robert Langdon (PhD), a Harvard “symbologist” (you get the idea - but it’s a new word that doesn’t pass spell-check or appear in the dictionary) who has just written a best selling popular text on religious symbolism.  He’s on the lecture circuit addressing sophisticated academic and social elite all over the world on the power and intricacies of religious symbol throughout history.  He’s a composite of Joseph Campbell (the Power of Myth) made famous in his PBS series and Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark.  When he’s called to the Musée du Louvre in the middle of the night by Parisian authorities to witness a crime scene, he meets a young cryptologist, Sophie Neveu.  The two of them collaborate in a race to unlock the secrets kept by the curator, her grandfather.

Langdon becomes Sophie’s mentor as the mystery unfolds.  A walking encyclopedia of religious mysteries, the good doctor fills in the gaps.  The curator left a puzzle, a scavenger hunt, filled with word games and formulas, a kind of Rubik’s Cube on the road.  And at one point in the search, Langdon explains a view of history that betrays the weakness of the basic premise of the book itself. 

He quotes Napoleon who said, “What is history, but a fable agreed upon.”

Langdon explains to a wide eyed Sophie, “History is always written by the winners.  When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books – books which justify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe… By its very nature, history is always a one sided account.”

History – a fable agreed upon.

Think about that one - Napoleon’s cynical view.  An interesting point, one a serious historian will take into account while rummaging through the source material.  Consider the source would be the lesson here.  But is this thesis true?  Was Napoleon right?

I don’t think so. 

If he is, then it’s impossible to know what happened.  We only have someone’s version of the truth, not the truth itself.  And generally, that version is skewed to serve someone else’s purpose.  So we can never know.

Historians are mere pawns in the hands of the powerful.  Revisionism is legitimized.  It’s only human to re-write history to suit one’s purposes.  We’re stuck.

As Langdon (Dan Brown’s alter-ego) espouses this view of history, we learn something about Langdon’s own version of history, too.

It will come as a surprise to many readers that a dark secret has been carefully kept from the general public for two thousand years, protecting the religious popular myth that served the church for two millennia.  It is irrefutable, undeniable evidence that the New Testament version of Jesus’ life and ministry is invalid.  He was not God.  He was a mere mortal, a man who took Mary Magdalene as his wife.  He was crucified, according to this evidence, but as he hung bleeding and suffering on the cross, Mary Magdalene carried his baby - a little girl, named Sarah - whose bloodline can be traced to this very day.  It was the Nicene Council (funded and choreographed by the great Constantine, who wanted a national religion to bind his empire together) that hatched the modern version of Jesus’ divinity, named the books of the New Testament (from a collection of over ninety gospels floating around), and codified a systematic theology that wedded the teachings of Jesus with pagan Roman tradition.  It gave the conqueror Constantine a loyal domain, a church with local priests who would manage morality and daily life, and most important, elevate his place on the throne to the level of divine right.  If word got out that Jesus was a husband and a father, the charade perpetrated by Constantine and his cohorts of the Nicene Council would be shattered, and the church would be left with no purpose in a world that would disintegrate into utter anarchy and chaos.  So at all costs, the secret must be guarded (for everyone except, of course, Dan Brown’s readers).

It became the role of a secret order to keep the truth in hiding – the Priory of Sion, a high level and clandestine counterpart of the Opus Dei.

The Roman Catholic Church spared no expense to keep the truth covered, according to the novel.  Murder.  Secret pay-offs.  Extortion.  The Vatican, fully aware of the existence of the documents, under the direction of the Pope, saw to it that the devastating “truth” remain hidden.  At all cost.

The professor continues.  The Holy Grail is not the chalice Jesus used to share the cup with the disciples at the Last Supper, as legend has it.  The Holy Grail is the child in Mary’s womb, according to the Priory Sion.  Further, the demonizing of the divine feminine was a conspiracy of the patriarchal Constantine who used the Council to suppress women, permanently eliminate them from positions of influence in the church, and to make the common fertility rights a damnable sin.  Leonardo Da Vinci knew this secret.  As did Victor Hugo and Sir Isaac Newton among other luminaries.  They never betrayed their knowledge openly, but if you look carefully, you can pick up their hints.  What was the Mona Lisa smiling about?  She knows.  She’s got a juicy secret.  She wants to tell you, but she can’t.  You see it in her eyes.

Actually, The Mona Lisa is not the wife of Francesco da Giocondo as historians claim, the professor goes on.  The Mona Lisa is an androgynous self-portrait.  Da Vinci, confused about his own gender identity, painted a picture of himself as a woman, with a secret and a smile and a gleam in her eye – all this according to Langdon.

So, if you read The Da Vinci Code, remember the words of Napoleon: “What is history?  A fable agreed upon.”

Dan Brown has entertained.  He’s raised some interesting questions.  He’s challenged believers to check into the facts.  But if we are to accept the premise of the good Harvard professor, Robert Langdon, we are accepting the Napoleonic view of history.

A fable. 

Agreed upon.

* * * * * * *

It’s Monday morning, you are a leader.

History is not a fable.  Napoleon confuses history with legend, myth.  History is a quest.  To be sure, a challenging quest.  Legends must be distilled, researched, comparative texts explored, eye-witness accounts considered, and conclusions drawn. 

The NFL has a stable of professional, veteran referees.  They make regular judgments about what really happened right before their eyes.  They judge history.  They sometimes need an assist from video replay, and even then it’s a challenge to reconstruct the facts of the case.  But in spite of all the barriers and difficulties, history can be known.  It just takes a little work.  The evidence demands a verdict.

Dan Brown has popularized some old legends.  He’s given an old story a contemporary spin.  He’s raised some valid questions about the abuses and distortions of religion.  If you are looking for excuses to dismiss the extraordinary claims of Jesus, you’ll find them in The Da Vinci Code.

But peel back the layers, and look for the presuppositions that drive some of the conclusions he draws.  Check other sources.  Think about the assumptions that inform the story.  And most of all, ask yourself, do I rely on thrillers and adventure stories for my history?  Do I consider Raiders of the Lost Ark to be a history lesson?

A better source these days would be the carefully researched and meticulously written and produced new film by Mel Gibson – The Passion of the Christ.

Better still, become a historian yourself.  Pursue the question of the reliability of the New Testament record.  Separate the wheat from the chaff in the historical record.  Discard the legend.  Embrace the history. 

This code is no secret.

What you find will change your life.

Posted in Valley Center, California

© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2004

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