A fiction based on falsehood

Saturday, 18th December 2004

To add to Ehrman’s catalogue of Brown’s disinformation from my area of expertise (sales of my book The Templars have risen thanks to The Da Vinci Code) I might add that the Templar church in London, like all Templar churches, was not ‘perfectly circular in honour of the sun’ as Sir Leigh Teabing claims in Brown’s novel, but in imitation of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Nor did Pope Clement V kill and inter ‘hundreds of Knights Templar’ on 13 October, 1307, burn them at the stake and throw their bodies ‘unceremoniously into the Tiber River’; they were arrested in Paris and other French cities by King Philip IV of France in defiance of the Pope who vehemently protested. Nor could the Pope have thrown the bodies into the Tiber: he was residing in Poitiers at the time.

If so many historical claims made by the characters in The Da Vinci Code are untrue one is left wondering about its author, Dan Brown. Is he ignorant, cynical or lazy, or perhaps a bit of all three? No doubt he saw promising material for a thriller in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: and no doubt the story taps today’s anti-Catholic prejudice and feminist paranoia. But by counting on ignorance and gullibility in his readers he implicitly insults them. With, say, 2.5 readers for every copy of the book (I read my son’s paperback) that makes almost 50 million dupes. Quite an achievement.

Bart Ehrman does not seem to mind. He is at pains to point out that off campus he is a regular guy who likes the movies The Last Temptation of Christ and The Life of Brian ‘almost without reserve’. He finds The Da Vinci Code as a work of fiction ‘intricate, compelling, spellbinding’ and, perhaps because he lives in that buckle of the Bible Belt, is not bothered by Brown’s slanders against Opus Dei and the Catholic Church. He also fails to pick up on a crucial contradiction: how can a church criticised for Mariolatry be said to have suppressed the ‘divine feminine’ in Christian teaching? However, Ehrman is right that the novel’s success may stimulate a wider interest in the history of the early Church and even for those who have not read The Da Vinci Code I would recommend this book.