Dan Brown has written an absorbing mystery; the kind of story that keeps one glued to the book until it is finished. The book, The Da Vinci Code, contains the deciphering of codes, a unique rewriting of religious history and a decidedly postmodern view of truth with an overcast of medieval and primitive images. The story begins with the murder of Jacques Sauniere, the curator of the Louvre in Paris. As the curator is dying, he leaves behind several cryptic messages, including the strange position of his own body. With the unfolding of the many puzzles the plot of the story unfolds. As the two main protagonists, Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology, and Sophie Neveu, who works for the Paris Department of Cryptology, follow the continuing trail of mysterious codes the reader is barraged by an alternative view of Christian history. Perhaps, because the author concentrates on so many mysteries, codes and audacious religious histories, the characters of the story are rather weak and underdeveloped. The novel is full of fantastically told stories of the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar. The Gnostic Gospels are used as factual material about the beginning of Christianity. Brown's alternative views of Christian history include his opinion that Jesus Christ was supposedly married to Mary Magdalene and propagated a family, which, according to the story line, continues to survive in Europe and England. Purportedly, both Jesus and Mary were intent on promulgating a primitive goddess religion rather than the orthodoxy of the historical Christian church.

Few historians would take any of the supposed facts of the novel seriously, but many non-historians are confused about the information in the story. This is partly because Brown states in his list of facts, before the story begins, that, “All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” One important part of the story, the secret surrounding the Holy Grail, is intertwined with the history of the Knights Templar. Brown, in his novel, portrays them as a group formed to find secret documents about the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the supposed worship of the divine feminine purportedly connected to Mary Magdalene. The author refers to someone he calls a French King, Godefroi de Bouillon. Brown writes that Bouillon had created a secret organization called, “The Priory of Sion,” and was also the founder of the order of the Knights Templar. In reality, Godefroi, (Godfrey) de Bouillon was the Duke of Lower Lorraine who led, with his brother Baldwin, one of the four military units that participated in the first Crusade.1 The nobles who conquered Jerusalem elected Godfrey ruler and he took the name of “Advocate (or lay-protector) of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.” However, when Godfrey died, his brother Baldwin later took the title of King of Jerusalem. Godfrey died sometime before 1100 A.D., and the Templars were founded later in 1119.2 Their order was formed as one of the monastic military orders whose members both fought and cared for others during the crusades.3 The Templars existing alongside another military order, the Knights Hospitallers, built large castle-like fortresses for protection since they were few in number.

Brown is right when he writes that the Knights Templar became wealthy in the later Middle Ages, but his statements about the events surrounding their wealth as well as their demise are not factual. Suggesting that at first the Catholic Church helped the Templars amass wealth as a means of keeping them silent about the marriage of Jesus and Mary and the early church's supposed worship of the divine feminine, Brown writes:

A “law unto themselves” is Brown's interpretation. He seems unaware, that many monastic orders since the time of the Cluniac order, 910, have been placed directly under the Pope as a means of keeping the orders pure. While it did not always help, it was meant as a way of keeping rich Lords and Kings from unduly influencing the monastic orders. St Berno, the founder of the Cluny monastic order, and the lay founder, William the Pious, sought for more uniformity and accountability among the Cluniac monasteries. By placing the monasteries directly under the Pope, a hierarchical system was devised that was meant to preserve the pure intentions of the movement. No one outside of the Cluniac system could interfere, but each monastery was subject to a motherhouse and that house's abbot.4 Such a system was intended to preserve the spirituality of the order not to cover up information.

Brown goes on to have his protagonist, Langdon, state that in the fourteenth century, Pope Clement V, with some help from King Phillip IV of France, “ingeniously planned” a “sting operation to quash the Templars and seize their treasure, thus taking control of the secrets held over the Vatican (159).” The reality is that King Phillip of France was the real instigator of this infamous event of the Templars history, since Pope Clement V was under the thumb of the French king. This began the so-called “ Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy. Beginning with Clement V, the Popes, from 1309 to 1377, would reside at Avignon. As Kenneth Scot Latourette points out the kings of France were often the dominating ruler, above the Pope, during this period.5 In fact, the king kidnapped Boniface, the pope preceding Clement, in a dispute over Phillip's taxation of the church. Boniface escaped but his health was broken and he died not long after his ordeal.6 Noting the riches of the Templars' order, King Phillip had his police arrest the Templars and read accusations against them trumped up by a man who had given the accusations to the king's council. This was in 1305; the Pope, ailing and old, intervened citing `right of clergy,' and the investigation went on for seven more years. In the end Phillip, by calling for a council of states at Tours and obtaining a decree against the Templars, pressured Clement, who by this time was dying, to take action against them.7 Some of the Templars survived and Henri Daniel-Rops notes that in Portugal they were known as the `Milita of Christ,' later assisting “Henry the Navigator to undertake his great voyages of discovery.”8 The end of the Templars as a strong order in Europe and elsewhere was not an advantage for the Roman church; rather, it was one of the signs of the decline of the Church as a ruling power since it marked the elevation of king's and state's authority over popes.9

More damaging than his misuse of history is Brown's slurs concerning the Knights Templars' method of worship. He has joined forces with those who misrepresented the Templars in the fourteenth century and those who have done so since. While Brown does not have his characters say the Templars spat on the crucifix or engaged in homosexual orgies as their original accusers did, he does have Langdon explain their worship in a manner that would have, undoubtedly, caused the monastic brothers sorrow and outrage. Both Langdon and another character, Teabing, insist the Templars worshiped “Baphomet” a fertility god, “by encircling a stone replica of his head and chanting prayers.” Teabing states, “The ceremony honored the creative magic of sexual union (316).” Furthermore, in Brown's reworking of the story of Jesus, this is the main emphasis on worship, sexual union between a man and a woman with the important point being the uplifting of the divine feminine. Langdon explains to Sophie the importance of sexual union as a means of experiencing God. He states:

Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine. Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis-knowledge of the divine. Since the days of Isis, sex rites had been considered man's only bridge from earth to heaven. (308)

Langdon further states that the Jews also worshiped using sexual union in Solomon's Temple with the aid of priestesses. According to Brown, using the voice of Langdon, the Temple was the house not only for God but, “also His powerful female equal, Shekinah.”(309) Brown attempts to center any knowledge about Jesus within a fictional religion that involves and absorbs ancient Judaism, pagan goddesses, and ancient fertility rites. There are two blatant errors Brown has made with his view of religion and sexual rites. First, Brown has not and cannot establish any historical connection between ancient pagan goddesses and Jesus and Mary Magdalene nor can he place the goddesses in any modern or medieval time frame. Second he cannot so easily turn the Jewish faith and its history into a pagan religion as he has attempted to do. These two errors will be explored in turn.

Brown has merged a fiction of the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene with a nineteenth century fiction that pagan goddess worship was a continuing, but underground system in Europe during the middle ages and even into contemporary times. However, according to Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, the belief that pagan society and the worship of the goddess had survived into modern times began with Victorian writers and folklore societies in England. In untangling this historical web, Hutton cites the work of Gillian Bennett and Mary Beard and then adds his own research. Evidently those who conducted folklore research from 1870 to 1970 used a model that depended on an evolutionary theory as well as comparative method. As Hutton puts it when explaining Bennett's research, “Folk customs, therefore, could represent cultural fossils, left over from the earlier stages of civilized societies, and a comparative study of them could provide a general theory of religious development for the human race.”10 Hutton's addition to this was the concept of German Romanticism searching for a national identity in folk customs hopefully wedded to the ancient past.11 Mary Beard's work focused on Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough and his method of writing religious history by using the comparative method.12 Hutton adds to Beards study the understanding that both Frazer and another folklorist, Sir Edward Tylor, intended to “discredit religion in general, and Christianity in particular, in order to assist the progress of humanity towards a more perfect rationalism.”13

The end result of the comparative and evolutionary model of religious research by folklorist was a forced picture of the reasons for rural celebrations and religious practices. Many practices were misinterpreted to fit the model of a fossil of some ancient ritual or as a reference to some ancient person, god or goddess. For example, Hutton writes of how in the first issue of the Folk-Lore Society, in 1890, Sidney Hartland interpreted “the legend of Lady Godiva as an example of a pagan fertility rite later converted into an occasion for Christian civic pride.”14 Hutton gives a long list of misinterpretations given by folklorists of the day. The list accumulates until it reaches the incredulous work of a “distinguished academic expert in Near Eastern Religion, S.H. Hooke, who suggested that pancake-tossing had been a magical rite to make crops grow, that Shrove Tuesday football matches had begun as ritual struggles representing the forces of dark and light, and that Mother's Day was a relic of the worship of the ancient Corn Mother.”15

Additionally a belief that all ancient societies worshiped a mother goddess, manifested in various regional goddesses, was wedded to this way of understanding local culture. Goddesses were imagined in places they had never been. Hutton traces this through the literature of the nineteenth century to a French archaeologist, Joseph Dechelette who “proposed that the cult of the Great Goddess had been conceived in the Neolithic of Asia Minor and the Balkans and carried thence across the Mediterranean to the whole Stone Age Western Europe.” Additionally, Dechelette conceived of her as having been visualized both as a giver of life and fertility and as a giver of death and rebirth; a light and a dark goddess.”16 Hutton explains how poets, novelists, and various intellectual thinkers of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth carried on the concept of a Great Mother Goddess who was known worldwide under various names. Robert Graves' book, The White Goddess was and is one of the more influential books in promoting this view of the goddess, especially among adherents of modern Witchcraft. 17 But the academic world connected with paganism sometime before the 1990's and most pagan academics and those who read them see the view that there was a continuing line of paganism from the distant past through the Middle Ages to modern times as a myth.18 To put it another way, there were goddesses in the distant past such as the goddess Freya worshiped by ancient Norse pagans, and there are pagans today who worship the ancient goddesses, including Freya, in various ways. However, there were no continuing worshipers of these various goddesses within Christian civilization during the middle ages.

The idea that sexual rituals were performed in Solomon's Temple or that a female deity shared honor with Jehovah is particularly disturbing because Brown has to shove aside the Jewish tradition of monotheism, the teaching of Torah and the ministry of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible in order to make such a statement. He portrays the Jewish people in France protecting Mary Magdalene and her baby, but he turns their community into a pagan society by misrepresenting their religious history. The reality of sexual rites and Jewish worship is that Israel in her early history struggled between the worship of the one true God, Yehweh, and the gods and goddesses of the nations surrounding her. She was warned by God not to do, “what is done in the land of Egypt where you lived, nor are you to do what is done in the land of Canaan where I am bringing you; you shall not walk in their statutes (Leviticus 18:3).” This included both immoral living and false worship. The choice was between those who held to the view of God's self-revelation that, “The Lord is our God, the Lord is one (Deut. 6:4b),”and those who worshiped the gods and goddesses. The divide was always between worshiping the one true God, who demanded acts of kindness and charity, and worshiping false gods and goddesses, whose worship included sexual ritual and at times even child sacrifice. K. A. Kitchens names the gods and goddesses of Canaan which included Baal and the goddesses Asherah and Astarte who “had multi-coloured personalities of sex and war.” He writes of the religious practices of the Canaanites, whom the Israelites and their brothers in Judah emulated, that it “appealed to the bestial and material in human nature.”19

The Jewish prophets thundered against Israel and Judah's apostasy to other deities as well as her disregard for the poor, the oppressed and the foreigner living in their land. The same prophet who denounces Judah with the words, “The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and women knead dough to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods in order to spite me [the Lord], (Jeremiah. 7:18) also pleads with the people to “not oppress the alien, the orphan, or the widow (Jeremiah 7:6a).” The same evil king, Manasseh, who set up alters in the house of the Lord for the host of heaven and made his son pass through the fire to a false god, who practiced witchcraft and used divination as well as dealing with mediums and spiritists, who set up a carved image of Asherah in the house of God and placed male prostitutes in the Lord's house, was also the one who “shed very much innocent blood until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another (2 Kings 21: 5-7b; 23:6).” The biblical writers show the sinfulness that existed in Israel and Judah when it pictures both the sin of false worship and the oppression of others, and that is a warning meant for all of humanity. It is often those who reject the history of the Jewish people or attempt to change it that throw away the ethics that are encased in the prophetic message and the law. Brown's mystery is an example. Brown honors sexual ritual as a proper means of worship while his book, The Da Vinci Code, has little human quality or moral viewpoint; only the mysteries are important. In truth, the story transports the reader on a search for clue after clue, until the need to know keeps one on the edge almost in frustration. This, of course, works well in a book written by one who uses gnostic stories as an authoritative view of early church history. That is, Brown sees, as the authoritative spokespersons for the stories about Jesus and Mary Magdalene as well as the early church, those who held a belief that knowledge, (gnosis), was a means to salvation.

The characters, Langdon and Teabing, attempt to prove to Sophie the truth of their tales about Mary Magdalene and the goddess by discrediting the New Testament and elevating several gnostic gospels to a place of authority. Brown's basic assumption, through the mouth of his characters, is that the Roman emperor Constantine “commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels [gnostic gospels] that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those gospels [New Testament] that made Him godlike (233-34).” The truth is that the Gnostics were not at all interested in Jesus' human traits; in many gnostic gospels there is no hint of his personality or his deeds, only a record of his sayings. This was because most Gnostics believed the material world was evil and unimportant. In most gnostic gospels, where Christ is mentioned, he is simply a phantom or spirit who descends on the man Jesus and leaves as Jesus dies. The man, Jesus, in the gnostic gospels is not important but is simply a means to an end, he is a vessel used to hold Christ. The Gnostic Christ has no humanity. It is in the New Testament that Jesus Christ is seen as both human and divine. He hungers yet overloads a fishing boat with a bountiful catch. He weeps because of the death of a friend and is compassionate while he heals the sick and raises the dead. He eats and sleeps, but walks on water and stills the storm. He dies yet rises physically to life. He suffers while redeeming humanity.

a dualism that opposed the transcendent God and an ignorant demiurge (often a caricature of the OT Jehovah).” In some systems the creation of the world resulted from the presumption of Sophia (Wisdom). The material creation, including the body, was regarded as inherently evil. Sparks of divinity, however, had been encapsuled in the bodies of certain pneumatic or spiritual individuals, who were ignorant of their celestial origins. The transcendent God sent down a redeemer, who brought them salvation in the form of secret gnosis.

“The Gospel of Phillip” belongs to the Valentinian type of gnosticism. Valentinus was a gnostic teacher who wrote around 140 AD. He emphasized the idea that some humans contained sparks of divinity. He divided humanity into three classes, “hylics, or unbelievers immersed in nature and the flesh; psychics, or common Christians who lived by faith; and pneumatics or spiritual Gnostics.” 20 Ben Witherington places the date of “The Gospel of Phillip,” in the early or late third century.21 He places The Gospel of Mary in the second century.22 In “The Gospel of Mary,” Mary Magdalene refers to differing powers, such as ignorance, which she tells the disciples the soul passes as it ascends. Like all gnostic texts this one implies the soul must overcome ignorance and other powers as well as the material world and one must look within to accomplish this. Allegedly, this gnostic view of salvation is part of the secret knowledge Mary was given by Jesus.23 However, neither the teachings nor the dating of these gnostic texts gives them any standing as truthful history about the life or teachings of Jesus. First, their gnostic doctrines contradict the whole Jewish background of the early church. Once again the Hebrew Bible and Jewish history come under attack. Secondly, these texts were written much later than the authentic texts of the New Testament. Finally, Brown's assertion that Constantine was the one who selected the texts and produced the New Testament has no basis in history. The fact is that Constantine had nothing to do with choosing the books of the New Testament. The books of the New Testament did not receive their status as the official canon at the Council of Nicaea, but at the Synod of Hippo in 393 and this “was re-promulgated by the Third Synod of Carthage” four years later.24 And it is certain the books were not canonized without first having been recognized by the Christian church as possessing authority. As F.F. Bruce writes:

There is a distinction between the canonicity of a book of the Bible and its authority. Its canonicity is dependent upon its authority. For when we ascribe canonicity to a book we simply mean that it belongs to the canon or list. But why does it so belong? Because it was recognized as possessing special authority. People frequently speak and write as if the authority with which the books of the Bible are invested in the minds of the Christians is the result of their having been included in the sacred list. But the historical fact is the other way about; they were and are included in the lists because they were acknowledged as authoritative. 25

In a continuing focus on Constantine and the Nicaea Council, Brown states that until the Council, Christians believed that Jesus was only a man, not a god. In truth, the Council of Nicaea was called to settle the Arian controversy. Arius, against the church of his day, insisted that Jesus was a created being, lower than the Father, and certainly not God. Contrary to Brown's opinion, the church had always maintained that Jesus Christ was Lord. That is the first creed of the church found in the New Testament. For instance, after the resurrection of Jesus, when Thomas sees the places where Christ had been wounded in his hands and side, he says to him, “My Lord and my God (John 20:28).” Paul writing to Timothy states: “By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness: He who was revealed in the flesh, was vindicated in the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory (1 Timothy 3:16).” Paul corresponding with the church at Philippi, writes of Jesus, “who, though He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men (Philippians 2:3,4). Writing to the church at Colossae, Paul warns them, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form (Colossians 2:8,9). The Council of Nicaea simply settled the question, maintaining the biblical witness that Jesus Christ is, “very God of very God.”

In Sayers' mystery, the truth was, Potty Peake did see ropes he just misinterpreted their meaning. Reading a mystery that includes medieval and ancient church history, as well as the figures of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is very satisfying when the historical facts do not get so entangled with fantasy. Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael mysteries as well as Umberto Eco's The Name of The Rose are proof that mystery mixed with truthful history makes excellent reading. In fact, reading mysteries can even be a spiritual activity, as Eugene Peterson points out in his book on spiritual reading. He writes that we may like mysteries because, “right and wrong, so often obscured in the ambiguities of everyday living, are cleanly, delineated in the murder mystery. The story gives us moral and intellectual breathing room when we are about to be suffocated in the hot air and heavy panting of relativism and subjectivism.” 27 If Peterson is right and I believe he is, The Da Vinci Code fails in so many ways. The book is too much like the postmodern, American way of life, running here and there in the dead of night, never stopping until every new fad and every bit of religious landscape is explored. When the reader is finished the truth is buried and the reader is exhausted.