The Da Vinci Code and the popularity of conspiracy theories

• Da Vinci Code. Given the number of people who have seen this, I have to say that I am relieved that most people I have spoken to have not been taken in by Brown’s flimsy plot.  What are the main problems?

    

  • Priory of Sion. Brown claims this as a “fact” as the outset, well aware that it is a discredited hoax, as proven by a legal trial of 1993. 
  • Jesus married? Whilst it is true that most people married in his culture there is no evidence for this in Jesus’ life. The reason is not hard to grasp: read Mark chapter 1 verses 9-18, for example, to see why Jesus might have considered marriage wholly inappropriate to his calling in life. 
  • Emperor Constantine’s Bible? Brown claims that the Bible was only cobbled together late in the 4^th century as the newly Christian emperor gave the church power. He is far too late in his dating of how and when the Bible came together and what books were recognised as authentic. 
  • Council of Nicaea.  Brown claims it was a ‘close vote’ as to whether Jesus was Divine. Firstly this was not the reason they met; secondly the vote among 200 bishops saw just 2 in opposition to the agreed statement – hardly close!
  • Brown makes lots of other claims that experts in various fields have been shown to be in error, to do with Da Vinci’s Last Supper, issues of architecture, etc.
  • In one sense, Dan Brown has set out to write a ‘ripping yarn’ but he knows that part of its appeal is that he is claiming a fresh angle on the central story of Western culture. If he were rubbishing Star Wars or the Tooth Fairy this would be no big deal. The problem is that he is attacking something that people believe to be both real and important. Some may be convinced by Brown’s clearly flawed account and so be deterred from examining the authentic story of Jesus.

• Philip Pullman. I have read his Northern Lights trilogy and also The good man Jesus & the scoundrel Christ. 

               

  • The trilogy is an increasingly thinly disguised attack on organised religion, something which becomes most barbed in the last book. While I am sure they can just be read as novels, those who have a grasp of history and language will spot his use of key words and plot devices. The ‘magisterium’ (the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrinal commission) is surely no coincidence as a choice for the evil power. The climax of the whole series with the death of God (the ‘authority’) and the reverse of ‘the Fall’ in the Garden of Eden is really a bit too obvious to miss.
  • In The good man Jesus & the scoundrel Christ Pullman really ‘takes the gloves off’! Interestingly the book relies on an old idea from early 20^th century liberal German scholarship, which tended to divide the ‘Jesus of history’ from the ‘Christ of faith’. Pullman develops this to literally create twin brothers. He basically says that Jesus was a fantastic chap who was nice to people and sacrificed his life but that his twin brother Christ pulled off a trick of ‘resurrection’ to create the myth that is Christianity today. In his re-telling of the Gospel stories, Pullman makes a number of rather simple errors too. 
  • The interesting question is why do people do this (apart from it being rather lucrative)? In Pullman’s case there seems to be a real anger against Christianity, such that I have wondered if he had a bad experience of faith at some point in his background. 

Six Big Questions                             Rev John Hibberd                     sixbigquestions@throughfaithmissions.org