ONE DOESN'T READ THE PROTOCOLS TO FIND OUT ABOUT JEWRY:

Debunking "The Code" (Philip W. Eaton, 6/18/06, THE SEATTLE TIMES)

[I]n an interview with Matt Lauer on the "Today" show, Dan Brown, the author of "The Da Vinci Code," says quite nonchalantly that "all of it is based on historic fact." Brown is consistently portrayed by the media and by his own self-promotion as a thorough and meticulous researcher. "The only thing fictional in the book are the characters," Brown says to Linda Wertheimer on NPR. "Everything else is factual."

Rather than "just a rollicking good bit of entertainment," apparently the author of the novel wants to strike a different posture, the pose that we are about to encounter the truthful retelling of the Christian story. [...]

But can we get historical accuracy from this novel? It might be helpful to start with some of the simpler "facts" found on the very first page of the book. The first word in the book is the word "fact," implying that what we are about to experience is based on fact. Brown claims on this page, for example, that descriptions about a mysterious secret society called the Priory of Sion are fact. In addition, at an even simpler level, Brown proudly touts sophisticated accuracy in his descriptions of architecture, detail that does indeed provide some of the delight and texture of the novel. But can we go along with the author that we are entering the realm of fact and accuracy?

N.T. Wright, the great British New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop, says the stories about the Priory of Sion are "really forgeries cooked up by three zany Frenchmen in the 1950s. They cheerfully confessed to this in a devastating television program shown on British television in February this year."

Wright goes on to note quite playfully that the "accurate" descriptions of Westminster Abbey, for example, are blatantly distorted and could have been corrected with a 10-minute walk through this glorious structure. Wright should know — he occupied an office as canon theologian at Westminster for a number of years.

"If Brown is so careless," Wright asks, "and carelessly inventive, in details as easy to check as those, why should we trust him in anything else?" N.T. Wright is among the finest Christian scholars of our day and says quite clearly that "the deepest irony" about the book "is that it portrays itself as historically rooted, when it is a tissue of fantasy."

"Any picture of Jesus," he adds, must "be produced by serious and sober historical scholarship." The claims to fact in "The Da Vinci Code" are quite simply "all pure imagination." [...]

He also presents as fact a total misunderstanding of what happened at the Council of Nicea in 325, where he supposes that Constantine suppressed the real truth in order to solidify power.

While all of this is too complicated for this short space, the historical sequence presented by Brown is totally out of whack, the texts he honors come centuries after Christ, and the record is entirely silent on some of Brown's key assumptions. The real story, by the way, is as intriguing and intellectually exciting as anything presented in the novel, but it isn't what Brown portrays it to be.

Having not read the book, it was surprising how easily Bart Ehrman, himself a skeptic of the Christ tale, annihilated Dan Brown.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2006 9:30 AM