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So Dark the Con of Man
The Phenomena Guide to the Da Vinci Code Guides - The Errors
Dateline: Monday, March 6, 2006
By: DAVID V. BARRETT
By: Author and Phenomena Senior Editor
Phenomena’s Senior Editor, David V. Barrett, continues the most comprehensive analysis anywhere of the spin-offs generated by the success of Dan Brown’s best-selling blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code.
Just a handful of the many basic factual errors made by Dan Brown:
Art scholars always call the famous artist “Leonardo”, which was his name, and never “Da Vinci”, which is the town he came from. Brown’s wife, apparently an art historian, really should have pointed this out to him…
In Chapter 8 Brown says:
He was “a flamboyant homosexual”. Wrong. In his 20s he and four other artists were anonymously accused of sodomy with an artist’s model, but they were all acquitted. There is no other evidence that he was homosexual – and being flamboyantly homosexual in 15th and 16th century Europe would not have been a bright idea.
“Da Vinci’s enormous output of breathtaking Christian art”. In reality he produced fewer than twenty paintings, and many of those were unfinished.
“Accepting hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions” – in fact, we know of one, and he didn’t even complete that.
In Chapter 55 Leigh Teabing tells Sophie that two quotations from Leonardo’s Notebooks are about the Bible. In fact “Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitude” is from his attack on necromancy or black magic, while “Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!” is actually criticising people who don’t study mathematics!
In Chapter 55 Brown says:
“More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament.” In fact there were only a handful of other gospels, and few if any of them were ever considered for the New Testament.
“The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by… Constantine” in 325 CE. In fact, the first list of the New Testament canon as we now have it was written by Bishop Athanasius in 367 CE, and the canon was not fixed until a synod in Hippo, North Africa, in 393 CE.
Until the Council of Nicaea, called by Constantine in 325 CE, “Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet”. In fact, most Christians viewed him as divine well over a century before that.
“Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible”, editing out certain material. Completely incorrect.
In Chapter 60 Brown says:
“A child of Jesus would undermine the critical notion of Christ’s divinity and therefore the Christian Church.” In fact there is no theological reason why Jesus, who mainstream Christianity believes was man as well as God, could not have had children.
“There exists a family tree of Jesus Christ” from Mary Magdalene and her daughter Sarah. There is no such thing; also, in the mediaeval French legends that tell of the Magdalene arriving in France, Sarah is her black Egyptian servant, not her daughter.
“The Sangreal documents include tens of thousands of pages of information. Eyewitness accounts of the Sangreal treasure describe it being carried in four enormous trunks.” This is complete invention.
“the legendary ‘Q’ Document – a manuscript that even the Vatican admits they believe exists… possibly written in [Jesus’] own hand… a chronicle of his ministry.” In fact, Q is a purely hypothetical document, believed by scholars to be one of the sources of Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels; it contained teachings of Jesus, but no scholar suggests it was written by him.
“The Merovingians founded Paris.” In fact the Merovingians, who were a branch of a Germanic Frankish tribe, date to the late 5th century CE; Paris was founded by a tribe called the Parisii between 250 and 200 BCE, at least 600 years earlier. And there is absolutely no genuine historical link between Jesus and the
The Priory of Sion
Merovingians.
In Chapter 23 Brown says the Priory of Sion is “one of the oldest surviving secret societies on earth”. In fact it was founded in 1956, by Pierre Plantard and a few friends. [Ed's note: This is actually an urban myth, as well - Plantard didn't found the PoS, he was only the "general secretary" to begin with and took it over when the original founders abandoned the "society"... the real story is far more interesting. And, for that matter, the Priory's logo is not the Fleur-de-lis, it's a symbol adapted from the glyph representing the Croix du Sud, incorporating the Fleur-de-lis... for very specific reasons.]
In Chapter 28 Brown repeats the old myth that five million women were burned at the stake during the Inquisition. Current scholarly thinking puts the total number at around 40,000, of whom 20-25 per cent were men, and many of them were executed in other ways.
In Chapter 37 Brown says the true goal of the Knights Templar was “to retrieve a collection of secret documents” from under the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem: “the one thing on which all academics agree is this: The Knights discovered something down there in the ruins”. In fact there is no evidence whatsoever that they even looked for anything, let alone found anything, and no academics claim they did.
In Chapter 58 Brown calls “the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea Scrolls… the earliest Christian records”, which is wrong on three counts: the Nag Hammadi texts are not scrolls, and are considerably later than the New Testament texts, while the Dead Sea Scrolls aren’t Christian at all.
In Chapter 74 Brown says that the tetragrammaton YHWH, the sacred name of God, was “derived from Jehovah”, then gives a derivation for Jehovah. This is complete twaddle. The Jews never spoke the name of God, saying Adonai (Lord) instead. The “name” Jehovah is a 16th century English invention, when a not-very-good “scholar” added the vowels from Adonai to the consonants YHWH, producing a hybrid and totally spurious name for God.
To be
David V. Barrett, author and Phenomena Senior Editor
continued...
Phenomena Senior Editor David V. Barrett is the author of The New Believers (Cassell 2001), a major study of “cults”, sects, and alternative religions, Secret Societies (Cassell/Blandford 1997), a historical analysis of the origins and beliefs of the Rosicrucians, Freemasons and other esoteric groups, and numerous other books. He is a regular book reviewer for a number of newspapers and magazines. He also writes science fiction/fantasy. When not writing, he is researching for a PhD in Sociology of Religion at the London School of Economics, U.K., or playing fretless bass in the rock-blues-jazz band Midnight. www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
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