The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (6 page)

AND WE HAVE KILLED HIM!

The Da Vinci Code
lifts another extensive complex of spurious data relating to ancient Templar discoveries and the mystery of Rennes-le-Château from yet another pair of authors, Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger.
¹⁸
Like most others in this genre,
The Tomb of God
concerns itself with the mystery of a nineteenth-century village priest named Bergier
Sauniere
(used as the name of Dan Brown’s murdered museum curator), who is said to have discovered four (or five) parchments within an old pillar while his church was being renovated. He eventually took these documents to Paris and had their cryptic Latin translated. Hitherto poor as a church mouse, the Abbé Sauniere returned home a very wealthy man. The speculations offered in most of these books is that the priest had found a treasure map and decoded it, unearthing a fabulous trove of golden treasure brought back from Jerusalem by the Knights Templar—or else he discovered documentation of some shocking truth he was able to use in order to blackmail the Roman Catholic Church. One of the first things he did with his newfound funds was to spruce up his church in hideous bad taste, including some possibly heretical, Rosicrucian-tilting decorations. Our various authors see in this detail a sure sign of the priest’s occult sympathies. All this is familiar from
The Da Vinci Code
.

Another of the priest’s purchases was of copies of three paintings, traced down by Andrews and Schellenberger, which, as their painstaking analysis demonstrates, embody complex Platonic-Pythagorean geometric forms. Andrews and Schellenberger next turn their attention to the parchments discovered by Sauniere. There is no pretense or claim that these Latin texts represent ancient scriptures or the like. No, they are of admittedly recent vintage and convey, to the knowing eye, a set of geometric and verbal puzzles referring back to the three paintings. Someone had cracked a code, and it turned out that all these enigmatic charts and hints were pieces of a map of the Languedoc area. Scrutiny of a fourteenth-century Templar map of Jerusalem disclosed the use of the same underlying geometric cipher. This discovery led our researchers to the conclusion that the three eighteenth-century painters, some of whom are known to have had Hermetic or occultist connections anyway (such things were then quite chic), were in touch with an ancient geometric code. It may have been one of many bits of classical learning rediscovered among the Arabs by the Templar Knights on their tour of duty in Jerusalem and its environs. None of this is unreasonable.

Nonspecialists (like me!) are in no position to evaluate the geometrical and art-historical claims made in these pages. Robert A. diCurcio vouches for both the existence of the Platonic geometrical code and the widespread, centuries-spanning use of it in both ancient paintings not discussed in
The Tomb of God
and in canvasses by Vermeer, disclosing hidden maps of Jerusalem and southern France.
¹⁹
The question for us, however, is what any of this has to do with the contention of Andrews and Schellenberger later on that the treasure to which these enigmatic clues lead is
the tomb containing the earthly remains of Jesus
! Andrews and Schellenberger guess (hypothesize is too restrained a word) that either Jesus survived crucifixion and fled Palestine for less-hostile territory, where he carried on his ministry. Or, equally as likely as far as they are concerned, the Templars, in the course of their excavations beneath the ruins of Herod’s temple, discovered the burial place of Jesus and decided to bring the holy relics back home to France. From this we see that the possible, even plausible, existence of a “Da Vinci code” hidden in his paintings (or the canvasses of others) is one thing. What it points to is quite another.

Perhaps the most fascinating hint they produce concerns the decipherment of a motto appearing in one of the relevant paintings, Nicolas Poussin’s
Les Bergers d’Arcadie
(“Shepherds of Arcadia”), where we see, chiseled into the lintel of a tomb, the words
ET IN ARCADIA EGO
. The phrase, which figures significantly in Dan Brown’s novel, is usually rendered something like, “I am present in Arcadia, too.” In this case, the sentiment is Kierkegaardian, a chill whiff of a reminder that even in Paradise death intrudes. Actually, even this reading would comport with Andrews’s and Schellenberger’s theory, if one were to take the phrase as the words of Jesus, meaning, “Though risen in heaven, I am also buried in Arcadia.” But they are still more imaginative. If one reads the line as an anagram, it comes out ARCAM DEI TANGO: “I touch the tomb of God.” This would leave four letters left over: E, I, S, U, reshuffled to form “Iesu,” or Jesus!

One must take care never to dismiss a radical theory simply
because
it is radical and would require a realignment of belief and assumption if accepted. Sounding outlandish is no argument against a theory. The real problem with the theological blackmail scenario posited by
The Da Vinci Code
;
The Tomb of God
; and
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
and the rest is this ill-founded assumption that the Templars, or the Masons, or whoever, could have sat on their secret, holding it in store as a trump card to disprove the doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is easy for a modern writer to imagine such a thing, for it rings true as a piece of a good mystery novel. But if one actually thinks out the implications of any attempt to cash in on this, to spill the beans and topple the Catholic Church, it immediately becomes apparent that the whole endeavor would be wasted effort. Who would believe such an announcement? Whoever made it would be considered insane. And, again, what hope could the keepers of the body have had of corroborating their claim?

Dan Brown borrows from Andrews and Schellenberger a groundwork of religious history and theological warfare that would make sense of some Templar grave-robbing scheme. Our authors seem to know they must make it sound reasonable that Christians, even heretical ones, would have thought it a
good idea
to announce the discovery of the corpse of Jesus! In their view, possession of the dead body of Jesus would be the vindicating token of a suppressed kind of Christianity for which Jesus Christ was a simple human being, albeit a great one, whose teachings have been lost behind the stained-glass curtain of his divinity, a later and artificial corruption of the historical truth by the Roman Church. Notions like Jesus’s inherent divinity, his incarnation, virgin birth, and resurrection they dismiss as inventions by Paul (already a Catholic?) intended to lift Jesus and his achievements beyond the capacity of mere human beings. The point was to reduce people to passive servitude to the institutional church, which could declare them “original sinners” and forgive them at the price of fealty and quiescence. If we were to excavate the site where Jesus’s bones lie buried and expose his lack of resurrection, our authors claim with hushed tones, maybe it would not be too late to restore to our generation the sort of freethinking self-help faith that the real Jesus preached.

But this is all hopeless confusion. It has been clear to critical New Testament scholars ever since Ferdinand Christian Baur in the nineteenth century that, far from being the charter of Catholic orthodoxy, the Pauline Epistles are among the most important roots of Gnosticism!
²⁰
By contrast, the Catholic Church represents a dilution of the Pauline faith with the Torah piety of Judaism. Catholicism is seen by many as a declension from Paulinism, while genuine Pauline emphases continued on primarily in the forms of Gnosticism and Marcionism.
²¹
And while Gnosticism did encourage spiritual self-liberation and innovation, it certainly was not friendly to the simple humanity or mortality of Jesus! For Gnostics the human Jesus, if he even existed and was not some sort of a holographic phantom, was merely the unimportant channeler for the Christ spirit, who spoke through him. What Brown and his literary-theological mentors are really interested in, it sounds like, is the victory of Liberal Protestantism or Unitarianism, a vaguely religious philosophy that will happily quote the maxims of a human Jesus and will rejoice equally to be rid of dogmas that make him an oppressive theological abstraction. The irony is: What a subtle and tortuous path one must trace, over geometrical chasms and around historical mountains, to obtain the key to this supposedly commonsensical piety! Whose is the simple faith here?

CODE AND CODEX

Finally, some have alleged an unwarranted degree of borrowing by Dan Brown in
The Da Vinci Code
from a 1983 novel by Lewis Perdue, revised for 2004 republication as
The Da Vinci Legacy
. As one compares the two novels, it does start to look as if Brown may have picked up some ideas from the earlier work, but there is nothing wrong with that, nor is there any question of plagiarism. We would be considerably poorer without various literary works that were conceived when their authors read other people’s work and reflected, “That was a good idea, but the author might have done better with it! Well, there’s nothing stopping
me
!”

What are the points of similarity? Well, for one thing, the phrase “the Da Vinci Codex” appears a few times in Perdue’s book, referring to a newly discovered notebook of Da Vinci containing designs for a dangerous superweapon. But the similarity between “code” and “codex” is as unimportant as any casual pun. Brown’s interest in Da Vinci focuses on his painting and the esoteric knowledge supposedly hinted in it, while Perdue concentrates instead on the artist’s famous prescience, hatching the basic designs of later inventions such as the airplane, the submarine, and the bicycle. Both mystery plots involve the early murder of three experts who had enjoyed privileged access to the coveted Da Vinci information, as well as their murder by a fanatic who appears to be carrying out orders from a secret cabal within the Catholic Church. In both books, it turns out that the Catholic schemers had nothing to do with the deaths. Perdue made up his arch-conservative Catholics, the Elect Brothers of St. Peter (whose founders included the literal bastard son of the apostle!). Brown’s, on the other hand, are the very real Catholic renewal group Opus Dei (“the work of God”). As one reads Brown, one is first inclined to accuse him of Catholic-bashing, but, as any reader of Brown knows, by the end of the book we discover that Opus Dei is innocent, off the hook. There was instead a single, hidden mastermind.

Lewis Perdue even has the element of a secret involving holy relics that, if disclosed, would threaten to turn the Catholic Church upside down. But, unlike many of the pseudoscholarly tomes already reviewed, the body in question is not that of Jesus, nor even that of Mary Magdalene, but rather that of Simon Peter. It seems that the Elect Brothers long ago spirited away the Petrine carcass from its resting place beneath Saint Peter’s Basilica and substituted some unremarkable non-apostolic bones. However, it is more than doubtful whether such news would disturb anyone a fraction as much as the Vatican II reforms did! As if sensing this, Perdue no sooner mentions the theft among the other fiendish pranks of the Elect Brotherhood than he drops it to move on to far more nefarious things—like whisking Adolf Hitler away from his flaming bunker and hosting him in their monastery till his
real
death in 1957 (a year earlier than the movie
Hellboy
has him die!).

At most, as in the case of the other books surveyed here, we may posit that Dan Brown was influenced by Lewis Perdue’s book. But there’s nothing untoward about that. The public is too quick to think, in these litigious times, of charges like those made against Stephen Spielberg, that he read some nonentity’s idea for a movie, said “no thanks,” and then went on to steal the idea and cheat the true creator out of her due rewards. This is hardly the same sort of thing. Both books were published; both authors made money. And Brown has not plagiarized from Perdue. Besides, the common ideas are neither very distinctive nor even central to the plots.

In this chapter, I have tried to do what Dan Brown’s Professor Teabing does for his guests in
The Da Vinci Code
, providing the reader a quick introduction to that body of scholarship underlying the Teabing hypothesis. None of it is original to Brown, just as his mouthpiece Teabing freely admits none of it is original with him. But I have taken the liberty of providing a bit more detailed introduction to the shelf of pseudoscholarly works in question in order to show just how arbitrary, ill-informed, and distorted the whole business is. Please note that I have never once discounted an idea because it is unorthodox or unsettling in some way, as if these things counted against a theory. (As for some people they do!) All I ask is some evidence and some idea of what can feasibly be done with it. Where shocking notions in these books do have an evidential basis, I am not reluctant to say so, and in the next chapters I will further examine some of these, and not at all negatively.

NOTES

1
Dan Brown,
The Da Vinci Code
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 1.

2
Robert Richardson, “The Priory of Sion Hoax,”
Alpheus: Site for Esoteric History
[online],
http://www.alpheus.org/html/articles/esoteric_history/richardson1.html
.

3
As such, they are only the most recent in a long chain of Templar-related forgeries. See Peter Partner,
The Murdered Magicians: The Templars and Their Myth
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 103, 135, 140, 146, 161-63.