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By Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel
Afrequent question asked by readers of Dan Brown’s The Da
Vinci Code is “How much of the novel’s depiction of historical
events, people, artwork, and institutions is correct.” The short
answer is “Not much.” In fact, the only thing more amazing than
Brown’s consistent misrepresentation of facts is a widespread
acceptance of his claims, with both reviewers and readers praising
the “research” and “knowledge” supposedly evident in his
novel. The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci
Code examines, in much detail, the lengthy list of claims made in
the Code. Here is a brief look at just a few of the claims made in
Brown’s novel and on his web site.
One of Brown’s “bizarre true facts” is that Opus Dei
exists and “has recently completed construction of a $47
million, 133,000-square-foot American Headquarters at 243
Lexington Avenue in New York City.” Why this is considered
bizarre is, well, bizarre. Far more bizarre than the existence
of a personal prelature of the Catholic Church - erroneously
described as a “a church” in the Code - is the character
of a murderous albino Opus Dei monk. Never mind
that Opus Dei is not a religious order and that it consists of
mostly lay people, with less than 2% of its members being
priests. As others have noted, Brown’s mythical Opus Dei
has simply taken the place of the Jesuits, an ordercommonly
depicted as murderous, vile, and corrupt by anti-Catholics writing in the 1800s and well into the 1900s.
The Da Vinci Code states that over a three hundred period
in the medieval era, the Catholic Church was responsible
for burning a total of five million women at the stake.
That’s quite a bit off of the best current estimate of 30,000 to
50,000 of men and women killed during the four hundred
years from 1400 to 1800—certainly a significant number,
but not comparable to the Holocaust or Stalin’s purges.
Many of those deaths didn’t involve burning. Witches were
hanged, strangled, and beheaded as well. In addition,
witch-hunting was not woman-hunting: at least twenty
percent of all suspected witches were male. Despite what
the novel clams, midwives were not especially targeted; nor
were witches liquidated as obstacles to professionalized
medicine and mechanistic science.
Another glaring error is found in character Robert
Langdon’s explanation of the origin of the tetragrammaton—
YHWH (pronounced as Yahweh)— the sacred name
of God, which observant Jews believe should not be
uttered. Langdon claims that YHWH comes from the name
Jehovah, which he insists is an androgynous union between
“the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve,
Havah”. Aquick trip to the encyclopedia (or theological dictionary,
if you prefer) shows that Langdon is wildly off the
mark. The name “Jehovah” didn’t even exist until the thirteenth
century at the earliest (and wasn’t common until the
sixteenth century), and is an English word. It was created
by artificially combining the consonants of YHWH (or
JHVH) and the vowels of Adonai (which means “Lord”), the
name substituted for YHWH in the Old Testament by Jews.
The Hebrew—not “pre-Hebraic”—word for Eve is hawwâ,
(pronounced “havah”), which means “mother of all living”.
There is absolutely nothing androgynous about any of this,
but that dubious assertion is in keeping with the neognostic
flavor of the novel.
Possibly Brown’s silliest mistake about the Templars is
charging that Pope Clement V not only burnt hundreds of
Templars but had their ashes “tossed unceremoniously into
the Tiber River”. That the statement is put in the mouth of
his “Royal Historian” character, Teabing, only adds to its
irony. The largest burnings of Templars actually took place
in Paris, with smaller holocausts in three other French cities
and possibly Cyprus. There’s no record of Knights burnt at
Rome. In any event, the pope couldn’t have dumped any
remains in the Tiber since he resided at Avignon in southern
France and not in Rome. Also, the Templars had nothing
to do with gothic architecture, despite Brown’s claims
that they had everything to do with it.
The Code claims that the Merovingians founded Paris.
Nope. This is a mistake no educated Parisian would make,
inasmuch as Paris was originally a Gallic village called
Lutetia Parisiorum that was expanded into a city by the
Romans.
On and on it goes, with faulty and often blatantly incorrect
statements about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the Vatican,
paganism, early Christianity, medieval Christianity, modern
day Catholicism, the life and work of Leonardo, secret
societies, the origins of the English language, Constantine,
and much more. ✥
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