The Da Vinci Deception: Excerpts #38 and #41

Book Excerpt:

38. Sometimes Langdon says that all these incredible secrets have been known for centuries by scholars, but at other times he insists that this "secret knowledge" has been cleverly covered up by the Church and nobody knows about it. How can both claims be true?

Logically, they cannot. But remember, The Da Vinci Code doesn’t have a burning interest in truth. If we read its claims not as attempts to tell truth, but as attempts to manipulate us into believing a lie, we can then understand the motivation for its many contradictions. Brown’s strategy is to intimidate the reader with his phony erudition. Then, he inflames the reader’s pride at discovering a blockbuster secret about Jesus and Christianity.

To intimidate, few things work as well as making the reader feel ignorant. And so, we see Langdon and Teabing continually delivering lectures to a wide-eyed Sophie, who (like the reader) exclaims, "What? I had no idea!" as each alleged "revelation" is unfolded. They then pat her (and us) on the head and refer to her as "dear girl" while constantly reiterating the mantra that "scholars have known all this for ages." Since most readers don’t know much about Leonardo da Vinci, the Priory of Sion, Aramaic, Greek, the Council of Nicea, or the way in which the Bible was written and assembled by the Church, they feel stupid. People of faith may feel embarrassed because whatever they say to articulate their beliefs sounds like the protests of a child who has just been shown the Santa suit in the closet and informed that "it’s all a lie."

We can see this at the heart of the novel when Teabing bluntly declares that "Many scholars claim that the early Church literally stole Jesus from His original followers." In his patronizing way, Teabing makes clear Brown’s message: "What I mean," he says, "is that almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false."

Nobody likes to feel stupid, of course. And nobody likes the feeling of being a sucker. Brown plays on these aversions with the second part of his strategy. Having persuaded you that the Christian herd is just a bunch of suckers, he offers you the chance to escape suckerdom by buying into his newly revealed "truth." If you accept his claims that "scholars have known this for ages," he promises you liberation from the mental slavery you have lived in all your life. It’s an appealing sophistry and many people fall for it. Yet, in doing so, they are actually falling prey to the manipulation they think they are escaping.


41. But isn’t the essential thing about a religion its timeless truths rather than its historical claims?

Not always. If a religion is founded on some universal moral principle such as "Abandon the desires of the flesh," it does not require roots in history. Thus, Buddhism would not be harmed if it could be proven that Buddha (i.e, Siddhartha Gautama) never existed. Why? Because the point of Buddhism is not Buddha himself but the teachings of Buddha. But religions that are essentially rooted in history—such as Judaism or Christianity—do stand or fall on the validity of their historical claims, because they are about persons, not merely ideas.

Judaism, for instance, exists because it is rooted in an historical claim: that the One God of the Universe entered into a covenant with the Jewish people through the ministry of Moses. If that claim can be shown to be false, then Judaism itself is false. Imagine if somebody wrote a book about the "real" Moses and the "secret origins" of Judaism, claiming that the entire Jewish religion is based on a pack of lies. What if it said the "historical" Moses was really a Hindu-like mystic who believed in many deities and preached tolerance and free love? He did not lead the people out of Egypt in the Exodus, did not give the Ten Commandments, performed no miracles, and gave no moral rules.

Suppose this same book claimed that, centuries later, the Jewish priests who claimed to be Moses’ successors rewrote their nation’s history and decided to give Moses an "upgrade." They turned him into a prophet who saw the one true God and spoke with Him. They then made him into a great military leader who defeated Pharaoh and led his people out of slavery. In effect, the Jewish priests created Moses in their own image—a priest like themselves—leading the people in worship and animal sacrifice. And they recast Moses as a divinely appointed moral teacher who gave the people Ten Commandments from God Himself on Mount Sinai, thus establishing the covenant with God.

Then, imagine that the book argued that the Jewish priests did all this to strengthen their own positions of power. For the priests wanted to be recognized as the divinely appointed leaders of the people, the teachers of a God-given law, and the spokesmen for God—just like the Moses they invented. So in the end, many core Jewish beliefs are really based on lies told by these power-hungry priests who successfully duped the people in their efforts to solidify their political control over Israel. And many Jews have fallen for the "legend of Moses" ever since.

Such a book would be widely condemned as being anti-Semitic and a direct assault on Judaism—and rightly so. But when Dan Brown comes out with an anti-Catholic conspiracy theory novel, we are assured that "It’s just a story!" As Philip Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, has recently argued, anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable American prejudice (see Phillip Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, Oxford University Press, 2003). The phenomenal success of a book like The Da Vinci Code bears this out.