Intellectual Suicide in the Name of Matriarchy 
A Review of "The Da Vinci Code" 

By Rick Pearcey

The plot of this best-selling novel by Dan Brown begins with murder in Paris at the Louvre. But before dying, the victim leaves encoded clues about the killing and the ultimate issues at stake, and these codes send the book's main characters on a consciousness-raising scavenger hunt that must be nirvana for crossword puzzle enthusiasts, feminists, and charter members of the conspiracy-of-the-month club.

From the opening page, the book asks readers to take its basic thesis seriously -- namely, that just about everything you were taught about Christianity in Sunday School is false. You may think that Jesus claimed to be God (and is God), but no, what we know today as the divinity of Jesus is really the result of a political power play by Constantine (A.D. 280-337), the emperor of the Western Roman Empire.

As politicians are wont to do, Constantine was seeking ways to maintain power, and he understood that paganism was fading and that Christianity was likely the next major player in history, so he caught the wave and used the Christian religion to help unify his constituency and solidify his powerbase. Jesus was a great prophet, says the book, but it was Constantine who elevated him to deity and had it all wrapped up theologically by orchestrating the outcome of the Council of Nicaea (325).

According to this book, Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene (also a descendant of King David), who was already pregnant with child (named Sarah) when she witnessed the crucifixion. After Christ died (and did not rise again), mother and child fled to Gaul (what is modern-day France).

They did not leave Jerusalem because they were saddened, disillusioned, and knew the game was up. No. According to the book, Jesus was the "original feminist" (p. 248) and believed in the "Sacred Feminine" (p. 36). He along with "the ancients envisioned their world in the two halves -- masculine and feminine. Their gods worked to keep a balance of power. Yin and Yang. When male and female were balanced, there was harmony in the world. When they were unbalanced, there was chaos," explains Harvard Professor of Religious Symbology Robert Langdon, the book's leading male character (p. 36).

As the first feminist, Jesus wanted Mary to run the church after he was gone. But the male-dominated church would have none of it, and was willing to do virtually anything to maintain its hold on power, up to and including the killing of those who would expose the truth about Jesus (that he was not God, etc.) and thereby undermine its power and authority.

Mary and child escaped the terror of the church, lived quiet protected lives in Gaul, and their royal bloodline eventually gave rise to the Merovingian dynasty that later ruled France. What we have in the Bible, according to The Da Vinci Code, is not reliable information from God but rather the human product of fallible man -- a male-approved and unreliable document that advances patriarchy and oppresses women.

So while the story begins with a murder in the Louvre, the parallel and real target of the book appears to be Christianity. The book goes to great lengths to paint a huge bull's-eye on the back of Christianity and fires away. And yet, it misses. Here's why.

Authentic History
Requires Proof
First, the book wants readers to believe "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate" (p. 1), but the facts do not seem to support this assertion. For example, the book confidently states that Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) embedded codes in the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and other masterpieces to secretly communicate and safeguard the real story behind the rise of organized Christianity.

But scholars do not seem to share the book's confidence. "I think the idea that Leonardo da Vinci had secret information passed down for 40 generations that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child is entertaining, but it is not history," John Martin of the Renaissance Society of America told News-Press.com.

"Absurd" is how J.V. Field, president of the Leonardo da Vinci Society and historian of art at the University of London, described the book's theory about Leonardo's putatively hidden messages. "Everything I know about how pictures were used to communicate indicates that the theory is absurd," he told News-Press.

"This means that I should require very strong evidence indeed to make me take it seriously -- such as a document written by Leonardo himself giving an explanation of the procedure he followed; and the authority of the document would need to be established by unassailable provenance. In the present case, that is clearly an unattainable standard of proof." Authentic history requires proof, said Field, but "The Da Vinci Code offers none that scholars would recognize."

But you do not have to be an art historian or Renaissance scholar to see that the book may not be quite as factual as it purports to be. Religious symbolism is at the center of this book, and at the center of this symbolism is the infamous "apple" that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden. The book's Langdon says the apple is the "orb from which Eve partook, and he informs us that the act of eating the apple incurred "the Holy wrath of God," was the cause of "original sin," and became the "symbol of the fall of the sacred feminine" (p. 425).

There is more to Langdon's confident explanation: "The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred," he says, "but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominately male Church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and made unclean. It was man, not God, who created the concept of 'original sin,' whereby Eve tasted of the apple and caused the downfall of the human race. Woman, once the sacred giver of life, was now the enemy" (p. 238).

That's an awful lot of symbolism, meaning, and condemnation to load onto the "apple" of Genesis, isn't it? But there's a problem: Genesis 3 never mentions an apple, which is something a professor of religious symbology at Harvard perhaps ought to know.

The information there speaks of "fruit" from the tree, but not apples. And without those apples, or that word apple, specific information that is key to solving the central mystery of The Da Vinci Code evaporates into thin air. The apparent specific factualness, which is enlisted to give the novel an air of plausibility, begins to unravel at its core. What appears at first glance to bear the marks of scholarship ends up being cotton candy for the soul.

An equal lack of confidence in the book's facticity might be attached to its rather remarkable statement about the so-called Gnostic gospels. Just on the face of it, does anybody really think the 4th-Century texts found at Nag Hammadi in central Egypt are "unaltered gospels" (p. 248), and that they are to be preferred to eyewitness accounts written by people who lived and died, were scorned and often rejected, on the basis of their personal knowledge of the information and reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and all the rest? "Calling the Nag Hammadi texts 'unaltered' gospels is like reading the official Soviet histories as objective fact -- complete with leading figures airbrushed out of the photos," theologian Albert Mohler wrote in a column.

There is a lot of thoughtful, well-researched material available on this topic, and on the question of how individuals, from the very beginning, used objective criteria to assess which writings represented the true history and teaching of Jesus. The short classic New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, by F.F. Bruce, Christ and the Bible, by John Wenham, and The Inspiration and Canonicity of the Scriptures, by R. Laird Harris, are good places to begin.

No Substitute
For Knowledge
In his just-published new book, The Market-Driven Church, Udo Middelmann writes that "faith is not a substitute for knowledge, but the response to it." But as we see in the following passage, The Da Vinci Code sees faith as something quite different. "Every faith in the world is based on fabrication," says Langdon. "That is the definition of faith -- acceptance of that which we imagine to be true, that which we cannot prove" (p. 341, italics in original).

The biblically correct view, and the more humane view, is the one articulated by Middelmann. It should be remembered that the work of Christ was a public ministry, done out in the open and not in a corner, and that this visibility and openness to investigation stands in continuity with the entire Old Testament emphasis. Namely, that the God who created the cosmos can use that cosmos as evidence for his existence as he speaks and acts into the cosmos.

Faith is not an epistemological magic wand that turns allegory into fact or falsehood into truth. From a biblical perspective, if something is not true, it should not be believed or acted upon, for "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile," says Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:17.

In contrast, note where The Da Vinci Code would take us -- namely, to the view that people should have "faith" in the "sacred feminine," even though this belief system offers inadequate answers to the basic questions of life. What, for example, is its answer to the problem of evil, of "disharmony"?

Well, none other than an impersonal Yin and Yang dualism of maleness and femaleness, which lacks a sufficient explanation for the existence and value of human personality (since everything emerges and returns finally to its impersonal origin) but also even contributes to further disharmony because the system itself posits two opposite reference points, each one vying for supremacy in an attempt to find a harmony in reality that does not appear to be there in theory.

This is a recipe for radical disharmony and instability, or for suppression, for the only way a kind of stability can be achieved in this system is by one of the opposites totally or significantly suppressing the other. The verifiable information given by the real Creator, however, takes us in a different direction. This content says there is both unity and diversity located in God himself, who is a personal being who thinks, acts, and creatively calls both male and female into harmony as beings -- both of whom are made in the image of God.

There is no impersonal monism here, nor do we have a chaos-generating threeism without unity. Only the biblical information allows the possibility of order without smashing the individual, but also of creativity without anarchy, which nobody wants. It sets us free as thinking and creative beings.

But The Da Vinci Code would have us bow down before the bones of Mary Magdalene, as the Harvard man Langdon does at the end of the book. Even though he himself has already said all faiths are built on fabrications, we read: "The quest for the Holy Grail is the quest to kneel before the bones of Mary Magdalene. A journey to pray at the feet of the outcast one. With a sudden upwelling of reverence, Robert Langdon fell to his knees. For a moment, he thought he heard a woman's voice ... the wisdom of the ages ... rising up from the chasms of the earth" (p. 454).

And yet, all of this is built on fabrication. What an ironic way to end a book that employs the reputation of brilliant men such as Leonardo da Vinci to help make its case that historic Christianity is an inhumane pack of falsehoods foisted upon an ignorant public by a male-dominated status quo. And then the male lead character is on his knees in reverence before the bones of a mere mortal woman who was, by the book's definition, the wife of a mere mortal himself.

If all faiths are built on fabrications, is the book not also saying that the faith it sets forth in the sacred feminine is also, by definition, built on fabrications? Of course it is. And so now we are at a point where the book's own definition of faith gives a convenient rationale for the concern that many of the "facts" the book marshals against Christianity may not be facts at all.

What began with the murder of man in the name of patriarchy ends with the intellectual suicide of a man in the name of matriarchy. One begins to see a better explanation of why Christianity triumphed over paganism.

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Rick Pearcey is editor and publisher of The Pearcey Report, and he blogs at Pro-Existence. He is formerly managing editor of Human Events and associate editor of the Evans-Novak Political Report. As a book editor, his projects include Persecution (by David Limbaugh), Story Craft (by John Erickson), and Total Truth: Liberating Christianity From Its Cultural Captivity and Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, and Meaning (both by Nancy Pearcey). Originally published at Boundless.org (March 18, 2004).