The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (5 page)

A deep dive into the Time Tunnel takes Picknett and Prince back into the first century and Christian origins. Here they make clever use of more mainstream scholars like Burton L. Mack and C. H. Dodd (whom they persistently misspell as “Dodds,” unlike whoever compiled their bibliography), employing them as hammers to chip loose the New Testament from traditional Christian conceptions. They try to soften up the reader with the ideas that Galilee may not have been strictly Jewish and that Jesus may not have been a Jew, and neither was John the Baptist for that matter. Picknett and Prince invoke the Gnostic Nag Hammadi texts, discovered in Egypt in 1945, to show that early Christianity was much more diverse than scholars had traditionally supposed (a valid enough observation) and that it was likely Gnostic.

Our authors maintain that Mary Magdalene corresponds to the Egyptian Isis in so many respects that Mary pretty much becomes the Christian version of Isis, with Jesus as her consort Osiris. The mythological parallels here are numerous and significant. Much of the discussion is derived from Barbara G. Walker’s endlessly fascinating tome,
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
. Though no longer taken seriously by mainstream scholars, even critical ones, the identification of Jesus with Osiris and of Mary Magdalene with Isis is, I think, a strong and finally even a persuasive theory. (See chapter 9, “A Christian Goddess?”) Most who have advocated it, like Walker, understand that the natural implication is that Jesus as a dying-and-rising god, raised by his divine consort, is
nonhistorical
. If there was a historical Jesus, this myth was soon applied to him. That would be Rudolf Bultmann’s view, for instance. Jesus himself, on this understanding, would never have had such a thought.

Of course, with Walker, Gilbert Murray, and others, we might go the whole way and understand Jesus and the Magdalene simply as a local variant of the old myth that was eventually historicized into the (fictitious) Jesus and Mary of the gospels. But this Picknett and Prince do not do. They insist on historicizing the myth. They believe that the historical Jesus and Mary Magdalene actually suffered under the delusion of regarding themselves as somehow being the incarnations of Osiris and Isis. This seems to me a fundamental misstep. Not only does it yield a reconstruction of the intentions of Jesus that is grotesque in its extravagance, but it fundamentally misses a crucial feature of myths as Rene Girard explains them. Girard knows that, for example, the Oedipus myth does not record a genuine historical case of scapegoating but that it is a sacred story embodying and presupposing the
kind
of thing that used to happen in the ancient world.
¹⁰
Picknett and Prince are historicizing the myth of Jesus and Mary as Osiris and Isis in much the same way Plutarch insisted that Osiris and Isis must have been real people in remote Egyptian history.

Their historical Jesus is composed of equal parts of Hugh J. Schonfield’s Jesus as “scheming messiah” and Morton Smith’s “Jesus the magician.” From Schonfield’s
The Passover Plot
they have learned that “Jesus the Nazorean” denoted not “Jesus from the town of Nazareth” but rather “Jesus of the Nazorean sect” and that “Nazorean” meant “Keepers of the Secrets,” related to today’s Mandaeans. (Both are valid insights.) This gives us a sectarian and Gnostic Jesus. From Schonfield they also derive the notion that Jesus did believe himself to be the messiah, or at least planned to be accepted as such, orchestrating even his own crucifixion, which he planned to survive. From Smith’s
Jesus the Magician
, our authors borrow the notion that Jesus must have been a sorcerer. Not only is he depicted as driving out demons and healing with spit, mud, and imitative gestures—the stock in trade of magicians as described in Hellenistic Egyptian magic handbooks—but also he received his powers and divine sonship by the descent of a familiar spirit in the form of a bird, as the Egyptians did. Some early Christians, as well as Jewish and Gentile critics of Christianity, regarded Jesus as a magician, and so Smith judges that he was.

What was Jesus’s own personal mission? Picknett and Prince take seriously what the Talmud said about Jesus being crucified for attempting to introduce alien gods (a familiar charge leveled at Socrates, too). They believe Jesus was essentially an initiated priest of the Isis religion who had experienced orgasmic deification in a ritual union with Mary Magdalene, a temple “prostitute” (what I like to call a “priestitute”). He felt it incumbent upon him to restore to Israel its original gods, the Egyptian pantheon, particularly the worship of Isis, whose local avatar, Anath, had long been worshiped in the temple. To gain public support he had to prove himself (or pretend to be—the authors are not sure) the Davidic Messiah, a notion more familiar to Jews. Then, once in a position of power and respect, he would lead them to believe in himself as Osiris and in Mary as Isis.

Dan Brown, without explaining all of this in detail, assumes a good bit of it with his vague statements that the Priory of Sion worships Mary Magdalene as the goddess and that Mary’s marriage to Jesus was this mystical union of goddess with god. So now we know what he is referring to!

In a revealing admission, Picknett and Prince confess that there is a millennium-long gap between the ancient sects of Jesus and John and the (apparently interchangeable) Templars, Masons, Cathars, Leonardo, and Priory of Sion. But their guess, obviously, is that all these groups learned and passed down the secret that the authors think they have pieced together. As for the great gap, which is to say, the lack of any evidence of a historical transmission or dissemination of these ideas, can we offer a better explanation than
The Da Vinci Code
and
The Templar Revelation
? As it happens, we can. Ioan P. Couliano, in his book
The Tree of Gnosis
, observes that the human brain is much the same from generation to generation, from century to century, and that whenever it is faced with similar challenges and similar data, the brain of whatever century will produce the same range of solutions.
¹¹
Thus Gnosticism as a theodicy (a theory of how evil came to infest the world even though God is good) can be expected to resurface, independently, again and again through the ages. We don’t need to picture some cleric discovering some dusty old parchments and reading some blasphemous gospel, which then acts as a match to spark a rediscovery of Gnosticism. No, we can just count on the inventive human mind to put the pieces together in similar ways again and again. If the world is infested with evil, and if God is good, how can he have created this world? Faced with this difficulty, some minds will always come to posit: “Perhaps it wasn’t God who
made
the world! Maybe some disobedient subordinates did it!”

The same is true when it comes to certain tantalizing biblical puzzles. Was something going on between Jesus and Mary Magdalene? You don’t have to read the Gospel of Philip to suspect that there was! Martin Luther thought so. So did Garner Ted Armstrong and numerous others, who apparently all came up with the idea from their own reading of the scriptures. Likewise, Pentecostal healer William Marrion Branham and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon both came up with the theory that Eve was sexually seduced and impregnated by the Serpent in Eden.
¹²
Neither knew of the other’s interpretation or that some of the ancient rabbis thought the same thing. No, it is just that “inquiring minds want to know,” and, given the same set of data, some of the answers are going to come up again and again. So if the Cathars had doctrines similar to the Nag Hammadi texts, that hardly means they must have read them there.

It certainly looks as if much of the material we read in
The Da Vinci Code
concerning the alleged occult connections and convictions of Leonardo—as well as the highly doubtful speculations about his depictions of John the Baptist, Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, filled with esoteric symbolism
amounting to a “code”
—have been transferred almost bodily from
The Templar Revelation
. Reading first either one, then the other, certainly brings with it a pronounced sense of déjà vu. All the business about the difference between the two versions of the
Virgin on the Rocks
triptych panel, the bit about the disciple next to Jesus in the Last Supper scene looking like a woman, the characters seeming to form an “M”? It was all in
The Templar Revelation
years before it appeared in
The Da Vinci Code
. And keep in mind it is no simple matter of common art history information. No, it is a specific and highly speculative interpretation that appears in both books. None of this means Brown is a plagiarist. Certainly not. It is rather a case of what H. P. Lovecraft called “second-hand erudition.”
¹³

SKELETON KEY

Another source of
The Da Vinci Code
’s Templar Jesus myth is
The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus
by two Freemasons, Christopher Knight (which ought to be a pen name if it isn’t!) and Robert Lomas.
¹⁴
Knight and Lomas, as Masons and as inquisitive fellows, found that, no matter how superficial Freemasonry may appear (even to its members), there may yet be more to it than meets the eye. Where did the Masonic names and stories come from? How far back did their traditions go? So they embarked on a grail quest of their own. The trouble with the result is that, assuming there would be something substantial to find, they at length cooked up something substantial and claim to have found it! The subtitle of the book, promising rediscovered Nasorean scrolls containing the Q document and so forth, is a perfect cameo of the whole. It is only a tease; our authors merely surmise that such a trove of texts resides within the vault of Roselyn Chapel in Scotland. Exactly as Geraldo Rivera was so sure he had located the lost treasure of Al Capone in what turned out to be an empty concrete bunker.

In this exercise in Mason apologetics, the authors go back to ancient Egypt. In the Egyptian concept of
Maat
, which Knight and Lomas understand as denoting something like, let’s say, “a sure foundation of virtues balanced in an architectonic manner,” they cannot help but see the central insight of today’s Masonic moral catechism clothed in Home Depot terminology. This is nearly enough, our authors imagine, to demonstrate direct succession by the Masons from the mysteries of the Egyptian pharaohs. And this is a tendency observable throughout their work. They discover “amazing” parallels to this or that piece of Masonic symbolism and jump to the conclusion that the Masons got it from ancient, arcane sources—when it was readily available in the Bible all the time! A good example of this methodological overkill is their quest for the true identity of Hiram Abif, the martyr hero of Masonic lore. They identify him with a minor pharaoh, a client king of the interloping Hyksos dynasty, one Seqenenre Tao. They disdain the obvious and much simpler solution that Hiram “Abif,” pious architect of Solomon’s temple, must have been intended as King Hiram of Tyre, period. Hiram supplied the materials and plans for the temple according to the Bible (1 Kings, chapter 5), but Masonic ritual splits him into two Hirams so as to be able to kill one of them off as a Masonic martyr. Hiram of Tyre did not so die, so they had to make up a second Hiram. “Hiram Abif” is like “Judas not Iscariot” (John 14:22), an artificial attempt to distance one version of the same character from another.
¹⁵

According to the text of a Masonic ritual, a delver in Solomon’s temple during Zerubbabel’s restoration spelunks his way into a cavernous pillared chamber where he discovers a lost scroll of the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments. This seems most likely to be simply a garbled (or artfully rewritten) version of the “discovery” of the Book of the Covenant by the priest Hilkiah during a renovation of the temple in 2 Kings 22:8-10. But in order to get their theory home, Knight and Lomas make the Masonic story refer instead to a hypothetical Templar discovery of early Christian (Nasorean) scrolls beneath the ruins of Herod’s temple. And they feel sure this document trove must include the Q document, even though they do not know what that is. They think Q underlies all four gospels in the manner of the old Nazarene Gospel theory of Robert Graves.
¹⁶
Now, according to some evidence, the Templars may indeed have excavated beneath the Dome of the Rock to get to the treasures, including hidden gold, of Solomon’s ruined temple.
¹⁷
It is sheer surmise, though certainly not absurd, to suppose that they found such wealth. But it is wild speculation to dogmatize that they discovered a library of early Christian scrolls there, too! And with this we have found the origin of Dan Brown’s description of “the Purist Documents” written by Jesus’s first followers and buried with the Magdalene. Not exactly an impeachable historical source!

Knight and Lomas also slander the Emperor Constantine, reducing him pretty much to the level of a clever Mafia thug. According to them, Constantine never sincerely embraced the Christian faith, being instead an adherent of Sol the Invincible Sun. I will deal with this portrait of Constantine in more detail later (chapter 5, “Constantine’s Christ”). For the moment, suffice it to note that this seems to be the origin of Dan Brown’s grossly confused account of Constantine and his influence on formative Christianity. Knight and Lomas make him a cynical advertising executive. They blame Constantine and the Greek Christians for paganizing Christianity.