The Dan Brown Enigma (18 page)

It would appear that Brown got the idea that Constantine had commissioned a new Bible from the fact that he ordered 50 copies of the existing and accepted Christian texts to be created. The man Constantine ordered to produce these 50 copies was Eusebius. ‘Brown totally misrepresents this enterprise as creating “a new Bible”, whereas, in fact, the texts Eusebius oversaw had already been accepted for over 150 years,’ says Tim O’Neill on his excellent website,
History vs The Da Vinci Code
. ‘These texts included the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which had long been considered the oldest and most authentic accounts of Jesus’ life. These gospels actually emphasised both Jesus’ human aspects and his supposed supernatural nature and they did not, as Brown claims, emphasise the latter over the former. Many of the books the accepted canon rejected, on the other hand (such as the Gnostic works), portrayed Jesus as purely spiritual and not human at all; despite Brown’s claim that they presented a “more human” Jesus. On the contrary, they were actually rejected largely because they portrayed a Jesus who was not human enough. Once again, Brown gets his history backwards.’
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Brown said he did not set out to write the book to ‘stir up a hornet’s nest. I am not the first person to tell this story of Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail,’ he explained in his High Court witness statement. ‘This idea is centuries old and I am one in a long line of people who have offered up this alternative history. The book describes history as I have come to understand it through many years of research, reading, conducting interviews and exploration.’

Along with the criticism came other books attempting to unravel the secrets within
The Da Vinci Code
, such as Dan Burstein’s
Secrets of the Code
, which is an attempt to study the mysteries behind the secrets of the novel. Burstein’s book is a collection of articles, interviews and essays with scholars both for and against Brown’s interpretation of religious history. Another book is
The Dan Brown Companion, the Truth Behind The Fiction
, by Simon Cox. These two are just the tip of the iceberg.

Back in 2004, Dan Brown had given a talk to the New Hampshire Writer’s Project at the Capitol Centre for the Arts in Concord, New Hampshire. At the time, he felt the books being written about his novel were ‘absolutely wonderful’ and that the dialogue the book had created was very positive. ‘The more we can debate these topics the better our understanding of our own history. Most theologians will agree that religion really only has one true enemy and it’s not me, it’s apathy,’ he told the 800-strong audience. ‘Apathy has a good antidote and that is passionate debate and I am thrilled to see so much of it. Debate makes us think about what we believe and why we believe it.’

Brown said he felt the debate around religion created by his novel was healthy and invigorating. He assumed his opponents had the best of intentions but cautioned his audience to remember that ‘the same way I was out on the talk shows trying to sell my book, they are now out trying to sell their book and it is in their best interest to generate as much controversy as possible and make as much of my book as possible, oftentimes making inflammatory claims.’

Brown’s response to people who called his own religious beliefs into question was to go into a little detail about his life in a religious family. ‘I was raised Christian, I sang in the choir, I went to Sunday School and I spent summers at church camp. To this day I try to live my life following the basic tenets of the teachings of Christ.’

Being a Christian, Brown said, is different for each individual. ‘If you ask three people what it means to be a Christian you will get three different answers. Some feel it means to be a Christian just to be baptised into a Christian church. Others feel that you must accept the Bible as immutable proof of historical fact, while others require a belief that all those that do not accept Christ as their personal saviour are doomed to Hell.’

From this we can see that Brown believes there is a vast grey area around what it means to be Christian and while millions of readers may fall into the first category, the really vitriolic criticisms of his books have largely come from those who fall into the other two camps.

But what of science and religion, another theme that Brown explores throughout his books? ‘When science starts tackling the really tough questions, it starts using phrases like uncertainty principle, margin of error, theory of relativity,’ he told his audience. ‘Slowly physics turns into metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers and even matter itself comes into question. Particle physicists now believe that matter that is everything around us is really just trapped energy.’

He then went on to say that ‘these same physicists are now quietly asking if it is merely coincidence if the vast majority of ancient religious texts, including the Bible, describe God as energy and God as all around us.’

This interplay of science and religion, he continued, was what fascinated him about Leonardo da Vinci. ‘Right now for the first time in history the line between science and religion is starting to blur. Particle physicists exploring sub-atomic levels are witnessing an inter-connectivity of all things and they are having religious experiences. At the same time Buddhist monks are reading physics books and learning about things they have believed in their hearts forever and yet have been unable to quantify.’

Perhaps key to understanding the way in which Brown weaves science and religion together in his books is his understanding and acceptance of science and religion as partners. ‘They are simply two different languages telling the same story and are both manifestations of man’s quest to understand the divine. While science falls on the answers religion savours the questions.’

Brown also told the crowd that no one is born a Christian and there is nothing in the make up of our genes or DNA that determines what religion a newborn baby will be. ‘We are born into a culture where we worship the God of our fathers,’ he said. ‘It is truly that simple. Now more than ever there is enormous danger in believing that our version of the truth is absolute, that everyone who doesn’t think like we do is wrong and therefore an enemy.’

Brown claimed he wrote
The Da Vinci Code
to explore how the shift away from the world of gods and goddesses occurred and why it took place. He said he wrote it partly as a personal spiritual quest and not as something that would be as controversial as the book had become. ‘I am aware there are those out there who disagree with me who say awful things about me who make little pictures and I know that a lot of them have published long lists of my shortcoming, my errors and my mistakes.’ But he felt that a lot of the critics had completely missed his main point that ‘prior to 2000 years ago we lived in a world of gods and goddesses. Today we live in a world solely of gods.’

He continued by saying that in most of the religions around the world women are, what he called, ‘second class citizens’ and there is no reason there shouldn’t be women priests. ‘Why is this even an issue?’

But Brown is also happy with multiple versions of where we came from. He told the crowd about one of his critics going on radio proclaiming he was on the air because he’d been called by God to fix the errors Brown had written in the novel. ‘He told the interviewer that he was angry with me for teaching inaccurate history. The interviewer pointed out that some scientists might consider this scholar guilty of the same thing for having taught his own children that evolution never happened and that they had come from two people named Adam and Eve. Everyone is entitled to believe what they believe. If you find someone’s ideas absurd or offensive just listen to somebody else.’

During this talk, it was clear that Brown was wearying of the criticism levelled at him saying that even the media were getting tired of the name-calling and the absurd debunking ‘with several going so far as to quote Shakespeare’s line from
Hamlet
about protesting too much.’

He told the audience that his critics had clearly read different books and been taught by different teachers in different schools than he had. ‘Some of these people sound absolutely certain about their truths and of that I am envious,’ he said, adding that he still had a lot of questions. ‘But I have written a novel in which fictional characters explore some of these questions for possible answers. I think readers can decide for themselves how much of this novel they want to believe. As far as us all making a bit too much of this, a very wise British priest noted that Christian theology has survived the writings of Galileo and the writings of Darwin and will surely survive the writings of some novelist from New Hampshire.’
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But instead of waning as Brown had hoped, the tide of criticism and controversy was to get worse and two years later he found himself in the witness box at the Old Bailey.

W
hile Brown was facing an ever-increasing attack from the Church and religious groups in America and around the world, he again found himself entangled in a court case. It seemed to be never-ending.

In August 2005, Lewis Perdue brought a lawsuit against Brown, claiming he had plagiarised his two novels,
The Da Vinci Legacy
and
Daughter of God
. When Perdue lost his case, Brown breathed a sigh of relief. With that out of the way he’d hoped he could concentrate on his next book, but that hope proved to be short-lived. Nine months later he found himself embroiled in another court case and this one was at the Old Bailey.

The authors of one of the books Brown had used as his research – and had credited in his novel – decided Brown had infringed their copyright and mounted a lawsuit against his publisher, Random House, in the UK. These authors were Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh who, together with Henry Lincoln, had written
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,
published in 1982. The central idea to their book was that Mary Magdalene and Jesus had married and had a child, and the bloodline of that union continues today.

Brown was stunned by their action. ‘I have been shocked at their reaction,’ he said in his High Court witness statement, and why shouldn’t he be? He’d given them an accolade in the novel itself when he created the character of Sir Leigh Teabing, an anagram of Baigent and Leigh.

Brown hadn’t thought up Teabing until he was well into researching and writing the book. ‘I initially conceived the character because Langdon and Sophie needed somewhere to rest and eat before moving on to London,’ he explained. ‘As well as providing a safe haven for Sophie and Langdon, I needed to create a character who could say some of the more far-fetched and controversial things that I initially had Langdon saying.’ In his witness statement Brown said he wanted to ensure Langdon’s integrity was preserved, enabling him to play devil’s advocate, provide some historical detail and allow Langdon to stand back a little.

So Brown decided to use the character of Teabing as a nod to the two authors. He had several reasons for doing this. The first was because
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
was in his opinion a more traditional book than many of the other sources he was using. ‘It seemed a more fitting match for my Teabing character, whom I had crafted as an old British knight.’
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One of Brown’s traits as a writer is to use the names of people he knows and cares about or respects, which was another reason he included Baigent and Leigh. Though he didn’t know them, he respected their book because it was the first to bring ‘the idea of the bloodline into the mainstream,’ Brown explained. ‘I decided to use the name Leigh Teabing as a playful tribute to Mr Baigent and Mr Leigh. I have never once used a novel to denigrate anyone, and most certainly my use of the name Leigh Teabing was no exception.’ Brown was hurt that the two authors would have brought a lawsuit against him when he had paid them a tribute in his novel. Perhaps he hadn’t counted on
The Da Vinci Code
being so phenomenally successful or that Baigent and Leigh might want to ride on his coat-tails in the hope that their book sales would also skyrocket?

In his witness statement Brown said he saw a document, titled
General Statements
, during the lawsuit. This, he said, made ‘a number of serious allegations against me. The document contains numerous sweeping statements which seem to me to be completely fanciful.’ Indeed, it concluded that Brown had lifted the overall design of
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
– its governing themes, its logic, its arguments – for his own novel
.
‘This is simply not true,’ he asserted.

Brown claimed that there were vast amounts of information in
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
that he never used for his novel. In his witness statement he said that comparing the first half of the two books would illustrate that there is enough of a gulf between them that no one could say the design, logic and arguments were the same. ‘And where there is overlap of ideas,’ Brown said, ‘the fact remains that I used
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
merely as one of a number of reference sources for some of the information which
The Da Vinci Code
sets out.’ One of the central questions in
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
is whether Christ really did die on the cross. ‘This is not an idea that I would ever have found appealing.’
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Bringing the resurrection of Christ into question is something Brown would never go near. In his witness statement he made it plain that having been raised a Christian and gone to Bible camp he was fully aware that the crucifixion and the resurrection were absolutely central to Christian faith. ‘The resurrection is perhaps the sole controversial Christian topic about which I would not dare write. Suggesting a married Jesus is one thing, but undermining the resurrection strikes at the very heart of Christian belief.’

As the lawsuit got under way Brown was still reeling from the accusations against him. ‘I find it absurd to suggest that I have organised and presented my novel in accordance with the same general principles as those in
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
,’ he said. The accusation that he had copied the facts as well as ‘the relationship between the facts and the evidence to support the facts, is simply not true.’ Brown also maintained that
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
was one of four books that he mentions by name in his novel. The other three were
The Templar Revelation
by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince,
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar
by Margaret Starbird and
The Goddess in the Gospels
, also by Starbird.
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