Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorised Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code
edited by Dan Burstein
( Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
Sometimes, despite itself, a book generates a debate that transcends its many weaknesses. Such a book is Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, a bestseller of no intrinsic merit, badly written, with wooden characters and an ultimately rather lame plotline, yet a work containing such sensational content that it has been a runaway success. This content, a mishmash of bogus history (taking seriously the discredited pseudo-history The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln), the fanciful and ahistorical claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child, and its misuse of the Gnostic Nag Hammadi manuscripts, has generated a renewed interest in gnosticism and Christian origins that is more interesting than the novel itself.
Unlike other works, cashing in on the Code’s success, often in the form of fairly tedious apologetic for and against the claims of the novel, Dan Burstein’s collection of essays seeks to understand the complexities of gnosticism, Christian origins and the battle over the feminine in Christianity. What the author does is present a range of divergent views about these matters – and about the novel – and in doing so try to generate a more fruitful debate.
He includes contributions sympathetic to the novel, including interviews and excerpts from the books on which Brown based Da Vinci Code. To these he adds works by those who to varying degrees debunk the book, including a number of scholars who have studied the Gnostic texts contained in the manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi, near Cairo, in 1946. In addition theologians – from a range of perspectives – debate the religious implications of Brown’s claims. There are also essays written by or about present day Gnostics and attempts to understand more clearly the historical significance of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Cathars (13th century Christian Gnostics) and the Knights Templars.
Inevitably perhaps, in a book such as this, one will gravitate towards those authors who support one’s position in the controversy. Having read the contributions in this volume – and having studied (admittedly in translation from the Coptic) the Nag Hammadi texts as well as a fair amount of the historical research done on gnosticism – I must weigh in on the side of the sceptics. Though some of the Gnostic texts do indeed ascribe a more prominent place to the role of Mary Magdalene (as does the orthodox Gospel of John, one must add), though the idea of a Jesus-Magdalene relationship of some kind has an appeal to the romantic in me, and though one may sympathise with the agenda of promoting a greater leadership role for women in Christianity, the evidence in the Gnostic texts don’t add up to Brown’s (and Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s) claims, a point echoed in this book by most feminist theologians and Nag Hammadi scholars in this book.
Similarly, the weight of serious scholarship about Leonardo Da Vinci and the Knights Templars is against Brown. Following the good sceptical principle of Ockham’s Razor, the simpler historical solutions are more convincing. In the light of his corpus of work which displays Leonardo’s strong predilection for attractive and effeminate young men, and given the tradition that St John was the youngest disciple of Jesus, the suggestion that ‘St John’ in his portrait The Last Supper is a woman seems nonsensical. In like vein, the evidence that the Knights Templars were suppressed owing to their wealth and political power seems overwhelming; even in the ‘holy’ Middle Ages, avarice trumps orthodoxy.
Finally, the evidence refuting the Holy Blood and Holy Grail seems irrefutable. Even before the book’s publication in 1980 a French journalist had established that the key documents on which it was based was a fraud, part of an elaborate hoax by a trio of tricksters.
Burstein’s collection, for me, confirms that the razzmatazz around The Da Vinci Code is nothing more than hot air. Yet it does more than that, and therein lies its value. On a popular level it seeks to generate debate about a number of issues that are otherwise confined to the realm of academe: the evolution of early Christianity, the role of women in the church, how contemporary people read – and misread – ancient manuscripts, and, implicitly, how people understand the humanity of Jesus. All of these issues are not only important to Christianity but also to the ongoing construction of human culture. In bringing such questions and scholarly voices together into the wider public domain, Burstein (and perhaps even Dan Brown) has done us a service.