The Da Vinci Hoax

I finally got around to reading The Da Vinci Hoax, about five years too late. Note the title: that’s Hoax, and not Code.

Written in 2004 in response to all the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code twaddle, it’s been on my radar to read but with my incredible self-feeding black hole of books to get to, I never got to this one. Sad, in hindsight, because it does perfectly what it’s supposed to do: Prove to the discerning reader that Brown’s novel is a really an awful work of pure fiction, successful only due to the rampant anti-Christianity prevalent in 21st-century America.

A quote from the Hoax’s closing pages:

“Imagine a novel based on the premise that the Holocaust had never happened but was the invention of a powerful group of Jewish leaders who have used that ‘myth’ to garner themselves power and fortune. Or consider a theoretical novel claiming that Mohammed was not a prophet at all but a drug-addled homosexual who married multiple wives in order to hide his deviant behavior and who killed non-Muslims in fits of rage against heterosexuals. Needless to say, such novels would be immediately and rightly condemned by a majority of critics and readers. Yet The Da Vinci Code, a novel claiming that Christianity is fraudulent, that the Catholic Church is a violent, misogynist institution run by murderers and liars, and that androgyny is the answer to life’s problems has met not with condemnation, but with incredible success and even significant critical acclaim.”

Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel, writers who I’ve followed online for the past couple of years, do a commendable job of systemically dismantling each and every one of Dan Brown’s allegedly well-researched talking points.* The nature and identity of Jesus Christ, gnosticism, paganism, Mary Magdalen, Constantine, the Holy Grail, the Templars, you name it – if Brown distorts it beyond all logical belief in his novel, Olson and Miesel set the record straight. With over 540 footnotes and over 110 books in the bibliography to support their conclusions. And they do it in a manner I found both interesting, informative, and – importantly – non-inflammatory. In other words, in a very Christian manner they correct Brown’s errors spread about the faith.

Another significant point from the Hoax’s closing pages:

“Some readers, puzzled by the concern over The Da Vinci Code, insist that it is ‘just a book’ or ‘only a novel’. However, what we read says much about who we are, both individually and as a culture … The Da Vinci Code is custom-made fiction for our time: pretentious, posturing, self-serving, arrogant, self-congratulatory, condescending, glib, illogical, superficial, and deviant. It has managed to tap into a deep reservoir of spiritual longing, restlessness, distrust, suspicion, and credulity.”

Don’t buy into the Dan Brown nonsense, even if you see his novels in the bargain bins at the used book store (which I often do). It’s not ‘just a book.’ But if you want to sharpen your knowledge of true historical and theological Christianity, the stuff you don’t necessarily hear in the pews every Sunday, pick up this book.


* Brown cribbed most of the “theory” for his novel from the 1982 book Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. He even named one of his protagonists Leigh Teabing, from those authors – “Teabing” is an anagram of “Baigent.” Despite this sort-of acknowledgement, Baigent et. al. unsuccessfully sued Brown for copyright infringement.