The Real Problem With the DaVinci Code
Is the same as the problem with many of the complaints about The DaVinci Code. The fundamentalists who refute Brown are as confused as is Brown himself.
Faith-based statements—like Brownds reliance on Picknett, Prince, Baigent, Lincoln, Leigh, Starbird, et al—are not documentary or historical evidence of factual content. Fundamentalists who contend that there is a difference of quality between canonical gospels and non-canonical gospels based on their faith that "God inspired these, but not those" are indulging in pure wishful thinking.
Protestant fundamentalists and Catholics alike are issuing statements which amount to "Brown is wrong because I believe he is". Nope. Sorry. Their wishful thinking is no more evidence than Brown's is. Brown is not wrong because of divine inspiration or belief in Jesus' divinity. Brown is wrong because his research sucks. Brown is wrong because speculative UFO-genre speculative books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and The Woman With The Alabaster Jar, and Templar Revelations are not history, but Brown thinks they are. Brown expresses conviction when he says that his research convinced him that this version of history was true. But the research he did was simply to read a bunch of conspiracy theory speculation. In what way is the "evidence" and the "chain of logic" in Holy Blood, Holy Grail different from Philip Corso's The Day After Roswell, Rochelle Sparrow's JFK is Still Alive, or von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods?
Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln "investigate" the mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau without ever getting into the "caves" they were told are under the church, and maintain that Poussin's painting The Shepherds of Acadia demonstrates a secret society initiation and that southern French legends of the presence of Mary Magdalene along with the "evidence" of cults of a black Madonna, prove that Jesus' descendents ruled France (actually the Kingdom of the Franks, Brown has no conception of the difference. Anything which is more than 20 years ago is all the same to him: sometime in the vague past.)
It seems to me that a step or two is missing in the logic. A hearsay legend that Merovech's mother was raped by a quinotaur is considered evidence that Jesus' descendents were the Merovingian dynasty of Clovis. The authors actually use the word "evidence" in this context. The unfounded medieval legend that Mary Magdalene was once in Provençe is considered proof that Jesus had children. Because black Madonnas of the Pyrenees are a different color than other statues, this is called proof that they actually represent Jesus' wife, despite several hundred years' tradition that they are representations of Jesus' mother.
Mind you, no thought is given to the fact that the very existence of Mary Magdalene is unproven—there is no (that's zero) historical evidence that she ever existed, but Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln have her giving birth to the Kings of the Franks. And they consider this speculation "proven".
This is the type of book that Dan Brown thinks is a history book. The very existence of Jesus himself is historically unproven—see Albert Schweitzer's Quest for the Historical Jesus, (and this will also give you an example of a book which actually uses evidence and logic). So from the very beginning, unproved assumptions are in place—faith-based speculation rather than hard evidence—and yet Dan Brown declares himself convinced by the "evidence" that his scenario is true history.
Statements like "Jesus himself said that Mary Magdalene was the Holy Grail" are typical of the pure stupidity. If Jesus actually existed it was probably in the first century or earlier. The Holy Grail is a medieval fictional invention which was never mentioned by anybody in the entire world before Chrétien de Troyes in 1180. The first time it was ever mentioned in writing which has survived is by Chrétien de Troyes in his poem Perceval ou Li Conte del Graal. Now that is the pure fact of the matter—there is no evidence of the existence of the Grail before 1180, so to say that you are convinced by the evidence that Jesus himself called Mary Magdalene the Holy Grail is a willful ignoring of the facts. Because documentary evidence concerning the Holy Grail does not exist anywhere in the world before 1180. And documentary evidence is all the evidence there is for the existence of a Holy Grail. How can there be any evidence that the cup Jesus used at the last supper really existed, when there is no evidence that Jesus himself ever existed? And how can there be any evidence that Jesus himself called Mary Magdalene by a name that did not exist until 1150 years after Jesus and Mary Magdalene supposedly died? If Jesus had existed, and had said, "This cup that you are drinking out of now is actually Mary Magdalene, so sip from it carefully", then he could have theoretically called her the Holy Grail 1100 years before the phrase "Holy Grail" actually existed. But have you seen any evidence that that actually occurred? Neither has Dan Brown. He is just blowing smoke when he says he is "convinced by the evidence".
This speculation that the Merovingian Kings of the Franks were descendents of Jesus is a perfect example of the type of speculative "evidence" used in books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail. First you have to assume that the legend is true that Merovech actually existed and that his mother really was raped by a quinotaur, then assume that it is symbolic of some actual real world occurrence. Then you have to jump to the conclusion that because of the fish symbol for Christianity that it really means Jesus descendents, and not that she actually married a generic unspecified Christian even though all archeological evidence point to the fish symbol being used only in the ancient world, and only being used to designate Christians in general, when it's used by Christians at all—it has a much longer history being used to designate the Great Mother (the fish looks like a womb). Then you have to have faith that a quinotaur, a legendary sea monster, is somehow identical to a stylized fish symbol. Then you have to assume that the legend of the rape of Merovech's mother is a symbolic representation of marriage into a bloodline which is not just Christian, but actually descended from Jesus himself. Then you have to explain why it took three more generations before the first Merovingian became a king—otherwise how can you call the Merovingian family "a royal bloodline"—Jesus' descendents somehow just knew that Merovech's mother's great-grandson would someday conquer northern Gaul. The problem of how or when Jesus' descendents got from southern France, which was in the kingdom of Burgundy, to the mouth of the Rhine is not addressed.
There are huge gaps in the chain of evidence. Yet Dan Brown declares himself convinced by the evidence. I'm not even convinced that Dan Brown knows what evidence is.
Unfortunately for the public, neither do most of the Dan Brown detractors. Web sites which start out by saying that early Christians believed that Jesus was divine cannot be trusted. The fact is that what early Christians believed is as disparate as the number of non-canonical gospels. There were the Ebionites who believed that Jesus was not divine, the Nasoreans who believed that Jesus was not a god, and the followers of Paul and Marcion who apparently believed that he was not a man. The Therepeutes mentioned by Philo, the Essenes documented by Josephus, and the Qumran communities and writers of the Jewish 7quot;wisdom literature", worshipped a divine emanation or Logos (or Chokmah or Sophia), and thought the word "messiah" (which means anointed with oil) referred to a human political deliverer.
Docetism is a term used to refer to a theological perspective among some in the early church who regarded the sufferings and the human aspects of Christ as imaginary or apparent instead of being part of a real incarnation. The basic thesis of such docetics was that if Christ suffered he was not divine, and if he was God he could not suffer. The combination of the two natures, Son of David and Son of God, affirmed by Paul in Rom. 1:3 - 4 was apparently already under attack in the Johannine community (see 1 John 4:2; 2 John 7). Docetic thinking became an integral part of the perspectives of Gnostics, who viewed Jesus as the alien messenger from outside the present evil world and one who was untouched by the evil creator. This alien Jesus came to awaken Gnostics to their destiny outside the realm of creation. While the framers of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds were opposed to docetic teaching and clearly assumed the two natures of Jesus, the drafters of the Definition of Chalcedon (451 AD) made explicit the Christian teaching concerning Jesus Christ as "truly God and truly man." ~G L Borchert (Elwell Evangelical Dictionary)
The historical fact that such a "heresy" existed in the first century is undisputed, but the supporters of Eusebius' infallibility try to pretend that the Docetists were a tiny minority, when in fact the "historical Jesus" adherents were a tiny minority before Constantine made his mother's faith the legal state religion.
The Epistle of Hebrews was written by someone who implies that Jesus never set foot on earth. (Hebrews 7:26-7) The second century apologists such as Theophilus of Antioch, Athenagoras of Athens, the writer of Epistle to Diognetus, Tatian and the early writings of Justin Martyr document a divinity which is seldom called by name, never set in a historical milieu, never spoken of as being human in any sense. Minucius Felix goes so far as to say Christians did not worship a man who suffered death nor a god who was slain ("a god cannot die"). He states that such a view is absurd, a man who is born cannot become a god, and gods cannot beget sons nor perform miracles:
1. These and similar indecencies we do not wish to hear; it is disgraceful having to defend ourselves from such charges. People who live a chaste and virtuous life are falsely charged by you with acts which we would not consider possible, except that we see you doing them yourselves. 2. Moreover, when you attribute to our religion the worship of a criminal and his cross, you wander far from the truth in thinking that a criminal deserved, or that a mortal man could be able, to be believed in as God. 3. Miserable indeed is that man whose whole hope is dependent on a mortal, for such hope ceases with his death …
Anyone who states definitively that "Early Christians believed…" like early Christianity was some monolith, is going to be wrong. The only accurate statement is that some early Christians believed one thing or another, and some other early Christians believed something else.
Christian sites take haste to point out that the debate at Nicea wasn't over whether Christ was divine, but over how to perceive that divinity. True, but they distort the truth when they fail to acknowledge that Constantine only invited those bishops who already believed the same doctrines as his mother did. And the vote over the orthodox view was opposed by only 3 members, true, but that was taken after some weeks of acrimonious debate. Debate so bitter that it is reported that Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra, got in a fistfight with Arius. After the Nicean council, opposing points of view were discouraged by force of law. Fact. This includes the points of view that Jesus was just a man and not a god, that Jesus was just a god and not a man, that Jesus never existed, that the whole thing was a myth typifying the emanation or mystical descent of the Logos or Sophia into matter in order to create the world, and that Jesus was a woman, as well as several others. In fact all the dozens of forms of Christianity which were available in the Roman Empire, but not believed in by Constantine's mother were outlawed as a result of Nicea.
Gnostic Christianity indisputably existed at least until the edict of Theodosius banning it. The Nag Hammadi codices were buried in the late 4th century. Ophites, Sethites, Valentinians, Marcionites and many others definitely did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, either before or after the council of Nicea. But they weren't invited. Fundamentalist web sites who paint the picture of a monolithic orthodoxy are little more than speculative themselves, taking Eusebius (author of The History of the Church, and self confessed liar) by faith as if he were divinely inspired, even though he admits to lying about Christian history. Archeology, textual criticism and the documentary finds of the 20th century have heaped up evidence of early Christianity's rich diversity. Dan Brown's historian Teabing is literally wrong when he says that the Nicean council voted on the divinity of Christ, but he is not wrong about the diversity of early Christian beliefs. And the fundamentalist (both Catholic and Protestant) authors who deny that Christians ever believed in the "divine feminine" simply have never read the Nag Hammadi codices or the early church fathers such as Ireneus. There were Christian sects who believed in the Sophia—a feminine deity who is God's advisor or agent of creation, sects who believed in Barbelos, the feminine emanation of god who created mankind, who believed that the divinity is personified in mother Eve, mother Mary, mother Isis, or some other personification of the divine feminine. The Thunder, Perfect Mind, one of the Nag Hammadi gospels, says:
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I amand the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
Check out Allogenes, Pistis Sophia or Thought of Norea. These feminine deities don't need to be married to a messiah to become divine. It's not just Christianity which has documentation of a feminine divine, Judaism includes indications of the feminine side of god in the Shekinah, in Wisdom literature, in Ruach, in Yetzirah's doctrine of emanations. The Hebrew word "Ruach" means "spirit", just as the Latin word "Spriitus", but in Hebrew, Ruach is a feminine noun, while in Latin, Spiritus is a masculine noun. The Holy Ghost got a sex change in translation. The amount of 1st and 2nd century BC and 1st and 2nd century AD Jewish and Christian thought modern fundamentalists would consider heretical is staggering.
Why didn't Brown use this very real and historically accurate disparity instead of the questionable statements by Teabing when he is pontificating on his version of history? Because he didn't know they existed—he gets his history out of speculative sensationalism. He's never read a real history book! Actually he's never read the sensationalism either, he claims in an interview that he has too short of an attention span to read a whole book, so he has his wife read them and write him a synopsis. No wonder he has trouble getting his history right. He literally never read a history book.
The other place where Brown is right and wrong simultaneously is when he talks about the Holy Grail. Four out of the five original grail stories have ties to southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. (And the exception, Robert de Borron, has ties to Burgundy.) The connections to the movement which spawned the troubadours is obvious, the Grail writers are putting to paper what troubadours have already been reciting. Tenuous as it might be, the connection to the Catharite heresy cannot be denied. The Cathars are connected doctrinally and historically to the Paulicians and Bogomils and ultimately to the Manichaeans, who in turn have very real and documented connections to 1st and 2nd century Gnostics.
The second clear influence is the Courts of Love and the Troubadour movement, Marie of Champagne, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the great granddaughter of the first troubadour was also renowned as the ruler of the first and principal Court of Love. When her husband the Henri I, Count of Champagne went on pilgrimage in 1179, then when he died in 1181, she became regent of Champagne for her son, Henri II, until he came of age in 1187, then again when he went on Crusade in 1190 and until his return in 1197. Her court at Troyes was renowned as a center of literature and was home to (among others) Chrétien de Troyes and Walter Map. Her mother, Eleanor, also ruled in England (which included most of western France at that time), when Henry II of England died in 1189, her son Richard the Lion-Hearted went on Crusade and left his mother as regent in his place—Eleanor acted as Regent of England until Richard's death in 1199.
The grail stories also have a definite connection to the Knights Templar, and writers who downplay it have to gloss over or ignore the clear textual evidence to do so. Three out of the five original grail stories indicate connections to the Templars. Perlesvaus has the Grail Knights wearing white with a red cross, Borron has Perceval encountering a white shield with a cross the color of blood, and Wolfram explicitly states that the Grail Knights are Templars.
Some form of Templar survival is also historically documented, especially in Portugal and Scotland, and why couldn't Brown have used this historically accurate scenario instead of the preposterous statement that the grail is both a woman and Jesus' family genealogy? Once again, because he didn't know about it. He is getting his "history" from Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln; and Pierre Plantard's forged "Priory" documents mean more to him than real historical documentation. If Brown had opened a Britannica or one of the history books he lists on his bibliography he would have noticed there is enough of a genuine historical question about this subject to create a mystery which could be historically accurate. But Brown's "research" consisted in reading popular sensationalist speculation. Presumably his next book will involve Langdon in a murder caused by the UFO aliens who built the Great Pyramids and killed President Kennedy—all on the same day (time travelers).
Alright, completely aside from his snide France insults and architectural misinformation and Art mis-history, I realize the book is fiction. But his writing style consciously tries to mimic Crichton, Ludlum, Morrell, etc. But where these best-selling authors strive to always get their details right, Brown seems to work extra hard to get all his details wrong.
The fact that Brown continually confuses the medieval Kingdom of the Franks with modern France is entertaining. He calls Godfrey of Bouillon a French king, failing to notice that the Duchy of Lorraine was part of the German-spaeking Holy Roman Empire at the time, he calls Pippin the Younger a French leader, he calls the Merovingians French royal blood, and yet he also seems to think that France, indeed, all of Europe, is some rural part of America. Sophie, a native French speaker, fails to understand the phrase "sangreal" until Langdon, a native English speaker translates it into English for her. He's got French police ordering around English police. He's got Silas commiting a crime in France (presumably, or maybe Spain) and ending up in prison in Andorra. He's got a French policeman who also speaks English, yet is so ignorant of the French language that he fails to realize that the spoken word "taureau" and the English word "tauro" have the same pronounciation. He's got residents of France unable to recognize equal-armed crosses, even though they have lived next door to Switzerland all their lives (and even Americans will recognize the Red Cross). He's got Sophie unable to recognize a fleur-de-lis even though even Americans with any familiarity with their own history will surely recognize it as a device on the French flag which flew over 70 per cent of this country at one time. (Check out six flags over Texas, for example.) Even today it is the logo for the New Orlean's Saints football team, as well as the device on the seal of both St Louis, Missouri and Louiville, Kentucky. He takes one of the most dramatic incidents in French history—the arrest of the Knights TemplarMdash;and transfers it to Italy (unless he believes the Tiber River is in France).
In order to keep things interesting and entertaining, Brown writes of the Holy Grail literature and Nag Hammadi codices and Dead Sea Scrolls as if they were all interchangeable. He writes of the 5th and 11th centuries as if they were interchangeable. He writes as if Gnostics and Pagans were interchangeable. He confuses Aramaic with Coptic. He confuses "literal" with "figurative". He confuses the Jewish tribe of Benjamin with the tribe of Levi. And he confuses medieval French with Spanish. When he says that "sang real" means royal blood, he is confusing French "sang" meaning blood with Spanish "real" meaning royal. The French for royal is "royale" or "regle" while the word "real" is not a word in French at all (actually it is, it means "unit of Brazilian money", it's a foreign word in French). The 16th century English authors who introduced this absurdity actually used a medieval spelling of sangreal which was spelled "sangraylle". At least with that spelling the "raylle" part of it has some appearance of French or pseudo-Frenchishness. Brown's version has no French referent at all, but Brown thinks all Europe is rural America, so after all, French, Spanish, it's all the same thing.
The Roman Church attempted to supress the Gnostic gospels in the 5th century with the edict of Theodosius making Nicean Christianity the only legal version of Christianity and the Easter Letter of Athanasius in 367 outlawing the Gnostic gospels. The Roman Church attempted to (or appeared to attempt to) supress the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 20th century when Milik and his Catholic cronies refused to publish their portions or let anybody else see them for 30 or 40 years. But Brown doesn't care—fifth century, twentieth century—it's all the same to him. He claims the supression of Jesus' family ties in the 4th century is the cause of the Crusades, so 4th century, 11th century, it's all the same to him. He calls the Paris meridian the "first prime meridian in history" even though it didn't become prime until around 1250, and the one through Alexandria was used as prime as early as 500 BC. But, hey, 6th century BC, 13th century AD, it's all the same. He has no conception of history, of time passage, of antiquity.
This is part and parcel of the moronic statement that the Priory of Sion was extablished in 1099 and has been in existence for more than 1000 years. The date 1099 was only 907 years ago as of 2006. Brown's inability to add, or neglect to do so, is more evidence that he has no sense of history, 11th century, 5th century—it's all the same to him. He doesn't comprehend the timespan represented by those six hundred years, and we can't expect him to comprehend the difference between 1000 years and 900, either (or between the 21st century and the 22nd).
Brown's conception of "pagan" include iambic pentameter, round churches, equal-armed crosses, and not sundials, but just the top of them, the gnomon. Presumably the dial or table part of them is thoroughly Christian. He completely neglects the 2000 year history of using an equal-armed cross to represent a Greek chi (Χ), the initial of Christ, and equally neglects the thousands of years before Christ when Roman crosses were used as symbols of paganism, as well as the piscis vesica (a fish symbol sacred to Venus and indistinguishable from the Christian one). His knowledge of etymology is frightning. He thinks "cruciform" is a noun, and can't break it down into "cruci" meaning cross and "form" meaning shaped, and yet he can trace "crucifix" back to Latin cruciare and declare than very few Christians are able to do so the way he can, and that few Christians equate crucifixion with torture.
He puts the Roman Curia in the Vatican in 1307, when they were actually in Perugia, just because they are in the Vatican now. He puts Lorraine in France in 1099 when it was actually part of the Holy Roman Empire, just because Lorraine is in France now. He puts the Franks in France in the time of Clovis' great-grandmother, when Clovis himself is the one who moved them into Gaul. He is naïve enough to think that the world was always just as it is now, and that the 11th century was just like last week.
Brown's mathematical naïvity is hilarious. He thinks because the square root of negative one is called "imaginary" that makes it a leap of faith. Of course his complete ignorance of what constitutes evidence, whether mathematical, logical or historical is part of the problem. He makes similar scientific and mathematical faux pas in his other books, notably Angels and Demons. There are some really egregious blunders in that one.
I find it hilarious that he read Baigent, Lincoln & Leigh's works on the Dead Sea Scrolls, but didn't bother to read any of the actual Dead Sea Scrolls documents themselves. He read Picknett and Prince's account of the Holy Grail literature, but didn't bother to read any of the Grail stories for himself. He wants to make reference to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but not to read this masterpiece himself.
"As any Aramaic scholar will tell you, the word companion, in those days, literally meant spouse." Teabing says. How long would it take to Google "The Gospel of Philip" or to look it up in an encyclopedia and find out it is in Coptic? But it's all the same to Brown. Aramaic, Coptic, you know, one of those forrin' non-white languages. For a man who lives in New England, Mr Brown has opinions and attitudes that are remarkably red-neck.
Brown's mistakes are the same mistakes that any fundamentalist makes, he accepts faith-based conclusions as "evidence". For example: as Catholic writers Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel point out in their book The Da Vinci Hoax,
"any historian, whether Christian or not, knows that the early Christians most definitely believed that Jesus of Nazareth was somehow divine.
“Biblical scholars cite an abundance of explicit and implicit evidence of early Christian belief in Christ's divinity in the writings of the New Testament—in the primitive confession 'Jesus is Lord,' for example, which appears in the apostle Paul's letters from the middle of the first century, and in the prologue to John's Gospel: 'In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God … and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.' "
As I have already pointed out, this is as absurd as Brown's other extreme. Some Christians believed that Jesus was divine, some did not. Notably, those who belonged to the same sect as Constantine's mother believed that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, and those who belonged to one of the other dozen Christian sects did not. (In fact archaeology shows conclusively that the city of Nazareth did not exist until the late second century, but Constantine's mother had a dream there, so that's the spot, all right.) In fact none of the locations in the Holy Land which are identified with the life of Jesus were so identified until the 4th century when Helena, Constantine's mother had a vision on the site.
The primitive confession "Jesus is Lord" which appears in Paul's letters from the middle of the first century belong to a tradition which does not identify a period in history to which Jesus belonged, nor a location, never mentions Jerusalem, Pilate, Mary or Joseph, any date, in fact does not seem to see this Jesus as an earthly human being at all. The Gospel of John, on the other hand, definitely comes from the second century, and belongs to a mystical tradition where myth and story are wrapped up together and incorporate the Logos or emanation myth with the teacher of Galilee myth. See Burton Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament.
The conviction that Jesus was both human and divine, concludes Oxford University scholar J. N. D. Kelly in his seminal study Early Christian Doctrines, was "all but universal". This is, of course, a bald-faced lie, which owes nothing to the actual real-world evidence of the matter. The evidence shows that the word homoousion and the doctrine of dual nature originated at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. In fact this statement requires holding Eusebius to be divinely inspired. Truly a "leap of faith".
James Patrick Holding, for example, of "The hardest-hitting Christian apologetics Web site on the Net", says, "The idea that religion was originally matriarchal, or dominated by goddess worship, and later (under the Judeo-Christian dominance) changed to patriarchal monotheism (male dominated) is a myth. It is not true."
He also appears to have overlooked The Thunder, Perfect Mind, Thought of Norea, Allogenes, even the very writings of Ireneus discrediting the Gnostics, nevertheless admits the existence of those who believed that god was female. But then I guess you can't expect the "hardest-hitting Christian apologetics Web site on the Net" to be required to actually read the documents he pontificates about.
Sandra Miesel says in Dismantling the Da Vinci Code, "Yet it's Brown's Christology that's false—and blindingly so. He requires the present New Testament to be a post-Constantinian fabrication [which of course it was, the 27 book canon of the New Testament was first set by the Easter Letter from Athanasius in 367 C.E., which contains the first known listing of the canonical twenty-seven New Testament books] that displaced true accounts now represented only by surviving Gnostic texts. He claims that Christ wasn't considered divine until the Council of Nicea voted him so in 325 at the behest of the emperor. Then Constantine—a lifelong sun worshipper—ordered all older scriptural texts destroyed, which is why no complete set of Gospels predates the fourth century. Christians somehow failed to notice the sudden and drastic change in their doctrine."
In fact Christians did notice that their doctrines suddenly and dramatically changed: "Although much of the church hierarchy in the East had held non-Nicene positions in the decades leading up to Theodosius' accession, he managed to impose Nicene uniformity during his reign. Later Nicene writers took special glee in the ignominious death of Valens, the Arians' protector, and indeed his defeat probably damaged the standing of the Homoian faction." (I'm pretty sure Valens, at least noticed the "sudden and drastic change in Church doctrine") Why do you think the monks of the Brotherhood of Saint Pachomius, the first known Christian monastery, burried their favorite scriptural texts? Better buried than burned.
The decrees of Theodosius made between 389 and 391 are why we know as much as we do about Gnosticism, because they resulted in the Nag Hammadi codices being buried to save them from destruction by the the fanatical Nicean Christians.
It is amazing that Fundamentalist apologists take Brown to task for his reliance on faith-based conspiracy-theory books and then proceed to make all their arguments faith-based, too.
She goes on to say, "Primitive Church documents and the testimony of the ante-Nicean Fathers confirm that Christians have always believed Jesus to be Lord, God, and Savior—even when that faith meant death." She has evidently forgotten to read the Nag Hammadi documents, too. Ms Miesel also identifies Elaine Pagels as a feminist scholar. Well, since the authentic Gnostic documents in the Nag Hammadi finds were largely feminist, I guess that's sort of accurate, but if she is implying that Ms Pagels displays a feminist bias, I challenge you to read The Gnostic Gospels and judge for yourself.
Ms Miesel goes on to say, "The earliest partial canon of Scripture dates from the late second century and already rejected Gnostic writings". The actual historical facts are that the earliest canon was created by Marcion who was a Gnostic. No New Testament manuscripts date from the second century, so in fact Ms Miesel is speculating based on writings of Church Fathers. However the plain and obvious existence of actual manuscripts of the New Testament dating from the 4th and 5th centuries which do not have a standard canon (in fact there still is no universal standard) definatively proves that there was no universally accepted canon as late as the 5th century. Ms Miesel seems to be getting her facts from the same kind of faith-based sources that Brown is getting his from. Sandra Miesel is a "vetran Catholic journalist", according to her own web-site.
Actually if you read her site, her historical distortions are worse than Brown's. For example, the third paragraph claims that Brown's reinterpretation of the Grail as a woman's body is completely new: "he wholly reinterprets the Grail legend". I wonder if she never heard of Jesse Weston and Sir James Frazier, or if she just chose to pretend that they never existed. She goes on to say, "Blasphemy is delivered in a soft voice with a knowing chuckle: '[E]very faith in the world is based on fabrication.' " "Blasphemy"? Faith based on fabrication is a justified interpretation of Hebrews 11:1, "Faith is the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for". Semantically equal to "wishful thinking". Ms Miesel's judgments are of questionable accuracy and of questionable morality. "Blasphemy" is what Christians say when other people mean "freedom of speech". She goes on to say, "Templars had nothing to do with the cathedrals of their time, which were commissioned by bishops and their canons throughout Europe." In fact the Templars commissioned the building of dozens of churches to their exact design, including the "temple church" in London. Ms Miesel simply can't be bothered to get her facts any straighter than Brown.
One of my all-time favorite absurdities is the US News and World Report web-site FAQ in which their "expert" throws out nonsense about Christianity, the Grail, the Nag Hammadi books, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and history. The "straw men" they continually throw up make one wonder what they are trying to hide.
One of their absurdities is the contention that, "The Grail legends were stories of forbidden quests to find the 'sacred feminine.' That would have come as news to Geoffrey of Monmouth, on whose 12th-century chronicle of King Arthur and Merlin the Grail story is based."
Geoffrey of Monmouth is a close to a Grail writer as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Both Geoffrey's Historia and the Grail stories are set in the 5th century, they both mention King Arthur. That's the only connection I can think of. To say the Grail stories are "based" on Goeffrey is blatantly in error. Actually it's more like blatantly stupid. Goeffrey never mentions the Grail. If there is a literary basis for the Grail stories other than the creativity of Chrétien de Troyes it would lie with the Celtic Preiddeu Annwn or Kulhwch and Olwen both of which likely predate Geoffrey by some significant margin.
Other silly errors include: "An early Grail romance suggests the sacred chalice was guarded by the Templars. Not in any accepted interpretation." Of course they might be defining Wolfram's Parsival as a non-accepted version, but Perlesvaus and Borron both include indications of Templars, so even with this exclusion, they are still dead wrong. Or maybe they are counting Mallory as early and ignoring the earlier Grail stories because they weren't in English.
They also claim, "In Christian tradition, the Holy Grail is the cup that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught his blood at the crucifixion. The Joseph connection comes along late in the tradition, but it has a venerable history." I'm not sure exactly what they mean by "late in the tradition". You can't get much earlier in the tradition than Robert de Borron or Perlesvaus. Only Chrétien predates them. Famous logical fallacies: "Once the church got its act together at the Council of Nicaea, all dissent stopped. The reaction to the Second Vatican Council reforms should be enough to dispose of that assertion." Has anyone other than US News themselves suggested that "all dissent stopped" after Nicea? In fact all non-Nicean dissent was outlawed by Theodosius I, so they simply moved to the Sassanian Empire, outside of Theodosius' jurisdiction. Classical "straw man".
They also claim that Gnostic doctrine couldn't have survived into the 12th or 13th century, completely ignoring evidence to the contrary. They just don't bother to do the research any better than Brown did.
The only web sites I've seen which are careful to limit their comments to the facts are the ones by Robert Price and Joe Nickell. Sites by Grail experts largely get their Grail facts right, but even they fail to grasp that Brown talks about the Grail as if Grail literature were interchangeable with Dead Sea scrolls or Gnostic gospels. It is inconceivable to anyone with any knowledge of history that someone can be as historically naïve as Brown, but I'm convinced that that is exactly the problem. He simply doesn't comprehend that the 5th century is a fundamentally different time from the 13th century. It's all the same to him "back along there somewhere".