People often ask, "How much of The Da Vinci Code is true?" I wearily answer that Paris is in France, London is in England, and Leonardo da Vinci painted pictures. Let's look at four areas where Dan Brown's history is bunk.

Constantine the Great

First is his treatment of Constantine the Great (d. 337), first Christian emperor of Rome. After adopting the Christian God as thanks for a dramatic military victory in 312, Constantine initially seems to have imagined him as the "the Highest Divinity" among other gods. But he swiftly gave tolerance, favor, and subsidies to Christians, even before becoming sole Roman emperor in 324.

These moves were not, as Dan Brown claims, an effort to curry favor with the "new Vatican power base." Not only were Christians just a small and unimportant minority of the population, the pope wouldn't reside at the Vatican for another thousand years. As historian A.H.M. Jones says, Constantine "would not on any rational calculation of his interest have chosen to profess Christianity."

The emperor called bishops to the Council of Nicea in 325 to settle disputes among Christians, not between Christians and pagans. He provided free transportation, served as honorary chairman, and proposed homoousion, "of the same essence" to describe the relationship between the Son and the Father. He didn't invent the Divinity of Christ, choose the canonical Gospels, nor rewrite the New Testament.

Constantine did continue to control all pagan cults through his imperial office of pontifex maximus--a title still held by the pope. Yet he forced no conversions and didn't devise a hybrid religion as Dan Brown claims. Neither was baptism forced upon him while dying. The emperor had delayed his baptism, as many adults did in those days. He'd had been planning an elaborate ceremony when he fell mortally ill. The Eastern Churches honor him as a saint, "the Thirteenth Apostle."

Knights Templar

Then Dan Brown grossly distorts the history of the Knights Templar by making them secret goddess-worshippers destroyed by the cruel Catholic Church. The real Templars were an order of warrior monks founded in 1118 to protect pilgrims in the Holy Land. This wasn't, as Brown absurdly alleges, a cover to excavate documents about Jesus and Mary Magdalene on Temple Mount.

Far from being masters of esoteric mysticism, the Knights were largely an illiterate bunch. They didn't invent Gothic architecture and their several round churches aren't proclamations of crypto-paganism.

The Templars lost their reason for existence in 1291 when Muslims drove the Crusaders from the Holy Land. But they retained great wealth which King Philip IV of France coveted. Having persuaded himself that the Knights were depraved heretics, he had all members in France arrested in 1307. After horrible tortures, a hundred of them confessed to idolatry and immorality, crimes that persuaded the pope to suppress the order in 1312. Scores of Templars, including their last Grand Master, were burnt at the stake. None of this happened in Rome as Dan Brown describes because the pope of the time, who was dominated by the French king, resided in Avignon.

Priory of Sion

Dan Brown piles on a further distortion by making the Knights mere puppets of the Priory of Sion, a secret organization that since medieval times has protected the holy bloodline descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Many notable figures from politics, science, and the arts including Leonardo da Vinci supposedly belonged. For a rare original touch, Brown also makes them worshippers of the divine feminine through sexual rites.

But the Priory of Sion was a hoax perpetrated by a convicted French conman named Pierre Plantard. In 1956, he and several friends had established a short-lived club of that title named for a hill in France, not Temple Mount. Plantard and his confederates later prepared phony genealogies and other documents "proving" his descent from Christ via the Merovingian dynasty of France. His great secret was supposed to shake the foundations of Christendom and make him king of France. These claims became of basis of Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1982) but were definitively debunked by BBC in 1996. Plantard was forced to admit his fabrication to a French court and died in 2000. So the con game was over before Dan Brown commenced his novel, but somehow he failed to notice this.

Leonardo da Vinci

Brown's wildest distortions cluster around the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. Exploiting the artist's enigmatic image was crucial to the project. Brown makes Leonardo a "flamboyant homosexual" with occult tastes whose contempt for Christianity inspired him to hide hostile coded messages in his paintings.

Leonardo may have experienced same-sex attraction but he can scarcely be called flamboyant about it. He despised occultism, including the mystic pretensions of alchemy. There was much to criticize in the Renaissance Church but he died and was buried with full Catholic rites.

Brown is flatly wrong on Leonardo's output (seventeen acknowledged paintings, not an "enormous" number and not all religious), his patronage (secular as well as clerical, one not "hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions"), the medium and location of the Last Supper (it was painted directly on a monastery's dining room wall; it isn't a fresco in the monastery's church), and even the size of the Madonna of the Rocks (six and a half rather than five feet high).

Brown's allegations about the paintings' content are just as wrong. That's St. John, not Mary Magdalene, to the right of Jesus in the Last Supper. He's painted as an effeminate young man according to the taste of the time. Leonardo's St. John the Baptist is--unconventionally--just as womanish. The Eucharistic aspect of the scene is expressed by Christ's hands near bread and a wineglass. No central "Grail" is needed.

The Mona Lisa is traditionally identified as a portrait of a Florentine lady. Perhaps it's just Leonardo's idea of feminine beauty. There's no reason to imagine it as an androgynous portrait of the self-pleasuring artist. The Louvre's Madonna of the Rocks and the National Gallery's copy the Virgin of the Rocks feature the Infant Jesus blessing baby St. John, an unusual but hardly heterodox subject.

Considering how Dan Brown makes hash of historical facts, who would trust his historical speculations?

What claims does the book make about the research that was done for it?

On the acknowledgements page of the novel, Brown issues extensive thanks designed to convey the impression that he has done thorough research:

For their generous assistance in the research of this book, I would like to acknowledge the Louvre Museum, the French Ministry of Culture, Project Gutenberg, Bibliothèque Nationale, the Gnostic Society Library, the Department of Paintings Study and Documentation Service at the Lourvre, Catholic World News, Royal Observatory Greenwich, London Record Society, the Muniment Collection at Westminster Abbey, John Pike and the Federation of American Scientists, and the five members of Opus Dei (three active, two former) who recounted their stories, both positive and negative, regarding their experiences inside Opus Dei.

He also thanks a bookstore for "tracking down so many of my research books" as well as a long list of specific individuals.

It is not clear how many of these acknowledgements represent Brown padding the list to make it sound more impressive and enhance his credibility. For example, Project Gutenberg is an online library of public domain texts, and Brown's "acknowledgement" may signify no more than that he looked at a text on one of the Project Gutenberg web sites. The same may well be true of others included in the list. The acknowledgements of museums, libraries, and similar institutions may mean no more than that he used their facilities and that they did nothing special to assist his research.

This, in fact, appears to be the case regarding his acknowledgement of Catholic World News. When contacted by Catholic Answers, the editor of Catholic World News, Phil Lawler, stated:

We were surprised and bemused to learn that Catholic World News had been listed in the acknowledgments of this book.

We cannot recall any contact whatsoever with Dan Brown. He is not listed among our past or present subscribers.

Since many of our stories are free and available to anyone who visits our web site, it is possible that he received some information from Catholic World News-just as anyone can receive information from any public news service. Certainly we never did any research for him or answered any questions from him.

Cracking The Da Vinci Code

Plantard hoped his Priory of Scion canard, an important plot point in Brown’s Da Vinci Code, would bring down the Catholic church and legitimate his claim to the throne of France. Brown's ambitions are just as audacious.

Pierre Plantard changed his name many times, but had he been honest, he would have called himself Pierre Canard! The Priory of Sion is rooted in one long, convoluted "unfounded, deliberately misleading story" which is the very definition of the word canard.

For the last 20 years, Paul Smith has uncovered the truth behind the Priory of Sion, well before Brown gave it his own spin in The Da Vinci Code. Eventually Plantard had to admit under oath that he had fabricated everything he had ever claimed regarding the secret society and his relationship to it. He died in obscurity in 2000.

But despite their definitive public debunking- Plantard's fabrications found new life in the novel Holy Blood, Holy Grail and later acquired a feminist spin in Brown's Da Vinci Code. Ironically, Brown's main character, Robert Langdon, claims the faith is built upon fabrication and unproven beliefs and yet the reader is lead to believe the opposite of The Priory of Sion.

"Recently, due to Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, there has been a new level of public interest in the Priory of Sion. In a short preface, Brown lists a series of 'facts' underlying the fiction of the novel. He declares that "the Priory of Sion - a European secret society founded in 1099 - is a real organization. In 1975 Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory of Sion, including Sir Isaac Newton, Sandro Botticelli, Victor Hugo and Leonardo da Vinci."

If this is not a mere marketing trick, it would seem that Dan Brown takes the fantastic claims of the Secret Dossiers more or less at face value, like the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail did before him. In the body of the novel itself (chapter 48), it is said that 'the Dossiers Secrets had been authenticated by many specialists and incontrovertibly confirmed' that the famous people listed were indeed former Priory leaders - something 'historians had suspected for a long time.' It should be understood that this fictionalized treatment completely reverses the judgment of real-world researchers, who (with the exception of dedicated conspiracy theorists) have rather dismissed the Dossiers as obvious forgeries. Nor had any 'historians' ever suspected that Newton, Botticelli etc. were members of any 'Priory of Sion'; this claim first appeared in the Dossiers themselves."

New Testament scholar Ken Bailey sorts out historical reality from murder mystery mythology

This one hour lecture succinctly reviews the origins of the four Biblical Gospels, the formation of the Canon, the council of Nicea, the role of Constantine and the emergence of the Gnostic gospels in the 3rd to 5th centuries. It then compares established historical facts with the imagination of the novelist that created the mystery thriller, The Da Vinci Code.

In the 16th century Theodore Beza of Switzerland wrote, "The Bible is an anvil that has broken many hammers." This lecture reviews the facts of the "anvil" that are important for any fair evaluation of the claims of the various characters in the novel.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Th.D., an ordained Presbyterian scholar, is an author and lecturer in Middle Eastern New Testament Studies. He currently serves as the Canon Theologian of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh. For forty years he taught in seminaries and institutes in Egypt, Lebanon, Jerusalem and Cyprus. For ten years he was Research Professor of Middle Eastern New Testament Studies at the Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem.

Carl Olson and Sandra Miesel will appear live on EWTN Wednesday, May 3rd at 8 p.m. to discuss their book "The Da Vinci Hoax".

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