The DaVinci Crock

Here's another superb review by Laura Miller of Salon, which I mentioned recently on the Crosstalk mailing list. I hope she reviews the film when it hits theaters in May.

Excerpts from the review:

"The Da Vinci Code is... a cheesy thriller, with all the familiar qualities of the genre at its worst: characters so thin they're practically transparent, ludicrous dialogue, and prose that's 100 percent cliché. Even by conventional thriller standards, the book isn't particularly good; the plot is simply one long chase sequence, and the 'good guy who turns out to be evil' is obviously a ringer from the moment he's introduced. Dan Brown is no Robert Ludlum, so why has his thriller so outdistanced the work of his betters?

"The answer is that what readers love about the novel has nothing to do with story, or character, or mood, or any of the qualities we admire in good fiction. They love it because of the nonfiction material the book supposedly contains, a complicated, centuries-spanning conspiracy theory... Virtually all the bogus history in The Da Vinci Code...is lifted from Holy Blood, Holy Grail...

"As enormous crocks of nonsense go, Holy Blood, Holy Grail is a kind of masterpiece...[but] its theories...have a certain invincible panache. They are proof of the adage that the hardest lie to refute is the Big Lie. Unlike, say, speculation about the 'real' author of Shakespeare's plays, these theories span so many historical specialties -- ancient Hebrew customs, early Christian texts, regional French folklore, ancient and contemporary church history, medieval dynastic minutiae, Renaissance and neoclassical art, esoteric movements of the early modern age, and so on -- that no one person has the expertise to refute all of the fabrications...

"Numerous books have been published refuting the novel's depiction of Jesus' life and Christianity's early years, but most of these have been written by defensive evangelicals. They aren't particularly interesting to a secular reader -- or reliable, since their authors are deeply invested in a particular view of Jesus. They don't apply standards of proof (or, to be precise, plausibility) of much use to nonbelievers. Fortunately, Bart D. Ehrman, who chairs the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just published Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code...

"Ehrman methodically demolishes a sizable chunk of the conspiratorial claims in The Da Vinci Code, which are mostly cribbed from Holy Blood, Holy Grail. To hit some of the high spots: Early Christian texts excluded from the New Testament did not depict Jesus as human rather than divine; in fact, quite the opposite...It was not unheard-of for a Jewish man of Jesus' time to be either single or celibate, particularly if he was part of the apocalyptic prophetic movement of the day, as Jesus most likely was...

"A significant portion of the fan base for The Da Vinci Code consists of women who are uncomfortable with the male-dominated, slightly to very misogynistic nature of the Christianities they were raised in and who see Brown's version of early Christian history as a corrective. As Ehrman points out, it does appear that women had a more prominent role in Jesus' ministry than might be expected of a religious movement at that time and place. Some of that status is apparent in the canonical texts...

"The early Christian scriptures...were written by people who were the product of a patriarchal culture that subscribed to many values we abhor today -- slavery, for one. Most of Jesus' followers assumed the world as they knew it was about to end very soon, to be replaced by an earthly kingdom of heaven. They were wrong about that and a lot of other things. To try to recast them as people with egalitarian attitudes about the sexes is to imply that we can't improve our own society without some kind of precedent from them. This idea could be even sillier than anything in The Da Vinci Code."

It's true that Ehrman's book is the best available corrective, though he gives the novel credit for at least being a good thriller. (Like Miller, I think it fails miserably even on that score.) Most other rebuttals are too defensively apologetic, though I suppose Ben Witherington's Gospel Code is decent enough if you can wade through his hallelujahs.