No one has yet made the claim that “The Da Vinci Code” is more popular than Jesus, as John Lennon famously said about the Beatles in 1966. But it’s now more popular than the real da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci’s name generates 25.4 million hits on Google, while Dan Brown’s super-selling novel–the pop culture phenomenon that purports to rewrite the history of Christianity–gets 25.7 million.
Not bad for a book that blends a little fact and a lot of historical fudging into a mixture that is the very essence of what Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness”–believing what one wishes to be true, rather than what is.
“Is it fact or fiction? The majority couldn’t care less because it’s what they want to believe,” says Dennis Maher, associate professor of theater arts at the University of Texas, who studies the book as as an example of modern melodrama.
In a nutshell, “The Da Vinci Code” is a thriller about the alleged true origins of Christianity, claiming that Jesus did not die on the cross, but married Mary Magdalene and had a daughter. Da Vinci (as part of a secret society) hid clues about the truth in his paintings. The Catholic organization Opus Dei is part of a conspiracy to keep the truth hidden, no matter what.
Truth or not, “Code” has struck a nerve like few books have, riding The New York Times Best Seller List for 155 consecutive weeks. “Code” is the biggest-selling hardback novel in history that doesn’t have the words “Harry Potter” in the title. There are more than 40 million hardbacks in circulation.
It’s poised to permeate the culture even further. On Tuesday, Anchor Books will release more than 5 million paperbacks.
On May 19, the film version kicks off the summer movie season and will expand the “Code” audience by millions more.
Thanks to a mention in Brown’s book, sales of another book about Jesus marrying and fathering a child, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” were boosted so much so that Random House reissued the non-fiction work. “The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History,” a sequel to “Holy Blood,” goes on sale Tuesday.
“Code” even got an extra boost of publicity recently with media coverage of the British plagiarism trial, in which Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of “Holy Blood’s” authors, sued publisher Random House claiming Brown stole ideas.
Most experts are more concerned with the falsehood of Brown’s version of history (and how many millions of readers now believe it) than with whether he stole his ideas from another book.
“He makes a number of claims about ancient texts and most importantly about the origin of the Christian Bible that either distort the facts or are demonstrably untrue,” says Brian Jones, assistant professor of religion at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. Douglas Cowan calls the novel “spiritual tripe” on the Web site thedavincichallenge.com.
“Very little in the book is ‘true’ in any historical sense,” writes Cowan, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Criticism of “Code” has scarcely slowed its sales. Since its publication in 2003, it has inspired more than 50 books that discuss–and frequently dismiss–its history.
Why this book has done so well is open to interesting conjecture.
“It taps into the distrust that some people feel about the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in the wake of the recent abuse scandals,” says Richard Hays, associate professor of New Testament at Duke University’s Divinity School.
Hays adds that the way in which “Code” promotes what is sometimes called the “sacred feminine” has increased its readership. “There is some sense in which it is true that established Christianity has been a patriarchal institution, and the voices of women have not always been given due attention.”
There’s also the attraction of a good conspiracy theory, particularly one that says some powerful “they” have been working against the interests of regular people. In “Code,” “they” is the Catholic Church.
“When our lives are out of whack, it’s easier to get ‘them’ than to fix ourselves,” says Maher of the University of Texas. “This is a simple technique, indigenous to melodrama, and one of the reasons that melodrama is popular.”
Cowan believes the appeal of “Code” can be traced largely to the growing number of people who call themselves “spiritual, but not religious.”
These people may or may not identify as Christian, he writes, but are “far more dedicated to their own religious search” than they are to any institutional church.
“If men and women are fascinated by ‘The Da Vinci Code’ because they want it to be true,” Cowan writes on thedavincichallenge.com. “What does that say about the ways in which the Christian story has been presented by those who claim to be Christ’s followers, and the way those who dare to ask questions have been treated?”
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Apparently there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Sony, the studio releasing “The Da Vinci Code” movie starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou (left), started a Web site with articles that attack the story’s accuracy. On thedavincichallenge.com, scholars and religious leaders pick away at author Dan Brown’s history. [ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION].
