BBC Timeshift_The Da Vinci Code
Transcript
00:002,000 years later, we might be forgiven for thinking it dates from the birth of Dan Brown's
00:28The Da Vinci Code. That's B.C., before the code, and A.D., after Dan. It's a measure
00:37of how this innocent-looking thriller has shaken up the establishment.
00:41More people are reading The Da Vinci Code than the scriptures at the moment, than the
00:44Gospels, and therefore many people are being introduced to the church and to Christianity
00:49through The Da Vinci Codes.
00:51And the word according to Dan Brown is that Christ was not only a mere mortal, but husband
00:57to Mary Magdalene, and a father.
01:00It is quite simply more plausible that a man should lay claim to a throne, be married and
01:06have children, than that he should be born of a virgin, walk on water, and rise from
01:10the dead.
01:12Although marketed as a novel, The Da Vinci Code's carefully created air of authenticity
01:17has made us question why we take the authorized version of history on trust.
01:22What we have been told, on the whole, by Christians and so on, and church people and
01:28others, is true, is actually very dubiously sourced.
01:32And with 43 million sales worldwide, Dan Brown's secular Jesus and Mary seem to have attracted
01:38a devoted following.
01:40Things like The Da Vinci Code will not just attract readers, that's okay. What is rather
01:48disconcerting is attract believers.
01:51But are we just being cynically manipulated?
01:53It's not as if this is the spirit of God moving on the waters. This is capitalism.
01:59Or has Dan Brown cracked the most difficult code of all? How to find meaning in the materialistic
02:0521st century?
02:07It makes it possible for people to believe again, even if it's only to believe in conspiracy.
02:21In case you've been cloistered in a monastery since 2003, The Da Vinci Code is the fourth
02:41and most successful novel by American author Dan Brown.
02:44It is officially the world's fastest selling book.
02:49The story is that for 2,000 years the church has fed us a myth about Jesus' death and resurrection,
02:55while suppressing the truth that he founded a bloodline that exists to this day.
03:02The secret is being kept alive by a shadowy organization called the Priory of Zion.
03:09The life of the book has been every bit as extraordinary as its content. It's been made
03:14into a Hollywood film.
03:20It's provoked protest, and fierce debate.
03:29The crowds have come along for a lecture series on The Da Vinci Code and its claims.
03:41It's been dissected in court following claims of plagiarism.
03:45The historians who wrote The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail say the whole architecture
03:49of their book has been stolen by Dan Brown, but Random House will argue that ideas have
03:54been recycled for centuries.
03:56And it's leading Britain's tourist recovery following the London bombings.
04:01OK, this is Temple Church.
04:08We're rather tucked away off Fleet Street, and so a great many people never even knew
04:11we existed until The Da Vinci Code came out.
04:15Some of the life of The Da Vinci Code, which I think we haven't taken enough into account,
04:20is less the actual reading of the book, and more the afterlife it has on, well, what if?
04:26What do you think of the idea there? Haven't you always wondered about it?
04:31He's actually got some pretty plausible theories on Mary Magdalene and that stuff, but I would
04:35have to do a lot of research of my own before I ever figured it out.
04:38I think it's always a good thing to re-examine, perhaps things that we've taken for granted.
04:43Yes, so it's beneficial.
04:46Reading it now, I think, well, is this all really true?
04:50Is it just a good story, a good yarn? Which I think it is.
04:57Readers are intrigued, even sympathetic to the plot, because it builds on ideas such
05:01as the Holy Grail, which hover in the popular imagination between legend and history.
05:08Many of the ideas advanced in it had been talked about before, for many centuries.
05:15Long before Brown wrote his book, the BBC had explored similar territory in a documentary
05:19series called Chronicle, made in the 1970s.
05:27The programmes investigated the sudden secret wealth of a French priest in the town of Rennes-le-Château
05:35and his connections to the Priory of Zion.
05:39The priest who began in poverty and yet spent millions, who made a discovery in his church
05:49of the parchments which hid secret messages, one speaking of a treasure belonging to Dagobert
05:56and to Zion.
05:57The thing about the Chronicle series was that they weren't some kind of new-age, hippy-dippy
06:03documentary. They were a proper, sourced, historical documentary series.
06:09The impact on the viewing public was enormous. They were, at the time, regarded as the most
06:15successful documentaries the BBC had ever done.
06:18The presenter and programme consultant was Henry Lincoln.
06:22He looked very credible as a presenter. He had a sort of rather magisterial way of presenting
06:29himself, telling you these amazing things that he'd discovered, these incredible documents.
06:36Among the information it contains is a list of the names of the Priory of Zion's grandmasters
06:41after their separation from the Templars and up to the present day.
06:47Victor Hugo, Jean Cocteau, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton. Some of these names are so illustrious
06:56that the list seemed just the sort of grandiose pedigree that would be created for itself
07:00by a lunatic fringe body of eccentrics playing at secret societies.
07:04You're inclined to say this has got the BBC's imprimatur upon it. It, therefore, must be
07:09pretty true.
07:11However, Henry Lincoln was more familiar with the world of fiction than fact.
07:16He wasn't a qualified historian. He hadn't taught. He hadn't actually done any major
07:21historical works. In fact, he was probably, in fact, at that stage, best known as a script
07:25writer for Doctor Who.
07:31And the story of the Priory of Zion read rather like a script.
07:35The Priory of Zion. Does it still exist? Is it really still alive? Still a force?
07:46A force to be reckoned with?
07:48Novelist Richard Lee collaborated with Lincoln on the Third Chronicle programme.
07:54Henry was swamped with a record quantity of fan mail.
08:00The number of letters received dwarfed anything the Beeb had done previously.
08:07Requests for more information, requests for additional films, requests for a book.
08:11In 1982, Lincoln, Lee and a colleague, Michael Bajent, expanded their research in The Holy
08:17Blood and the Holy Grail.
08:20When the book appeared, it, within a day, shot to the top of the bestseller list. For
08:25the next three weeks, it sold on a scale comparable to that of the Da Vinci Code.
08:30In the book, they speculated that the Priory of Zion was formed to protect the Holy Grail
08:36and its secret, that Christ's bloodline descended through the Merovingian kings of France.
08:44The theologians, naturally, were up in arms.
08:46If we take the message and turn now to the bishop, what does that, the message of the
08:50book, what is that going to mean to Christianity? If people accepted it as true, would there
08:54be any point in continuing with Christianity?
08:56Well, they're not going to accept it as true, and I really think that's a hypothetical question
08:59which is useless. Let's consider whether it is true or not, because no one's going to
09:03accept a thesis which is so academically absurd.
09:09And the professional historians were up in arms because we had trespassed on their territory,
09:14and we had committed the cardinal sin of making connections between diverse spheres.
09:20Regular triangles. What possible connection could there be between geometry and the priest
09:26who found treasure in a sleepy Pyrenean village?
09:29What Holy Blood, Holy Grail did was to dismiss reputable evidence which didn't go with its
09:39theories, accept disreputable evidence, and fill in the gaps where there was no evidence
09:47at all.
09:47Then I remembered that Rennes-le-Chateau is only one of three castles vital to this story.
09:53One of the things that the authors of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail claimed was that there
09:57was a kind of old, dry, and inadequate scholarly way of doing history which was essentially
10:04analytical, and that this wouldn't suit their purposes.
10:07There's a passage in the book where they say this, and what they had to come up with was
10:10a new essentially kind of synthetic way of looking at history which effectively meant
10:16it allowed them to join up any two utterly disparate points if they could find any point
10:20of connection between them at all, and if they could find any point of connection between
10:25them at all to say that they were connected.
10:28Coincidence? The accuracy is astonishing.
10:33One must bear in mind that in certain areas, any research inevitably is going to be historical
10:39conjecture. Most biblical scholarship involves conjecture.
10:45In 1996, the BBC made another investigation into the Priory of Zion in a Timewatch documentary.
10:55This time, it concluded it was a modern hoax by a Frenchman, Pierre Plantard, who was claiming
11:01descent from the Medovinian kings.
11:05Under French law, every new club or association must register itself with the authorities,
11:11and that's why there's a dossier here showing that a Priory of Zion filed the proper forms
11:17in 1956.
11:18You know, I'm older than the Priory of Zion.
11:23According to a founding member, this eccentric association took its name not from Jerusalem,
11:28but from a nearby mountain.
11:31The dossier also notes that the Priory's self-styled grandmaster, Pierre Plantard, who is central
11:37to this story, has done time in jail.
11:40One of the things I think which is interesting about this is the way in which the authors
11:46of the Holy Blood and Holy Grail have never, as far as I know, turned round to the rest
11:51of the world and said, it was a load of rubbish.
11:55Terribly sorry and all that.
11:56We're not going to give the money back, because we've spent it all, and you know, we did do
12:00quite a lot of work, and we were hoaxed too.
12:02But actually, it's all complete and utter tosh.
12:07The authors, however, still maintain there was a Priory of Zion in medieval times.
12:13We do not know whether the 1956 Priory was a latter-day concoction, whether it was a
12:25continuation of the medieval Priory, whether Plantard and the other members of the 1956
12:33order simply hijacked the name of the medieval organisation and appended their own operation
12:41to it.
12:42But they never claimed the book was pure history.
12:45We never said this is what we believe.
12:47We never said this is what happened.
12:49We didn't even say this is probably what happened.
12:53All we attempted to do was ask, are the various points of this hypothesis plausible?
12:59Is it plausible that Jesus might have had a claim to the throne?
13:04Is it plausible that he might have been married, that there might have been children, that
13:07those children eventually might have intermarried to produce the Merovingian bloodline?
13:13And we concluded, yes, it was plausible.
13:15And that was all we concluded.
13:17So the irony of the recent plagiarism court case is that there's little historical basis
13:21for either book.
13:24I think it's bizarre, this court case of Bejend and Lee versus Dan Brown, because it just
13:31shows that the whole thing is made up.
13:35One side says, no, we made it up, and the other side says, no, I made it up.
13:39So if anybody was in any doubt that this was complete fiction, they just need to look at
13:43the proceedings of the court case.
13:49Lee and Bejend say all they wanted was a fuller acknowledgement of their work, not just a
13:54passing reference the Da Vinci Code gives them.
13:57Here's perhaps the best-known tome, Teebing said, pulling a tattered hardcover from the
14:02stack and handing it to her.
14:04The cover read, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the acclaimed international bestseller.
14:10Sophie glanced up.
14:11An international bestseller?
14:12I've never heard of it.
14:14And the reference to the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is one that damns us with faint
14:18praise, nor does it even mention the authors.
14:23For all the uninitiated reader knows, the book could be fictitious.
14:28However, Dan Brown does hint at the author's existence through his mischievously named
14:32character, Lee Teebing.
14:35Lee Teebing.
14:36It's the name of a character from the Da Vinci Code.
14:39And look, Teebing is an anagram of Bejend.
14:42And look what Dan Brown has done here.
14:44He's taken all the letters from Richard Lee's surname and replaced them with identical
14:49replicas. And what sort of character is Lee Teebing?
14:52Well, he's an English expert on books about the Holy Grail.
14:56I don't think the patronising,
15:02slightly comic and slightly sinister figure of Lee Teebing constitutes an acknowledgement.
15:08Despite being able to take advantage of fictional devices, Brown's book offers itself as factually
15:14based.
15:16When you read Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which purports to be a work of fact, it actually
15:21feels as though you're reading a work of fiction.
15:24It seems to be full of wild and fantastic leaps of the imagination from one fact to
15:30another.
15:32And then you have the Da Vinci Code, which purports to be fiction, but when you read
15:36it, it feels as though you're reading a book, a novel, full of factual accuracies.
15:41It even starts with the word fact.
15:55The fascinating way the book itself seems to be constructed is that the beginning of
16:00it sort of tells you, these are the facts. Now, that's the first step into the fiction
16:06of the book. It's quite a clever, engaging device.
16:10So for any novelist to state that categorically, this is fact, means he expects the reader
16:17to accept it as such, and most readers will.
16:21Dan Brown has come so close to something that is deep and important and true, and then at
16:29the very last moment, he sort of shoots off into orbit, and really into fantasy.
16:36I believed a lot more, perhaps, than I should have done about it, and thought that there
16:40was a great deal of fact in it.
16:42It made me pretty amazed about it all, because I can't believe that it really existed. It's
16:49pretty amazing that it's all real, I guess.
16:52In the case of the Da Vinci Code, actually the assertion in the front is quite cleverly
16:57written, because he does not assert that the book is factually true. He asserts that Opus
17:05Dei exists, that it's controversial, that the Priory of Zion exists, but he doesn't
17:10say it's a completely new invention, and it's absolute nonsense anyway.
17:14And he asserts that his description of places are correct, though how he came to put Versailles
17:22north of Paris, I shall never know. But what he never ever said, actually, was that the
17:27book was factually correct. But people sort of just read that preface quickly, I think,
17:34and then assumed that that is what he'd said.
17:37Commentators are divided over whether it matters that readers are taken in.
17:40I mean, the Da Vinci Code is a strange hybrid animal, because although it is partly about
17:45history, it's set in the present. So some of the rules that you apply to historical
17:50fiction you don't necessarily need to immediately apply to it. So I suppose the only argument
17:55about something like the Da Vinci Code is how, therefore, honest you are about all of
18:00the source material that you based it on. So people can always say, look, it was here,
18:06I drew on it, but I made more of it than it is, because this is a work of fiction, and
18:12those were works of pseudo-fact or theory.
18:16If Dan Brown puts that preface at the front of his book, he's following in a long and,
18:21frankly, noble literary tradition. Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, supposedly the first
18:25English novel, had a preface which said, everything in this book is true. It was a device to make
18:33his readers interested. Now, in fact, Defoe did base it on a true story, but he made much
18:38more of Robinson Crusoe up, much the same as Dan Brown.
18:42If you believed it, if you took any action based on the notion that you believed it,
18:47if it affected any of your other kind of relationships to the truth, then you have been sold a pup.
18:57So why did Dan Brown write that preface?
19:04If Dan Brown hadn't put that preface in the beginning of the Da Vinci Code, the Da Vinci
19:08Code would not have been the success it was.
19:14But of course, Brown is also an accomplished handler of the thriller format.
19:21It was a good read. It kept me gripped, actually. I found it quite difficult to put down.
19:29I'm getting to a point where they bash one of the significant people over the head, and
19:35I want to see what happens next.
19:37I had a lot of admiration for the skill in holding an audience. I had a lot of admiration
19:43for the fact that at the end of each chapter, you have to read on to the next page.
19:50It's kind of clunky, the way it's put together. So you can almost see the mechanism of how
19:53it's happening. You can see that he ends every chapter with a question that has to be resolved
19:58in the next chapter.
19:59Now, as a thriller writer, I knew there was a danger in that, which is if you do it one
20:04too many times, people start to get bored. They start to kind of see that it's a device.
20:10But the clever thing about the Da Vinci Code, of course, is that exactly when you're starting
20:14to see the device, you're actually having fed into you a quite interesting bit of almost
20:20secret pseudo-history. So you're slightly more intellectually interested, as well as
20:26being kind of manipulated.
20:30Brown's narrative draws on many sources.
20:33It is a plot trawling of every esoteric potboiler for the last 30 years.
20:39It has got ingredients, components that will appeal to most people on a subliminal or semi-conscious
20:49or subconscious level. Lost kings, buried treasures, secret societies, conspiracies.
20:55All of this is potent, heady stuff.
20:58You put them all together, four or five of the most potent myths in European history
21:03into one interwoven saga, and you've got a winner on your hands.
21:08It's a very clever, but actually rather old-fashioned thriller. Hitchcock used to define the thriller
21:14as being something that needed a McGuffin, i.e. it didn't really matter what it was,
21:22but there was a reason for the plot to start rolling, which then threw conflicts and obstacles
21:29in the way. And you could argue that the search for the Holy Grail is about the biggest McGuffin
21:34you could possibly have if you were writing a thriller.
21:39The legend of the Holy Grail was itself a literary invention.
21:46It was invented in the late 12th century by Chrétien de Troyes, although it wasn't at
21:52all clear what it was. But it very soon came to be associated either with the cup Christ
22:00had used at the Last Supper or the dish in which there had been the meat at the Last
22:06Supper, and further that Joseph of Arimathea had used this vessel to collect Christ's blood
22:17from at the time of the crucifixion. That very, very quickly came to be believed, and
22:28all sorts, rather like now, all sorts of bodies started exploiting this. The most famous,
22:34from our point of view, is the Abbey of Glastonbury, which was busy building its reputation on
22:39the Arthurian myth. Glastonbury Abbey fixed the Grail in the public imagination.
22:50What it was fixed at was something which was out there to be searched for, could be found
23:00if only you were heroic and pure enough, but was unbelievably difficult to find. The Grail
23:07myth then went underground until the 19th century, and the man who, above all, restored
23:13it, it was Wagner in Lohengrin and Parsifal. In modern times, the Grail has become something
23:27less tangible, as Dan Brown recognises. And for most, I suspect, the Holy Grail is simply
23:34a grand idea, a glorious, unattainable treasure that somehow, even in today's world of chaos,
23:41inspires us. The book's main characters hunt the Grail, but they are also seeking personal
23:46answers. In new ages, it is very often that the Grail ceases to be actually a physical
23:55cup and becomes something else. And this is where this spills over into Dan Brown. One
24:02search for the Holy Grail is a search for self-realisation, self-understanding. In the
24:13Da Vinci Code, the secret of the Grail is reserved in cryptic form in some of the world's
24:19most famous Old Master paintings. Pictures are a great choice, because without labels,
24:26without clear labels, you can make anything of them. You can bring any potential interpretation
24:32and encourage your viewers to see them in a wide range of different ways. The idea of
24:39great secrets hidden in paintings had been championed by Henry Lincoln in the Chronicle
24:44series. He saw possible clues in a painting by Nicholas Poussin, which featured a grave
24:50close to Rennes-le-Château. Lincoln wondered if Poussin was the artist and if the Shepherdess
24:57was an allusion to Poussin's best-known painting, The Shepherds of Arcadia.
25:03The obvious relevance of the painting led me to undertake a detailed examination of
25:07it, and I found what seemed to me to be a curious and rigid geometry. I sought the guidance
25:13of Professor Christopher Cornford of the Royal College of Art, who has made a special study
25:17of the geometry of paintings. As I worked on the painting, it did seem to me to become
25:21evident that there was present in the geometry of it, somewhere in this area, the presence
25:29of what could be a regular pentagon and the angles of the pentagon.
25:34The next step was to join the opposite points of the pentagon. This makes a five-pointed
25:39star. What could this imply? In fact, what is the significance of the pentacle?
25:46An ancient symbol of the occult, the pentacle seemed to indicate something of magical significance.
25:54But the Da Vinci Code, as its title suggests, targeted a higher-profile artist.
26:01If you say, name an artist to a total stranger, he's more likely to say Leonardo da Vinci
26:08than anything. Besides, the Da Vinci Code sounds rather better than the Rembrandt Code
26:15or the Raphael Code, doesn't it? Da Vinci.
26:18Da Vinci, well, A, it scans rather well, and B, that name brings that kind of resonance.
26:25So we feel clever because we're not simply buying an airport thriller, we're buying into
26:32a whole package of cultural references.
26:36Leonardo is a figure who orchestrated his mystique, even during his own lifetime.
26:41We have these coded notebooks in mirror writing, we have his drawings. So he remains a fascinating
26:48figure whom each generation tries to put back together for themselves.
26:56Leonardo is surrounded by myths that encourage people to write silly things. Leonardo is
27:02always said to be the inventor of the tank, the inventor of the aeroplane, a man who understood
27:08about aerial perspective. Well, yes, he did, but he wasn't the first to do so, by any means.
27:15And Leonardo, in his own lifetime, was very keen to promote himself, promote himself as
27:21a genius who was far superior to his fellow Florentines.
27:28In The Da Vinci Code, Leonardo's Mona Lisa is portrayed as androgynous, in celebration
27:38of one of the book's themes, harmony between the sexes.
27:48Dan Brown takes a fairly conventional, almost cartoon-like reading of the Mona Lisa, i.e.
27:55this good combination of masculinity and femininity, and then throws in some quite wacky ideas
28:02about Egyptian references as well. This is only one of many ways in which that poor picture
28:11has been abused over the centuries.
28:18In fact, far from being an enigmatic portrait, the Mona Lisa is one of the most well-researched
28:26paintings in the world.
28:28We know who the sitter is, Lisa del Gioconda. We know she's a doctor's wife. We know that
28:34the picture was in Leonardo's possession until he died, and we know that it came back into
28:39Milan amongst the possessions of one of his favoured apprentices there. So we can, bizarrely,
28:46it's one of the pictures that doesn't contain much mystery, much clues to secret hidden
28:53meanings, but we won't let it go.
28:58Brown liked the idea of ciphers so much that he gave his two main characters complementary
29:02code-breaking skills. Robert Langdon is an American symbols expert, and Sophie Neveu
29:09is a French cryptographer, who supposedly trained at Royal Holloway College in England.
29:15I used to jokingly introduce myself as the man who supervised Sophie Neveu, but then
29:22was alarmed that roughly one in five, five, six people actually asked me what she was
29:25like. So the books have taken over and people have lost reality and fiction and so on, so
29:32I don't do that anymore.
29:34Codes are a perfect match for the thriller genre, because they create mystery by concealing
29:38real meanings.
29:40OK, well I suspect that Dan Brown latched onto coding theory because he recognises a
29:44sexy topic with popular appeal.
29:47I have to break the code. I'm sorry, I'm very thick.
29:52I told you though, my skills on code-breaking were absolutely nil.
29:57No idea.
30:01People like it, they like puzzle-solving and they like the air of mystery, and the concept
30:06of things being encrypted adds mystery.
30:10OK, it's a row of flowers.
30:16This is one of the cleverest things about the Da Vinci Code, is the use of puzzles and
30:19the use of codes. What's happening to the characters happens to you as the reader, you
30:23identify with them as a result, even though they bear no resemblance to any human being
30:27I've ever come across. That's what sucks you in, and it rewards you as well. It makes you
30:32feel clever if you get it before them, which frankly a lot of the codes aren't particularly
30:36earth-shattering, so you might well do.
30:38Eight roses. It's a line of eight roses and I have absolutely no idea what's in it.
30:45Prior to 1960, coding theory was a black art that was mainly confined to governments and
30:51spies and military and so on. It was in the Second World War when, not surprisingly, armies
30:57need to communicate and they don't want the enemy to know what they're doing, so they
31:01use secret codes and things like the Enigma and the activities of Bletchley Park are now
31:06right in the public domain because the 30-year rule's out, and there's no doubt that they've
31:11had a lot to do with the popularisation of cryptography. With the advent of the internet,
31:17computers, telecommunications, it's now part of everyday business practice and it's just
31:22become a popular science.
31:24Holy Grail. Oh, holy...
31:30Ah, the rose line.
31:32Yes, that's good, yeah.
31:35Part of the appeal of the Da Vinci Code is that it offers neat solutions in a messy world.
31:41You can go to Waterstones, take the Da Vinci Code off the shelf and escape into that, and
31:46there it comes alive for us, because it's well-written, it's a good book, it comes alive
31:50and there we are in the conspiracy and there we are getting the answers, it's all resolved
31:54and we come away satisfied and the world seems to be a better place.
32:04The book also picks up on the contemporary rise of conspiracy theory, as we've become
32:09more suspicious of authority figures and institutions.
32:13One of the kind of strong selling points of something like the Da Vinci Code is the idea
32:18that there is an official version of history, which the authorities give us, whether they
32:23be the church authorities or the government or shadowy others, and then a true version
32:29of history, a true version of history which we can be let into.
32:34Events like the death of Diana and the 9-11 attacks have increased our feelings of suspicion.
32:41That situation became increasingly acute after the millennium and even more after the events
32:49of 11 September, when everything seemed increasingly uncertain, when people desperately wanted
32:57answers to account for what seemed to be a general collapse of everything that had previously
33:03been taken for granted as stable and secure.
33:06I think the spread of different kinds of media and the lack of trust in different kinds of
33:10media, whether you talk about political spin or newspaper bias or internet blogging or
33:17whatever the other reason is, people are starting to read in a different way.
33:20They're starting to think, what are the sources of this?
33:23And I think that the paranoia that lies behind that, the fear that in fact you might not
33:28be being told the truth, is something that underpins the fascination of the Da Vinci Code.
33:33We are readier to believe the strange, the unnatural, the ghost story than we are rational
33:43explanations or simply ordinary alternatives.
33:47Our susceptibility prompted the Archbishop of Canterbury to make conspiracy the subject
33:52of his Easter message.
33:53We are instantly fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups.
34:00This has become so much the stuff of our imagination these days that it's only natural, it seems,
34:07to expect it when we turn to ancient texts, especially biblical texts.
34:12They will believe that there is this big force out there, whether it's the Catholic Church
34:16or Opus Dei or the Pope himself, deliberately keeping everybody in ignorance so that none
34:23of us will ever know that Jesus' bloodline is out there and these children are out there
34:28and, you know, if they're out there, why aren't they out there doing miracles?
34:33Why aren't they out there saving the world?
34:40As a major institution, the Church is fertile territory for conspiracy theories,
34:45and the Catholic Church especially so.
34:48I think it taps into, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, the very ancient anti-Catholic prejudice
34:57that really exists very strongly in parts of the Protestant imagination.
35:04You won't see much negative in the book about the Protestant Church.
35:09The previously little-known Catholic organisation Opus Dei found itself demonised in the Da Vinci Code
35:15as the powerful force trying to wipe out the Priory of Zion.
35:19Brown presents the following description in his preface.
35:24And it says, fact, the Vatican prelature known as Opus Dei is a deeply devout Catholic sect
35:30that has been the topic of recent controversy due to reports of brainwashing, coercion
35:35and a dangerous practice known as corporal mortification.
35:38Opus Dei refutes that description.
35:41The main character of Opus Dei in the Da Vinci Code is a brainwashed killer monk.
35:48It's not very nice to be depicted as a brainwashed killer monk,
35:53but actually we don't have any monks.
35:55We love monks in Opus Dei because we are Catholics,
35:58and there are many types of monks in the Catholic Church,
36:02but Opus Dei isn't one of the organisations containing monks.
36:06I mean, I know Opus Dei. I'm not myself a member of Opus Dei, but I know Opus Dei.
36:11They are decent, well-meaning, rather rigid, rather too rigid for my taste, Catholics.
36:23The Opus Dei movement began in Spain.
36:27Madrid, 1928.
36:30In that year, a young priest in a working-class district
36:33founded an organisation intended to help ordinary Catholics dedicate their daily lives to God.
36:39The name of the priest was Josemaría Escriva de Balaguer,
36:42and the organisation was Opus Dei, God's Work.
36:49During the turbulence of the Spanish Civil War,
36:52Opus Dei offered stability and structure.
36:55In Spain under Franco,
36:59Opus Dei became rather like Freemasonry without the secrecy.
37:05It was an energetic, diligent, fundamentally apolitical philosophy.
37:09Socialists as well as Franco supporters were Opus Dei members,
37:12and it appealed especially to the professional classes.
37:16Opus Dei expanded rapidly.
37:18In the 1960s, seven members of the Spanish government were Opus Dei men.
37:23If you wanted to get on in business, you joined the Opus Dei.
37:29And for that reason, the Opus Dei got a name in Spain.
37:34Which I don't think it deserves elsewhere.
37:40When Opus Dei reached Britain, it now has 500 members,
37:44it made headlines for encouraging its members to practise corporal mortification.
37:50Brown's killer monk revels masochistically
37:53in the wearing of a spiked metal band on his leg called a syllis.
37:57I think the thing to think about corporal mortification
38:03is, like everything else in the Da Vinci Code, is grossly distorted.
38:07And it's not put in context.
38:09I mean, the context is that to be a Christian,
38:12Christ said you have to pray, fast and do good works.
38:15These are the three things that Christians do.
38:17And within fasting and self-denial, there's a long tradition.
38:21So corporal mortification has to be understood in the context of all sacrifices,
38:26where most of life's sacrifices are small.
38:30Sometimes they're bodily things,
38:32like wearing a syllis at the top of your leg,
38:37which causes discomfort,
38:40but doesn't draw any blood or harm you in any way.
38:45And you offer that discomfort to God
38:47in the same way as you offer the fasting, not eating,
38:50or sleeping rough, or walking barefoot.
38:53And this is very far removed from the type of masochistic, gruesome representation
38:58that you find in the Da Vinci Code.
39:01Brown's biggest conspiracy theory of all
39:04is that Jesus intended women to have a powerful place in his ministry.
39:08According to these unaltered Gospels,
39:10it was not Peter to whom Christ gave directions
39:13with which to establish the Christian Church.
39:15It was Mary Magdalene.
39:17Sophie looked at him.
39:19You're saying the Christian Church was to be carried on by a woman?
39:23That was the plan.
39:25Jesus was the original feminist.
39:27One theme of the book which particularly appeals to female readers
39:31is the idea of a woman at the centre of Christianity.
39:35Perhaps this is no surprise,
39:37given that the court case revealed
39:39that Dan Brown's wife, Blythe, did much of his research.
39:43He really extols the feminine in early Christianity
39:48and also really blames, appears to blame, the Catholic Church
39:53for kind of writing female sexuality out of its doctrine.
39:57Now, admittedly,
39:59whatever the rights and wrongs of the Da Vinci Code in doing this,
40:03the Catholic Church has made it very difficult for women throughout the ages
40:07by elevating, as its most prominent woman, the Virgin Mary,
40:13you know, a virgin who has a child.
40:15How much more impossible can life get?
40:18There's an argument as to whether or not there should be women priests.
40:21So the idea that actually Mary Magdalene was Christ's lover
40:26and sired a generation which then continues to this day
40:30is a perfect way of kind of feminising Christianity
40:33at exactly the moment when a great many women and some men
40:37are saying that that's exactly what needs to be done to it.
40:40So even if it's not true,
40:42the speculation fits into endless discussions that we're already having.
40:46It's very much trying to celebrate and bring back the feminine divine,
40:50which is really important to me because I'm actually Wiccan,
40:53so I actually believe in that, and that was really important
40:56because it's mentioned a lot in the Book of the Goddess and everything.
40:59So that was, you know, that was really good to read.
41:03Brown attempted to prove the importance of Mary Magdalene
41:07by claiming that Leonardo painted her into the Last Supper
41:11on Christ's right hand.
41:14Sophie could not take her eyes from the woman beside Christ.
41:18The Last Supper is supposed to be 13 men.
41:21Who is this woman?
41:23Although Sophie had seen this classic image many times,
41:26she had not noticed this glaring discrepancy.
41:29Everyone misses it, Teeping said.
41:31Our preconceived notions of this scene are so powerful
41:35that our minds blank out the incongruity it overrides our eyes.
41:39It's known as scotoma, Langdon added.
41:43The brain does it sometimes with powerful symbols.
41:47Brown's claims have even made art historians do a double take.
41:51I have been back to look at the Last Supper
41:55with a fiercely analytical eye.
41:59This is what he thinks, can I see it?
42:02Not this is what he thinks, I don't want to see it,
42:05but can I see it?
42:07Can I see in that picture what he sees?
42:10And spending a day, a whole day, virtually on my own,
42:16in contemplation of that picture,
42:19I see absolutely no foundation to any of his ideas about it.
42:24To try to argue that one figure is female,
42:28other figures are male, doesn't work,
42:31because if you actually look at the faces,
42:34they're quite similar, and the so-called Mary Magdalene
42:37and the features of Christ are indeed almost identical there.
42:41Long hair, long flowing hair in this period
42:44does not indicate femaleness there.
42:47There's a real confusion over what the 16th century,
42:51the late 15th, early 16th century,
42:54understood to be female dress,
42:56what they understood to be male dress there,
42:59and this book just hasn't got it there.
43:02Dan Brown has quite cynically pressed the feminist button.
43:06Wonderful.
43:08Here you have a picture in The Last Supper of 13 men,
43:13and one of them is suddenly turned into a woman.
43:16Not only a woman, but a woman with a past.
43:22And there, a prostitute,
43:25redeemed by the company of Christ himself.
43:29All those who think that we should have women priests and women bishops
43:33and even a woman archbishop sooner rather than later
43:37will rejoice in the presence of the Magdalene at the Last Supper.
43:42The novel could have been written for all those silly women.
43:47Even if there was a secret message in The Last Supper,
43:51it would have been fortunate to have survived.
43:54Fresco paintings were an extremely fragile medium
43:57where speed was of the essence.
44:00Leonardo, halfway through the painting,
44:03would go and spend a whole day just looking at it,
44:07gazing at his own work,
44:10and then put one tiny touch of paint on and go away.
44:16You're talking about a fresco.
44:19The whole business of painting a fresco
44:22means that you paint on damp plaster.
44:25You do not come back three weeks later,
44:29contemplate and put a dry touch of paint on dry plaster and go away.
44:34It falls off.
44:36The fresco disintegrated rapidly
44:38and was greatly altered by heavy-handed repairs over the centuries.
44:42A recent restoration reveals how little of Leonardo's original work remains.
44:48What we have with The Last Supper today is a ghost of its former self.
44:52We're seeing very much the under, under, underpaint
44:57of what was a very complex and highly built-up picture.
45:07Brown based his thesis about Mary Magdalene
45:10on a series of Gospels discovered in 1945 in Egypt,
45:14which are known as the Gnostic Gospels.
45:17They were written several hundred years after the New Testament
45:21and create a very different image of Mary Magdalene.
45:27They paint a picture of Mary as a significant woman in the early church,
45:31in conflict with Peter and the disciples,
45:35one whom Jesus loved and therefore spent time with and gave knowledge to.
45:40But there are some teasing omissions to the texts,
45:43which were damaged by ants.
45:45And he kissed her, that we have at the beginning of this line,
45:50on her, and then there's a lacuna.
45:53And, of course, this lacuna, this missing text,
45:56has been the object of quite a bit of speculation by scholars.
46:00Where exactly did he kiss her?
46:02Most likely on the mouth, and that can be restored here
46:06on the basis of Coptic grammar and the length of the lacuna
46:10with a great deal of confidence.
46:12Now, in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, there's a very interesting passage
46:17where Jesus and Mary Magdalene have a very passionate snog, basically.
46:22And the disciples get very upset about this, the watching disciples,
46:26and say, Jesus, Master, why do you love her more than you love us?
46:32And Jesus says back to them,
46:34no, no, you're getting the question the wrong way round.
46:36What you must ask yourselves is,
46:38why do I not love you as much as I love her?
46:41This tale would seem to undermine Christ's feminist credentials.
46:45All the Gospels, even the Gnostic ones,
46:47he never has a female disciple among the 12.
46:51And, you know, Mary, even at the most liberal expression
46:57you can take of the Gnostic Gospels, is a sex object to him, basically.
47:02So, it's not ideal, even in the Gnostic Christianity,
47:08the way that women are represented.
47:11Today, the Gnostics are viewed as the New Age believers of their day,
47:15seeking a direct communion with a higher power.
47:18This coloured their writings about events that happened centuries before.
47:22One of the things that's very attractive about Gnostic beliefs
47:25is that they do seem to offer knowledge,
47:28especially knowledge about the transcendent, about the supernatural,
47:32and they offer pathways to knowledge, through doorways, through mysteries.
47:36You know, at one point in the Da Vinci Code,
47:38Sophie Nouveau is carrying this key around,
47:40this key that's the answer to the mystery.
47:42And that's what the Gnostic religions offer.
47:44They were the key to the mysteries of life.
47:47The fact that the Gnostic Gospels were left out of the New Testament
47:51has fed the idea that the official Church
47:53tried to bury Mary Magdalene's importance.
47:56The Church didn't need to suppress them.
47:58They fell into disuse of their own accord.
48:00You know, the real Gospels were very much used,
48:03and the others just fell into disuse.
48:05They were not important.
48:07The people didn't take them seriously.
48:09No-one reputable would treat the Gospels of Mary Magdalene
48:14in the same light as the Mark, Matthew, Luke and John.
48:20Although the Mary Magdalene story is a conspiracy theory,
48:24the modern Church, both Catholic and Protestant,
48:27has been alarmed at the public reception of Brown's story.
48:30The heresy that he has revived in this book
48:33is one that goes back to the earliest days of the Church,
48:36one that the Church spent a lot of money, a lot of time
48:39and a lot of lives suppressing.
48:42And the Church is alarmed because it knows that this heresy
48:46was very, very powerful and very potent early on
48:49and was capable of attracting people to it.
48:51So, again, it naturally has frightened them
48:54to see it taking hold of the public imagination
48:57in quite such a powerful way once again.
48:59The book, at one level, is nonsense,
49:02is historically inaccurate,
49:05but at another level, of course, it touches nerves with the Church
49:09and half-truths are there.
49:11When it first came out and it became clear
49:14that millions of people were reading this book,
49:17the Catholic Church responded in a fearful way,
49:20in an aggressive way, in a defensive way,
49:23dismissing it as fantasy, as rubbish, as nonsense.
49:26There are good reasons why readers of the Da Vinci Code
49:29are prepared to question the traditional doctrine of the Church.
49:33The best thing that you can say about this discussion
49:37is that it reminds people
49:40that there are practically no sources
49:43for what exists in the New Testament.
49:46There's practically nothing to suggest
49:49that any one account is better than any other account.
49:52And that has allowed people to come in and say,
49:54my version of this that I now give you
49:57is actually as good and as well-sourced
50:00as the one which everybody is led to accept.
50:03I think you could probably argue that the history of the Church,
50:07as it moves from early reality into institutionalised power,
50:13was always one where there was a lot of slippage
50:16between what the doctrine became and what the reality became.
50:21The Da Vinci Code also taps into the spiritual uncertainty
50:25and distrust of the 21st century.
50:27And lonely like you've lost all hope
50:33And your sanity...
50:36My own theory, for what it's worth,
50:39is that over the last two centuries,
50:42in Western culture at any rate,
50:45religion and secularism have fought each other to a standstill.
50:52And people believe in science as little as they believe in religion.
50:57And we're left with neither side having won in a kind of vacuum.
51:07We have a duty, we really have a duty.
51:09People like myself, who do genuinely and heartfeltly believe
51:13what the Gospels and the Church tell us,
51:15we have a charge to recognise that the story we are telling
51:19is to our generation, frankly, balmy.
51:22Let's be honest, and then we might at least have a real dialogue
51:26with those who wonder, why do we tell this story?
51:30The perceived threat of Dan Brown's version of the Christ story
51:33has united many branches of the Church in a counter-offensive.
51:37With Greater Plom, they're riding the tail of Da Vinci Code tourism
51:41to get people through their doors.
51:43Lincoln Cathedral has seen visitor numbers rise
51:46since it played host to the feature film,
51:48for it should be mentioned a six-figure sum.
51:52It would have been easy to just say no, and that was a real option,
51:56because if the film comes out, it paints Christianity in this light,
52:00people go to the film, they don't believe as a result of that,
52:03then that would harm our mission and the mission of the Church.
52:07So it was a difficult decision, and many others thought
52:10that we should not have proceeded, but we did on the basis
52:13that we felt that this was something we had to engage with.
52:16But to have had quite such a response, such an active response
52:20on the web, on television, on the radio, in books,
52:23this is all to the good, and I have to admit that I've joined the fray.
52:27Not only do I give my weekly talk on Fridays,
52:30I've actually written a short book about it.
52:32Even Opus Dei is taking a positive attitude to the negative publicity.
52:37With the Da Vinci Code, we've had a huge amount of interest.
52:42For example, our website had 100,000 hits in 2003
52:49and a million in 2005, so it's a tenfold increase.
52:54So for all its fears, it appears as if the Da Vinci Code
52:58might benefit the Church in the long run.
53:00Even though it's a work of fiction, in 40 or 50 years' time,
53:03people will still be talking about it, it's a seminal book.
53:06They will look back and see this as a life-changing era
53:10for the world and for the Church, really.
53:12I don't think that's putting it too strongly.
53:14Visitor numbers have also increased to the galleries of London and Paris.
53:18Does it matter that a thriller is responsible
53:21for this renaissance in art appreciation?
53:23If you go to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa,
53:26are all those people who are standing in front of you
53:30looking at this picture produced in Florence in the early 16th century,
53:36are they trying to kind of really understand the picture
53:39or are they saying, oh, ticked off that clue,
53:42let me rush off up to Milan now and tick off that clue?
53:46The only thing that makes Dan Bryan's book important
53:51in the field of Leonardo's studies
53:55is the rip-roaring success that it has been.
53:59Nobody who has ever written a serious book on Leonardo
54:02has had anything like the success.
54:07And Dan Bryan's hypotheses
54:11have disrupted the general understanding of the picture.
54:16Therefore, it does matter.
54:20For the last three years,
54:22Da Vinci Code mania has dominated our culture in extraordinary ways.
54:26And the fact that a mere novel can wreak such havoc
54:29with our sense of reality perhaps reveals a great deal
54:32about our state of mind at the turn of the millennium.
54:36What the Da Vinci Code is doing is, it is...
54:42I hate to use the word exploit
54:44because I'm not sure that is the correct word
54:47for what the author considered he was doing,
54:50but the effect is it exploits illusions.
54:54It presents these illusions,
54:58which so many people believe in,
55:02and creates a story out of them.
55:07And I don't blame him, I don't blame the author for doing this.
55:11He's made an awful lot of money out of it, of course,
55:15but, well, that is his right.
55:17But, nevertheless, what he is doing is exploiting those illusions.
55:22That is all he is doing.
55:24And I just feel very, very sorry for the people
55:27who believe what they read in the Da Vinci Code.
55:30It will be very difficult for,
55:34I imagine, millions of readers now
55:37who have no other access
55:40to the realities of the story of Leonardo
55:45to believe anything other than the Da Vinci Code.
55:51It is such a distortion.
55:53That is why I deplore it.
55:55In fact, what I think I'm deploring is the success of the novel
56:00rather than the novel itself.
56:02And for that, of course, one can't blame Dan Bron.
56:05So can we blame his publishers, Random House?
56:08It's very interesting that when people say,
56:10the book has sold this many million hardbacks in America,
56:13well, one of the reasons it's done that
56:15is because you can't buy it in paperback in America.
56:18So some of this is marketing,
56:21very creative, successful, powerful marketing.
56:24But it's not as if this is the spirit of God moving on the waters.
56:29This is capitalism.
56:31In fact, the American paperback has just come out,
56:34coinciding with Random House's successful defence
56:37against plagiarism claims.
56:39I'd like to thank Dan Bron for his patience
56:43and for his tremendous support through this trial.
56:47Renewed interest in the Grail story
56:49has put the Da Vinci Code back on the bestseller lists,
56:52shifting 20,000 copies a week.
56:55While the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,
56:57which is also from the Random House stable,
57:00has seen a 100% increase in sales
57:02some 24 years after publication.
57:07It prompted the judge to refer to speculation
57:10that the whole trial was a giant publicity stunt.
57:13Conspiracy theory, anyone?
57:19For all of us, and most people we knew,
57:23it was a running joke.
57:26In fact, early on it was suggested
57:29by somebody on their side, jokingly,
57:33take out an injunction and both books will profit.
57:37But realistically, no, there was no such conspiracy.
57:45It's perfect. It's got fantastic timing at the moment.
57:48The court case has absolutely brought it into perfect prominence,
57:51which is seamlessly moving into the paperback.
57:54I'm not claiming that any of these things are deliberate,
57:57I'm claiming that the secret of this strange Holy Grail continues.
58:01Much more worrying is that I'm told that Dan Brown's next book
58:06is about the Freemasons,
58:08and you cannot write about the Freemasons
58:10without writing about the Knights Templar.
58:13I think it's all going to start again.
58:22And another author who stirred things up tomorrow night,
58:25after his death, we examine the cultural legacy of V.S. Naipaul,
58:29The Trouble with Naipaul, here on BBC4 at 10.