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