This appeared in the Catholic Asian News magazine recently. Read this before you watch the movie "The controversial Da Vinci Code", says writer Rufus Bruno Pereira.
THREE core claims that The Da Vinci Code makes are:
- That the Catholic Church brutally suppressed information concerning Jesus’ marriage recorded in the Sangreal Documents, which Jesus’ followers hid under the Jerusalem Temple’s Holy of Holies
- After Jesus’ crucifixion and death – from which he never rose – Mary Magdalene now pregnant with Jesus’ daughter Sarah, fled to France. Her descendants married into the French royal bloodline of the Merovingians in the fifth century
- Leonardo Da Vinci, knowing this secret, depicted it in The Last Supper where the figure seated to Jesus’ immediate right, and painted to look effeminate is Mary Magdalene and not John the Apostle.
The Da Vinci Code begins with a monk murdering The Louvre’s curator Jacques Sauniere to keep the secret hidden. The story’s hero Robert Langdon summoned to The Louvre concerning this murder, meets Sophie Neveu, who discovers that she and her grandfather Jacques Sauniere are Jesus Christ’s descendents.
(1) The myth of the Sangreal Documents
The story is false at its roots. There were no Sangreal Documents hidden beneath the Jerusalem Temple’s Holy of Holies for only the High Priest stepped into the Holy of Holies annually during the Day of Atonement to engage in sacrificial ritual for his and his peoples’ sins. Jesus’ disciples being laity could never enter the Holy of Holies, let alone get underneath it.
The 66 A.D. Jewish rebellion against Rome saw the Temple and Jerusalem destroyed in 70 A.D. During the attack on the Temple, a Roman soldier threw a torch that burnt the Temple to the ground. The overall commander of the Roman legions, Titus – Vespacian’s son – stepped into the Holy of Holies inspecting it before its consumption by fire. How could the Sangreal Documents not be found if Jesus’ followers placed it there in four large trunks?
Caliph Omar I took Jerusalem in 635 A.D. In 691 A.D, the Caliph Abdul Malik built the Dome of The Rock followed by the Caliph al-Walid building the Al-Aqsa Mosque both within the Temple premises. Couldn’t the Sangreal Documents be found amidst such activity? The Da Vinci Code states that the Knights Templars found the documents, while it could have been found much earlier.
(2) French Bloodline?
This claim can be discredited by recognising two falsehoods in The Da Vinci Code:
- (a) that Jesus fathered a child and,
- (b) that the Merovingians founded Paris.
In the Gospels, married women are always mentioned as “the wife of....” reflecting the Gospels’ Jewish roots where women were seen as property of their husbands. Mary Magdalene, however, is associated with place of origin and not wife of, for if she were married, she would have been identified as “the wife of...” as opposed to place of origin.
Furthermore, The Da Vinci Code’s claim that Mary Magdalene was of the tribe of Benjamin where her marriage to Jesus being of the house of David creating a powerful political union is false. Mary is of Magdala in the north beside the Sea of Galilee, while Benjaminite territory was south.
The Da Vinci Code claims that the descendents of Jesus married into the Merovingian clan and that bloodline founded Paris. But Paris is mentioned already as a village named “Lutetia” in Julius Caesar’s 51 B.C. record. It was a fishing and farming village surrounded by marshland.
(3) Leonardo Da Vinci And The Secret
That Leonardo did not intend the figure to be Mary Magdalene on Jesus’ immediate right can be confirmed by the fact that the painting is a one-point perspective that had just become the art style and was the craze then. In a one-point perspective all lines (other than horizontal lines) from the viewer into the picture converges at a point called the vanishing point. In Leonardo’s The Last Supper, the lines converge at Jesus’ head showing him to be the thematic focus.
The novel identifies John the Apostle as Mary Magdalene seated beside Jesus claiming that the figure looks effeminate. But drawing figures looking feminine was typical of the style of renaissance art. Other Last Supper artists did the same.
Dan Brown’s story claims that the reason why Leonardo’s work has no chalice is due to the artist wanting to show that Mary Magdalene’s womb and not the chalice was the real chalice carrying Jesus’ bloodline. In actual fact, Leonardo was trained at the Florentine School where all artists trained there did not draw a chalice in their paintings of The Last Supper due to their understanding that The Last Supper in the Gospel According to John is not depicted as a passover meal where the chalice was used.
This may also be the reason why the bread depicted is not unleavened bread. Peter, according to the novel, holds a knife and looks threateningly at Mary Magdalene (actually John the Apostle) while in actual fact Leonardo depicts the moment in John’s Gospel where Jesus announces his betrayal. Peter had just cut bread in half (seen in the painting) only to suddenly turn and look at John upon hearing Jesus’ announcement.
