The Real Story Behind "The Da Vinci Code"
I’m sure many of you know about Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), the book, the movie, the millions of dollars it made, the court case, the conspiracy theories, the hype, the Louvre, and the crazy people who think it tells the real story of the secret origins of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the Priory of Zion, Opus Dei, and the evils of the Catholic Church.
As I look back on it now, The Da Vinci Code was basically QAnon-level atheism for people who liked Dawkins, Dateline, and Vatican conspiracy theories.
Now behind every good conspiracy theory is usually a clever forger, a daring fraudster, a cunning crook, an ex-priest, or a jilted lover. And behind The Da Vinci Code (DVC) is Dan Brown, but Dan Brown largely based his book on the earlier book Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. But even that book was inspired but an even earlier book, The Gold of Rennes (1967) [French title: L'or de Rennes ou la vie insolite de Bérenger Saunière, curé de Rennes-le-Château]. And that my friends leads down a big rabbit hole involving forged documents hidden in the Bibliothèque Nationale, a misbehaving priest, legends about the Cathars, and Gnostic Gospels.
If you want to know the story, behind the story, behind the story, behind Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, then you MUST LISTEN to Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on “The Real Da Vinci Code.”
It is fascinating. It is up there with The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, First Century Mark, the Secret Gospel of Mark, as conspiracy theories fabricated to sell!
As it goes, many years ago, back in Scotland, I did a seminar on why The Da Vinci Code was a load of absolute tosh! Here’s a few things I said about it back in the day!