Screeching Christian Codebreakers

emarkp · April 27, 2004, 11:22pm

True enough, but Dan Brown is publicly quoted as saying The DaVinci Fiasco is truth. And many people are believing it as truth. That is spreading ignorance. And here we try to fight ignorance. That’s what factual rebuttals are for.

The examples you mention are not “early Christian history”. They’re Jewish mythos, which is included in the Christian mythos. Early Christian history includes things like the ecumenical councils–The DaVinci Travesty in particular mentions the Council of Nicea (or Nicaea) which happened in 325 AD. That council has minutes, and is part of factual history, not part of disputed belief. Here’s how Dan Brown describes it in The DaVinci Disaster:

“Indeed,” Teabing said. “Stay with me. During this fusion of religions, Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea.”
Sophie had heard of it only insofar as its being the birthplace of the Nicene Creed.
“At this gathering,” Teabing said, “many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon?the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus.”
“I don’t follow. His divinity?”
“My dear,” Teabing declared, “until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet… a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal.”
“Not the Son of God?”
“Right,” Teabing said. “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”
“Hold on. You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?”
“A relatively close vote at that,” Teabing added.

This is of course woefully wrong. The Council of Nicea was all about the Arian Controversy–Arius proposed the idea of Jesus as divine, but of lesser divinity than the Father, that there was a time when Jesus “was not.” The Nicene Creed was one of the results of the council, which coined the greek word “Homoousious” (commonly translated as “consubstantial”) with the Father. Additionally only 17 of the roughly 300 bishops present initially refused to sign it, with eventually only 3 objecting. Cite, cite.

These are facts of history, not mythos, and not opinion. There are copious records. Dan Brown makes a hash of most of his presentation of history. Furthermore, the characters presenting the information (like the “Teabing” character in the above quote) are supposed to be professors–the most learned in their field. Hence, the authority figure in the book is presenting this misinformation in a matter-of-fact way someone who “knows his stuff”. As a result, many people believe the laughable statments of “fact” in The DaVinci Doot.

But it doesn’t just stop with trashing history. It trashes everyday fact as well. In his agonizing discourse about phi (the golden ratio) Brown pens the following tripe:

“PHI’s ubiquity in nature,” Langdon said, killing the lights, “clearly exceeds coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained by the Creator of the universe. Early scientists heralded one-point-six-one-eight as the Divine Proportion.”
“Hold on,” said a young woman in the front row. “I’m a bio major and I’ve never seen this Divine Proportion in nature.”
“No?” Langdon grinned. “Ever study the relationship between females and males in a honeybee community?”
“Sure. The female bees always outnumber the male bees.”
“Correct. And did you know that if you divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive in the world, you always get the same number?”
“You do?”
“Yup. PHI.”
The girl gaped. “NO WAY!”
“Way!” Langdon fired back

This of course is wrong (as well as painful to read). Brown apparently knows nothing about bees. In any hive there are many workers (sterile females) a single queen (fertile female) and a handful of drones (males). Specifically, drones are only produced when the queen needs to mate (which happens once in the queen’s lifespan) and she only mates with roughly 10-20 drones (whereupon the drones immediately die).

The real “phi” in the story of bees is that because males are born from unfertilized eggs (hence they have a father and no mother) the ratio of ancestors of a male bee to that of a female bee approaches phi. This isn’t that surprising: a female bee has the same mother as a male in the colony but additionally has a father. That produces the recursion relation which results in a mathematical sequence whose limit is phi.

Brown also gets other things hideously wrong:

Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world. There were no female Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, nor Islamic clerics. The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos?the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole?had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice… woman.

Not even the feminine association with the left-hand side could escape the Church’s defamation. In France and Italy, the words for “left”–gauche and sinistra–came to have deeply negative overtones, while their right-hand counterparts rang of righteousness, dexterity, and correctness. To this day, radical thought was considered left wing, irrational thought was left brain, and anything evil, sinister.

In his attempt at the Grand Unified Women-Hating Theory, Brown screws up again. The left brain is actually the rational side, the right the irrational/emotional side. And he continues to claim that every element of Christian history or symbolism is designed to crush “the divine feminine”.

He also claims the olympiad cycle was based on the cycles of Venus, etc. etc. ad naseum.

Yes it does. That’s the problem. From the book FAQ:

Not the word I’d choose–gullible or uninformed might be better. But much of the populace picks up things like that and then says, “I read somewhere that…” And that requires rebuttal/refutation/correct/what have you. The guy’s in the tin-foil-hat part of society and he’s got millions of people reading his rubbish.

You’re wrong. I can point to any number of counterexamples of people who are deeply involved in their religion (even in positions of leadership) who get zero compensation (in cash or kind) for what they do (oh yeah, I’d be one of them).