While I’m proud of myself for actually finishing the DaVinci Code… it left me quite disappointed.
No one could walk away from the book thinking it holds truth. At least no one who actually thought about what they were reading as they read it. As the label correctly distinguishes it, it is clearly fiction. The story is fantastic, but it’s anti-climactic finish leaves the reader with neither the option of a cliff hanger nor a surprise. The book seems to peak somewhere in the chapter 60 range and then grinds to a halt 40 chapters later.
Chapters 55 & 56 are the full blown diatribe against biblical Christianity. Brown’s assertion is that Christianity was created by a power starved Constantine, Jesus possessed gnostic-like god qualities and it’s fine for people to believe whatever they need to get by in life. In fact, this is a well-worn humanist argument and nothing new. It’s relativism’s view of religion. However, his assertion that the 4 gospels of the New Testament were chosen among the 60 reviewed is just a conspiracy theory. According to church history, there wasn’t any serious argument brought forth for the Gnostic’s… any controversy at all was over the handful of books in our NT whose authorship is veiled. (Hebrews for example.) If you aren’t sure why the others weren’t included… just head over to the nearest Borders and flip through the gnostic texts. It will immediately leap out at you why they were not included.
The conspiracy about a smear campaign against Mary Magdeline and the "secret lineage of Jesus’ bloodline" is a fun conspiracy. And entirely implausible and fictional altogether.
Why is the book so popular? Well, it’s pretty simple. Brown takes every conceivable cliche` and wraps them together with all the stuff that most people half-remember from high school Western Civ class. So he simply ties together oodles of names with secret sex cults, church conspiracy theories, murder mystery, a distrust of anything Christian, character double-crossing, riddles, knights of the round table, exotic locations, America’s fascination with Harvard, and the deep desire of American to figure out mysteries. Of course it’s popular!
For those who think this book contains truth: Is the DaVinci Code the revelation of "the holy grail" to the world? If the powers that are described in the DaVinci Code are real… do you really think that they would have allowed Dan Brown to publish this story? Or is the secret behind the church merely being revealed to 46 million of the books buyers? Is some albino monk going to come kill us all?
Glad I finally read it. It is worth reading. It’s fun, and it’s obviously fictitious!
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