The History Channel in Canada broadcast "The Real Da Vinci Code" as a two hour show a few week ago (March 23/05). Actor, journalist and politician Tony Robinson was the narrator and he brought a comic and sarcastic presence, honed in his appearances as Baldrick in Rowan Atkinson's "Blackadder" shows, to his role as debunker of modern myths.
The show was originally broadcast in Britain as part of a Channel 4 series called "Weird Worlds", which is devoted to debunking claims of magic, fantasy, fiction and the paranormal.
It starts with a clip of Dan Brown, the author of the wildly successful novel "The Da Vinci Code" being interviewed during a promotional tour claiming that while his story is a work of fiction, the underlying history of the Grail, secret societies and suppression of the truth about the Holy Grail by the Catholic Church was true. Brown still makes the same claims on his web site, in a somewhat circumscribed way.
Channel 4 has a page for "The Real Da Vinci Code" which summarizes the program's answers to Dan Brown's historical claims. There is a savage review of the novel and its historical claims at salon.com (unfortunately only an excerpt but fun)and a thorough article at the ever-useful Wikipedia.
The Grail was originally supposed to be the goblet used by Christ at the Last Supper, which had been found in the Holy Land and transported to Europe, where it became the object of quests by knights - a sort of religious purpose within an essential martial pursuit. The idea first turned up an 11th century work of adventure fiction - about knights on holy quests - and it became a popular story line in medieval literature and art. The Templars were a real group of military men who organized themselves as a quasi-monastic religious organization. They became bankers and shippers, although their main work was providing security for Christian pilgrims in the Holy land. They were suppressed by King Phillip of France who confiscated their lands. Phillip accused them of heresy. Corrupt French Inquisitors supported his accusation, which held off any intervention in defence of the Templars by the Papacy or the so-called Holy Roman Empire (in medieval times the Pope used to crown a European monarch as Emperor of the new Roman Empire - but this is getting a little far from the story). The accusation was false. It was contrived to cover up the King's campaign to eradicate a powerful group and steal their money. They disappeared in fact, but not in myth. One of the myths was that the Templars had the Grail and went underground to hide the Grail for various mystical purposes. The Priory of Sion is a 20th Century hoax. The idea that Leonardo da Vinci was part of the original hoax. The idea that there are coded messages in his paintings seems to be Brown's own idea.
Article comments
1 - Michael
HB,HG is a fun read as a historian. It's a house of cards with plenty of missing cards.
Chapter 1: Some facts, and some speculation
Chapter 2: If we take what we proved in Chapter 1, then wildass guess isn't out of the question.
Chapter 3: Now that we've established that wildass guess is indisputably true, it naturally follows that dodgy logic leads to wild conclusion.
The authors of HB,HG are good at this. If they'd been responsible for Official Lies about WMDs, they'd be a best-seller, too...
2 - PeaceLoveWoodstock
B.S. since everyone knows Joseph of Arimathea, Mary (the mother of Jesus) and an entourage went to Glastonbury England, where Tea Talphi went centuries before.... planting the Glastonbury Thorn tree with Moses staff, and.... taking King David's Lyre to Ireland, where it became the national symbol.
Mary Magdalene went to the region around Llords France. It's common knowledge....
It's also called folklore. Take it at face value.
That a bunch of folks through out history went around chasing folk tales, doesn't make it fact.
They should have been out witnessing to discipleship as directed by Christ. They blew off the commission and went in pursuit of their own glory, rather than the Glory of God (it's Sunday, permit me my liberties) But in essence, that is what transpired. Sort of like Groupthink in action... on with a twist of the middle ages.
3 - Andytime
First of all, most serious biblical scholars will admit that the stories in the synoptic gospels are not exactly "historical" events but more accurately " mythical" ones. That does not mean to say that they are not true, but contain truth on a different level of understanding. Yes, some historical names and places have been inserted as landmarks but still it is myth. There is no evidence to support an historical Jesus let alone a Mary Magdelene. So who cares if these supposed "historical figures" married and had kids. I think the Church knows this. That is why they will deny that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife. Not because they don't want people to know whether this happened or not , but because they know that people who never even existed can't get married in the first place!
4 - DD
Response to Andytime:
Are you saying that the Church doesn't believe that Jesus and Mary were real people? Why would the Church continue to teach that Jesus was a real man who came down from heaven to save the world if they didn't believe that he was a real person?