the da vinci code

In an excellent analysis of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (movie to be released May 19), scholar N.T. Wright points out that many of the details Brown insists are historical are easily proven false. He notes: "Brown claims, in a note at the start of his book, first that the architectural details of the places mentioned are correct and second that there really is a secret society called 'The Priory of Sion' to which people like Da Vinci himself, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and others belonged. Both of these claims can be shown very easily to be false.
"On the first: I only know well one of the buildings which features in the book, namely Westminster Abbey. All right, Brown knows where the Isaac Newton monument is. But he still makes gaffe after gaffe which could have been corrected by 10 minutes of walking around with his eyes open. The Abbey has towers, not spires. You cannot see Parliament from St James's Park. College Garden is an extremely private place, not 'a very public place' outside the Abbey's walls (527). You cannot look out into it from the Chapter House; nor is there a 'long hallway' leading to the latter, with a "'heavy wooden door' at the end (529 ff.). Ten minutes' observation by a junior research assistant could have put all this right. If Brown is so careless, and carelessly inventive, in details as easy to check as those, why should we trust him in anything else?
"And when it comes, second, to the Priory of Sion, the documents which Brown, following Baigent and Leigh, cite as evidence were forgeries cooked up by three zany Frenchmen in the 1950s. They cheerfully confessed to this in a devastating television program shown on British television in February (2005). And as for Brown's theory about Da Vinci's 'Last Supper,' according to which the Beloved Disciple next to Jesus is actually a woman, that he/she and Jesus are joined at the hip, that they are sitting in such a way as to display the letter V, apparently a sign of femininity, and also the letter M, for Mary, or Magdalene, or marriage, or something else, this is pure fantasy. You can take any great painting and play this kind of game with it. That's not to say that some painters may not have implanted coded messages in their work. It would be surprising if they didn't. But you won't find too many serious art critics giving Brown's reading of the painting more than a passing smile.
"Other details abound which make the first-century historian snort and want to throw the book into the fire. . . . We may safely conclude, then, that The Da Vinci Code is fiction not just in its characters and plot but in most of its other details as well." (Click here to read the full lecture.)