Learnt some interesting facts about the book The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown this morning at a talk given at Feltham Evangelical Church. Whilst the book itself is a work of fiction, it does tread the line between fact and fiction in the minds of many. It doesn’t help that the book is prefaced with the following

all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown

With such a preface, many people will have trouble separating out the fact from the fiction, especially as it uses the names of many non-fictional organisations and documents, with a very fictional twist to them.

This fine line between fact and fiction causes many Christians (and non-Christians) to wonder how much of it is true, especially as the book blatantly questions the Christian view of Jesus Christ as God and Saviour, both fully God and fully man, and also attacks the authorship and validity of the Bible. Instead, it puts forward an age-old heretical Gnostic view of the world, where Jesus is merely a man and that the gnostic writings are more truthful than the New Testament. It becomes even more significant when you realise that if this gnostic view is correct, Christianity as we know it is false.

Initially this might seem to be an interesting challenge, but on inspection, the “facts” the book is based on are very fictional indeed. All of the gnostic writings quoted in the book, which form the very basis of the main plot of the book, are written long after the New Testament was written, yet alone the time of Christ and are almost certainly not what they claim to be. Whilst the New Testament can be shown to be written by eyewitnesses to the events they claim to document, the gnostic writings – the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene are written so long afterwards, they cannot be what they claim to be, they cannot be eyewitness accounts.

With this linchpin gone, the claim of being based on facts disappears and the whole book can only be really seen as a complete work of fiction, without any basis in fact at all. This is not to say the Da Vinci Code is not a gripping read, many people who’ve read it have thoroughly enjoyed it as a work of fiction. If anything though, once you scratch the surface of its factual basis, you realise how reliable and factual the Bible is compared with other books, both factual and fictional, in this world.

For the curious, there’s an interesting article on Wikipedia about the ‘facts’ of the Da Vinci Code. A more indepth analysis can be found at ‘the truth about Da Vinci‘.