cognac

What makes you believe that Brown wrote the novel with this intention?

John A. Broussard

I've always suspected that Charles Dogdson was trying to undermine the Anglican Church when he wrote Alice in Wonderland. Certainly his sly references to English history raise questions.

NOGO

Come on John A. B
Who ever said that?

How many times do I have to repeat myself.
He could have left out many inaccurate historical elements without any loss to his story.

I have no problems with speculations about Jesus marrying Mary Mag and having children etc.

My problem is about such things (and I do realize that my list is not complete) as - early Christians did not consider Jesus as divine but only a man and it was Constantine who made him into a God.

This has nothing to do with the story, is total nonsense and could have been left out and still have a fictional best seller.

NOGO

Well, thank you.

I do believe that I stated before that I had no problem with the speculation about Jesus being married to Mary Mag. I think that most believers have a real problem with this one.

... and they probably don't care much about my point on Constantine.

I read this book and I enjoyed it.
I nearly died laughing went Teabing stated that the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was written by historians. Or was it scholars?

It is possible that Dan Brown threw that in to tells us that Teabing was a quack but he also has him hired by the BBC to make a TV documentary.

cognac

No problem.

Yes, they do. It's blasphemy, practically. How could Jebus(God) get married and have sex? (But then God supposedly got the virgin Mary pregnant, so it doesn't make a lot of sense.)

I seriously doubt most believers even know who Constantine is.

I laughed a lot too, but for other reasons. It's just plain goofy at some points. I haven't read HBHG. Is that where Brown gets most of the stuff Teabing says?

This is interesting. I keep wavering. I think there are at least three posibilities where all the mistakes in history and in common sense are concerned. Brown was just sloppy. In this case, it just means, he probably gave a year for "research" and then threw the book together over another year. Research just means he read a few books and traveled to the Lourve and viewed the Mona Lisa or something. That would be typical of a writer of thrillers. Crichton comes to mind. He puts a book out about every other year or so (it seems). The second option is that he could have thrown in the errors because he wanted to clearly show that the book was fiction. If you are writing about history and you don't want people to read it and think you're trying to be a historian, you could throw in glaring errors. This should insure that no one takes it seriously. And then there's the third option, which I've been leaning more toward. And that's that Brown is just stupid, an idiot. The more interviews I read, the more I think this is the case.

lpetrich

You people might want to read my thread Mary Magdalene the Goddess?; it contains my discussion of Earl Doherty's review of The Da Vinci Code, which he describes as containing "a farrago of fantasy which is every bit as egregious as the Gospel story."

Also, I think that Dan Brown is being weaselly and evasive and disingenuous about how factual his book is. He is trying to imply that the history presented in that book is factual, even if that book's present-day characters are fictional. But if he is challenged on any of it, he could easily claim that what he's challenged on is fictional. Something like how Rush Limbaugh's admirers have attempted to whitewash his more inflammatory statements.

Amaleq13

Absolutely. In fact, the character's name is derived from the names of two of the authors (Leigh and Baigent) and it has been suggested that his need for crutches is a reference to the third author, Lincoln, who allegedly walks with a limp.

lunchblaze

MM: You could kiss me on the veranda...

HJ: Umm, lips would be fine.

NOGO

It's been a while.
The HBHG is very speculative.
It is about a secret society and the authors belief that they are the descends of Jesus and MM.

So many things come from this book or other book like it on the same subject.
The idea that these people could bring down all the Christians churches if they were to reveal themselves also comes from the HBHG.

Personally I think that this is a lot of bull.
How does one go about proving that you are the descendent of Jesus and MM? People would simply not buy it. It they have some evidence it would be of a nature that only experts can really evaluate it. Bottom line is that they would be challenged and called all the names under the sun.

Believers would go on as if nothing happened.

cognac

A few points:

The book itself does not claim to present factual history. Carefully reread the "fact" page. Besides, I personally believe the fact page is more a literary device. (Forgive the use of "literary" in this context.)

Now, Dan Brown has made some stupid comments in interviews since the book has become some weird cultural phenomenon over the last couple of years. It must have gone to his head.

Another thing to keep in mind is that when a writer of thrillers says he's done "a lot of research to write this novel" it's not the same thing an historian means when he says he's done research to write a volume on some historical period. Thriller writers are not concerned with the sort of nuances that experts are. A work of pop fiction is aimed at the general public. You assume a low common denominator. So simple level of effort calculations apply: How much research is this book worth? Does he need to spend another month reading medieval history before he writes this one paragraph? If he's got enough to shade the background and make it believable to a general audience, then that's all he needs, even if that shade doesn't comport with a historian's account.