EthnAlln

In another thread on this topic, I noted that the basic plot line was used in an episode of the American drama series "The Name of the Game," back in 1965. Perhaps they got the idea from "Holy Blood, Holy Grail."

jeremyp

I once heard somebody say that the correct way to contract "Leonardo Da Vinci" was as "Leonardo". "Da Vinci" means "of Vinci" which is a town. Calling Leonardo da Vinci "Da Vinci" is like calling JeremyP of Reading, UK "of Reading, UK".

Apparently.

Is this true? If it is, I find it somehow appropriate that even the title of the book contains an error because about the only thing Dan Brown gets right is that the Louvre is in Paris.

S.C.Carlson

If there is a connection, it would have to be the other way around because according to tv.com "The Name of Game" aired from 1968 to 1971, but Holy Blood, Holy Grail was published in 1982.

Nevertheless, it would be interesting if the authors of HBHG could have gotten some of their ideas from the show. Unfortunately, the episode guide tv.com is a little too terse to identify which episodes are similar. Do you remember anything about the episode (e.g. which of the 3 alternating main characters it featured, etc.)?

Stephen Carlson

EthnAlln

Hmm, I begin to doubt my memory. One line I distinctly remember was the guest star of the week saying "These documents prove that Jesus of Nazareth did not die on the cross." But my memory is clearly faulty. I thought I remembered watching this show in the basement of the Graduate College. But I finished graduate school in 1966, so that is impossible. I'm fairly sure it wasn't Gene Barry's character, but which of the others it was I can't say.

Alternative hypothesis: Maybe it was a different show. I seem to remember that it aired on NBC, though.

Bingo! Episode 46, "The King of Denmark", February 20, 1970. Where the hell did I watch this? My oldest daughter was just 6 months old, and we had no television set.

S.C.Carlson

I have not watched this episode (or show, but I want to now), but according to this web page, it had the following plot:

Change Shakespeare to Jesus, and we're getting into Da Vinci Code territory.

Stephen Carlson

johno

You forgot to write 'American' writing classes. No doubt Henry James would have made a great success in American writing classes, as would Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, William Faulkner when taught by contemporary instructors.

It should be clear from the discussions that we are having that English and American are different languages, and that the criteria of taste are markedly different in English and American cultures, or we would not be having this discussion. It was kind of you to avoid ad hominem attacks. I do find it difficult to tease Americans. Perhaps you believe that the sentences I was deriding are unimprovable. Is that your position?

By the way, vulgarity: from the SOED: The quality of being usual, ordinary, or commonplace. Are you seriously suggesting that there is anything about Brown's style that sets it above the usual, ordinary, or commonplace?

Perhaps you cannot write as well as Dan Brown, but I am sure that you will be able to write a paraphrase that is of higher quality than my own attempts. So let's see it.

johno

ps Perhaps, after all, I might have been over-dogmatic about the relationship between arches and vaults, but then English is the language of Humpty Dumpty.

The Bishop

Claims that Jesus did not die on the cross certainly predate Holy Blood, Holy Grail. I picked up a book once called The Jesus Scroll by an Irish writer whose name I can't remember at the moment, which promoted the idea that Jesus was a Hasmonean who really was expected to lead an insurgency and put himself on the throne of David. His death being faked, he ended his days at Masada, iirc. This book I think dates from the early 70s, but I could be wrong. Again, I'm almost sure the concept that Jesus married Mary Magdalen was mentioned. Jesus and Mary Magdalen being lovers is also an element of Nikos Kazantzakes's The Last Temptation of Christ, published in English in 1961.

EDIT: The Jesus Scroll is by Donovan Joyce and was published in 1975.

I was looking forward to seeing the movie and having a badly written book with appallingly handled exposition and clunky - really clunky - dialogue, turned into a tight, exciting thriller in which the characters were ten times more convincing.

Unfortunately, it would appear that Howard and his scriptwriter Avram Goldsman have genuflected before the mighty power of the Dan Brown "fanbase" (70% of whom, I would estimate, probably had been hoping for the same thing), have treated the book as Holy Writ, and have produced two and a half hours of appallingly handled exposition and clunky - really clunky - dialogue that amounts to an enormous snoozefest.

RainbowSerpent

I haven't read TDVC, but I am prepared to accept that it is full of lies, errors and other nonsense. The thing is, that even considering all that, it cannot help but be a more believable version of Christ's life than that presented in the Gospels.

As an atheist I believe that there is no god, therefore virgin births and resurrections are impossible. So either Christ (if he existed) died on the cross or he did not. And if he did not than it seems perfectly reasonable to me that he should have run far away from Judea, to England for example, and lived happily ever after.

As the previous post suggested, there is nothing new in this idea. It may have been part of the inspiration for William Blake to write the following in about 1804.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Whose feet do you think he was talking about?

RainbowSerpent

Malachi151

Well, the point of my post is that Dan Brown's version of events is not very probable at all, because Dan Brown takes stories that were viewed by everyone as fiction and acts as if they were true.

Basically:

Traditional Chrstianity:

Canon = True
Apocrypha = False

Dan Brown:

Canon = False
Apocrypha = True

Reality:

Canon = False
Apocrypha = False

UNfortunately, all Dan Brown does is perpetuate the Jesus Myth instead of truely criticize it in a scholarly way.

Dan Brown did for Jesus criticism what Dover School Board did for Intelligent Design (except in this case Jesus criticism is legitimate). Basically, he has thrown up a big load of really, really bad and unsupported claims that are easily refuted, when the "real truth", is the opposite of what Dan Brown is claiming.

Brown is claiming that Jesus was "all man" and that we have all of this detailed record of his life and whatnot, instead of claming that Jesus is all myth and that we have no legitimate redord of his existance.

EthnAlln

There are many alternate interpretations of the Gospels, all of which are forced to say that some of the events reported just plain didn't happen. One that was around in the late 1960s was by an Orthodox Jew named Scofield or Scofeld, "The Passover Plot". It goes somewhat along the lines you mentioned. Jesus psychologically manipulated Judas into betraying him at just the right moment, because he knew he would be taken down from the cross in time for the beginning of Passover (or the second night of it, depending on whether you believe John's Gospel or the synoptics---Scofield bases his work on John's Gospel, the least reliable of the four historically). It might have worked, Scofield argues, except for the spear in the side, which was a serious wound. Jesus was taken down, but when his rescuers came to revive him during the night, they found that he had succumbed to the wound, so they hid the body away and spread the story that he had been resurrected. Well, it's as plausible to me as what is in the Gospel. Scofield points out what is glaringly obvious: that the "appearance" of Jesus to the disciples on the road to Emmaeus was in fact not Jesus at all.