Posted on 05/08/2006 5:08:09 PM PDT by wagglebee
With less than three weeks before the May 19 release of the Sony Pictures version of Dan Browns Da Vinci Code, worries continue to mount among Christians about both the books and the movies impact. But should non-Christians be concerned, too?
Absolutely. Jews in particular need to be aware of the gift mega-selling Dan Brown has given, in all innocence, to anti-Semites.
As everyone knows by now, Brown uses a gripping suspense story set in the present to inform us that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and that he has descendants living in Europe today. Furthermore, the members of this surviving Jesus family have been protected for centuries by an altruistic secret organization, the Priory of Sion, which is locked in combat with a sinister, violent Catholic group, Opus Dei. That latter seeks to keep the secret of Jesus paternity from getting out. Behind Opus Dei stands the Catholic Church. For millennia, the church has perpetrated what the film calls the biggest cover up in human history.
Opus Dei, the real-life Catholic lay order, asked Sony to place a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie admitting that the story is fictionala request the studio has so far refused. Brown himself states at the outset of the novel that his tale is grounded in fact: The Priory of Siona European secret society founded in 1099is a real organization, and so on.
Scholars have done a solid job of pointing out the fictions that interweave Browns facts. Notably, the Priory of Sion is real only in the sense that it really is the modern invention of Pierre Plantard, a peculiar Frenchman with royalist and anti-Semitic views. It dates to the year 1956, not 1099. Plantards hoax merely took the name of a medieval monastic order that had ceased to exist by the 14th century and which had nothing to do with legends about Jesus fathering children.
You may wonder if Browns readers find his tale convincing, not as fiction but as truth. Seemingly they do. A Barna Group poll found that 53 percent of the books readers said The Da Vinci Code aided their personal spiritual growth and understanding.
But why should a non-Christian care?
Consider that the alleged conspiracy underlying the biggest cover up in human history bears a remarkable resemblance to another phony conspiracy, the famous hoax called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Apparently authored by Russian monarchist and anti-Semite Mathieu Golovinski in 1898, the Protocols tells of a secret society of Jewish elders that work to keep gentiles ignorant of a plot to rule the world through Darwinism, Marxism, and Nietzscheism.
In both conspiracy theories, an ancient world religion turns out to be a massive fraud perpetrated to gain or maintain power. In Dan Browns version, the Priory of Sion (Sion simply means Zion in French) is the good guys. Theyve been waiting for the right moment to reveal the secret about Jesus having children and to introduce the world to the worship of the Goddess, a.k.a. Mary Magdalene.
Meanwhile the Catholic Church plots to suppress forever the truth about the sacred feminine. Opus Dei is willing to go to any lengths, including murder, to keep the male church hierarchy in power.
Pierre Plantard (1920-2000), the French monarchist and anti-Semite who gave us the Priory of Sion, spent much of his life inventing minuscule esoteric organizations intended to purify France of the evil influences of modernityand of Judaism. In 1940 he wrote of the terrible Masonic and Jewish conspiracy that threatened France.
The Priory of Sion was one group he started. The point of this occult order was to advance Plantards claim to be the surviving heir of the ancient Merovingian line of French kings, whose holy blood was guarded by the Priory. The idea that the Merovingians were the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene was added on later.
Besides highlighting the word Zion or Sion, the two conspiracy theories share an understanding of how to deal with ideas you disagree with. Rather than taking traditional Christian beliefs at face value and arguing with them (as I do in my current book by the way), Dan Brown portrays the religion itself as resting upon a conscious deception. That excuses him from having to make arguments at all.
Anti-Semites do the same thing. Rather than coming out honestly against Darwinism or Marxism or modernity in general, they concoct a story about Judaism as a lie and a conspiracy. The Protocols remains a global phenomenon of staggering popularity, especially in the Arab world.
I emphasize that Dan Brown never intended to foment bigotry. Yet to the cause of conspiracy theorizing, he has done a wonderful favor, training his readers in the habits of paranoia and gullibility. For people committed to finding the truth through investigation and argumentation, thats depressing.
As for Jews, we havent fared well when the culture we live in turns to entertaining fantasies and delusions at the expense of an unfashionable religion. The success of Browns book, now transformed into a movie blockbuster, is bad news.
David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author most recently of Why the Jews Rejected Jesus: The Turning Point in Western History.
A very interesting insight.
Ping.
IT'S A NOVEL..................IT'S A NOVEL.....
Thank Hollywho for another attack on Western Civilization.
I stopped reading after that. We all know it's WMD's./sarc
I doubt this very much.
No, it's not WMD's, the big cover-up is starting the WOT to make money for Bush's and Cheney's oil pals.
Good grief.
It is a novel novel. Only the guilty dog barks while no man pursueth...or some such. I enjoyed the novel and I am enjoying - hugely - the apologies.
This Klinghoffer guy isn't a Jew, he's an evangelical Christian who davens. There's nothing wrong with that, but he should be honest with his readership.
Its a story. A fantasy. Pure fiction. I saw the same intellectual energy wasted on Harry Potter.
I'm fairly certain that adherents of "Mein Kampf" and "The Communist Manifesto" would say the same thing.
The Democrats would never go for this, they already have Hillary.
What a boatload of crapola. We went down this same road prior to the release of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. So far, all the prediction of doom and gloom for Jews have failed to materialize.
Did you know that one can be Christian and Jewish?
And "War of the Worlds " was a fictional radio invasion from Mars. The problem as I see it. Is that the average person in America is so Biblically illiterate and so uninformed of the historical church that fiction and non-fiction will blend together. I am surprised real groups like Opus Dei have not gotten an injuction to either stop the movie of get the "disclaimer."
If that fails, I would try a multi billion dollar defamation of character suit after the movie comes out.
From what I can find, he was raised as a non-practicing Jew who has moved toward orthodox Judaism.
http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684823411/702-9727943-7399250
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