Louvre curator and Priory of Sion grand master Jacques Saunière is fatally shot one night at the museum by an albino Catholic monk named Silas, who is working on behalf of someone he knows only as the Teacher, who wishes to discover the location of the "keystone," an item crucial in the search for the Holy Grail.
After Saunière's body is discovered in the pose of the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, the police summon Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who is in town on business. Police captain Bezu Fache tells him that he was summoned to help the police decode the cryptic message Saunière left during the final minutes of his life. The message includes a Fibonacci sequence out of order and an anagram: 'O, draconian devil Oh, lame saint'.
Langdon explains to Fache that the pentacle Saunière drew on his chest in his own blood represents an allusion to the goddess and not devil worship, as Fache believes.
Sophie Neveu, a police cryptographer, secretly explains to Langdon that she is Saunière's estranged granddaughter and that Fache thinks Langdon is the murderer because the last line in her grandfather's message, which was meant for Neveu, said "P.S. Find Robert Langdon," which Fache had erased prior to Langdon's arrival. However, "P.S." does not refer to "postscript", but rather to Sophie — the nickname given to her by her grandfather was "Princess Sophie". She understands that her grandfather intended Langdon to decipher the code, which leads to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which in turn leads to his painting Madonna of the Rocks. They find a pendant that holds the address of the Paris branch of the Depository Bank of Zurich.
Neveu and Langdon escape from the police and visit the bank. In the safe deposit box, they find a box containing the keystone: a cryptex, a cylindrical, hand-held vault with five concentric, rotating dials labeled with letters. When they are lined up correctly, they unlock the device. If the cryptex is forced open, an enclosed vial of vinegar breaks and dissolves the message inside the cryptex, which was written on papyrus. The box containing the cryptex contains clues to its password.
Langdon and Neveu take the keystone to the home of Langdon's friend, Sir Leigh Teabing, an expert on the Holy Grail, the legend of which is heavily connected to the Priory. There, Teabing explains that the Grail is not a cup, but connected to Mary Magdalene, and that she was Jesus Christ's wife and is the person to his right in The Last Supper.
The trio then flee the country on Teabing's private plane, on which they conclude that the proper combination of letters spells out Neveu's given name, Sofia. Opening the cryptex, they discover a smaller cryptex inside it, along with another riddle that ultimately leads the group to the tomb of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.
During the flight to Britain, Neveu reveals the source of her estrangement from her grandfather ten years earlier: arriving home unexpectedly from university, Neveu secretly witnessed a spring fertility rite conducted in the secret basement of her grandfather's country estate. From her hiding place, she was shocked to see her grandfather with a woman at the center of a ritual attended by men and women who were wearing masks and chanting praise to the goddess. She fled the house and broke off all contact with Saunière. Langdon explains that what she witnessed was an ancient ceremony known as hieros gamos or "sacred marriage."
By the time they arrive at Westminster Abbey, Teabing is revealed to be the Teacher for whom Silas is working. Teabing wishes to use the Holy Grail, which he believes is a series of documents establishing that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and fathered children, in order to ruin the Vatican. He compels Langdon at gunpoint to solve the second cryptex's password, which Langdon realizes is "apple." Langdon secretly opens the cryptex and removes its contents before tossing the empty cryptex in the air.
Teabing is arrested by Fache, who by now realizes that Langdon is innocent. Bishop Aringarosa, head of religious sect Opus Dei and Silas' mentor, realizing that Silas has been used to murder innocent people, rushes to help the police find him. When the police find Silas hiding in an Opus Dei Center, Silas assumes that they are there to kill him and he rushes out, accidentally shooting Bishop Aringarosa. Bishop Aringarosa survives but is informed that Silas was found dead later from a gunshot wound.
The final message inside the second keystone leads Neveu and Langdon to Rosslyn Chapel, whose docent turns out to be Neveu's long-lost brother, whom Neveu had been told died as a child in the car accident that killed her parents. The guardian of Rosslyn Chapel, Marie Chauvel Saint Clair, is Neveu's long-lost grandmother. It is revealed that Neveu and her brother are descendants of Mary Magdalene. The Priory of Sion hid her identity to protect her from possible threats to her life.
The real meaning of the last message is that the Grail is buried beneath the small pyramid directly below La Pyramide Inversée, the inverted glass pyramid of the Louvre. It also lies beneath the "Rose Line," an allusion to "Rosslyn." Langdon figures out this final piece to the puzzle; he follows the Rose Line (prime meridian) to La Pyramide Inversée, where he kneels to pray before the hidden sarcophagus of Mary Magdalene, as the Templar knights did before.
Characters
Robert Langdon: A professor of symbology at Harvard University and the protagonist of the novel.
Jacques Saunière: The grandmaster of the Priory of Sion, Curator of Louvre Museum.
Sophie Neveu: A cryptologist of the French police and granddaughter of Saunière.
Bezu Fache: A member of Opus Dei and a French police captain.
Silas / The Monk: A member of Opus Dei who murders Saunière and the secondary antagonist of the novel.
Manuel Aringarosa: A bishop of the Vatican and member of Opus Dei.
Sister Sandrine: A Seneschal of the Priory of Sion and nun of St. Sulpice.
André Vernet: A guard of Zurich bank.
Sir Leigh Teabing / The Teacher: A Grail scholar and British expatriate living in Paris, and the main antagonist of the novel.
Rémy Legaludec: A servant who assists Teabing.
Jérôme Collet: A French police lieutenant and Fache's deputy.
The Da Vinci Code generated criticism when it was first published for the fictitious description of the core aspects of Christianity and descriptions of European art, history, and architecture. The book has received negative reviews mostly from Catholic and other Christian communities.
Many critics took issue with the level of research Brown did when writing the story. The New York Times writer Laura Miller characterized the novel as "based on a notorious hoax", "rank nonsense", and "bogus", saying the book is heavily based on the fabrications of Pierre Plantard, who is asserted to have created the Priory of Sion in 1956.[6]
Critics accuse Brown of distorting and fabricating history. Theological author Marcia Ford considered that novels should be judged not on their literary merit, but on their conclusions:
Regardless of whether you agree with Brown's conclusions, it's clear that his history is largely fanciful, which means he and his publisher have violated a long-held if unspoken agreement with the reader: Fiction that purports to present historical facts should be researched as carefully as a nonfiction book would be.[7]
The most flagrant aspect[...] is not that Dan Brown disagrees with Christianity but that he utterly warps it in order to disagree with it[...] to the point of completely rewriting a vast number of historical events. And making the matter worse has been Brown's willingness to pass off his distortions as 'facts' with which innumerable scholars and historians agree.[7]
Much of the controversy generated by The Da Vinci Code was due to the fact that the book was marketed as being historically accurate; the novel opens with a "fact" page that states that "The Priory of Sion—a French secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization", whereas the Priory of Sion is a hoax created in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, which Plantard admitted under oath in 1994, well before the publication of The Da Vinci Code.[8] The fact page is itself is part of the novel as a fictional piece, but is not presented as such. The page also states that "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents[...] and secret rituals in this novel are accurate", a claim disputed by numerous academic scholars and experts in numerous areas.[9]
Dan Brown addressed the idea of some of the more controversial aspects being fact on his website, stating that the page at the beginning of the novel mentions only "documents, rituals, organization, artwork and architecture", but not any of the ancient theories discussed by fictional characters, stating that "Interpreting those ideas is left to the reader". Brown also says, "It is my belief that some of the theories discussed by these characters may have merit" and "the secret behind The Da Vinci Code was too well documented and significant for me to dismiss."[10]
In 2003, while promoting the novel, Brown was asked in interviews what parts of the history in his novel actually happened. He replied "Absolutely all of it."[11] In a 2003 interview with CNN's Martin Savidge he was again asked how much of the historical background was true. He replied, "99% is true... the background is all true".[12]
Asked by Elizabeth Vargas in an ABC News special if the book would have been different if he had written it as non-fiction he replied, "I don't think it would have."[13]
In 2005, UK TV personality Tony Robinson edited and narrated a detailed rebuttal of the main arguments of Dan Brown and those of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, who authored the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, in the program The Real Da Vinci Code, shown on British TVChannel 4. The program featured lengthy interviews with many of the main protagonists cited by Brown as "absolute fact" in The Da Vinci Code.
Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of the Prieuré de Sion, the cornerstone of the Jesus bloodline theory: "frankly, it was piffle",[14] noting that the concept of a descendant of Jesus was also an element of the 1999 Kevin Smith film Dogma.
The earliest appearance of this theory is due to the 13th-century Cistercian monk and chronicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay who reported that Cathars believed that the 'evil' and 'earthly' Jesus Christ had a relationship with Mary Magdalene, described as his concubine (and that the 'good Christ' was incorporeal and existed spiritually in the body of Paul).[15] The program The Real Da Vinci Code also cast doubt on the Rosslyn Chapel association with the Grail and on other related stories, such as the alleged landing of Mary Magdalene in France.
According to The Da Vinci Code, the Roman Emperor Constantine I suppressed Gnosticism because it portrayed Jesus as purely human.[16] The novel portrays Constantine as wanting Christianity to act as a unifying religion for the Roman Empire, thinking that Christianity would appeal to pagans only if it featured a demigod similar to pagan heroes. According to the Gnostic Gospels, Jesus was merely a human prophet, not a demigod. Therefore, to change Jesus' image, Constantine destroyed the Gnostic Gospels and promoted the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which portray Jesus as divine or semi-divine.
However, most scholars agree that all Gnostic writings depict Christ as purely divine, his human body being a mere illusion (see Docetism).[17] Gnostic sects saw Christ this way because they regarded matter as evil, and therefore believed that a divine spirit would never have taken on a material body.[18]
Literary criticism
The book received both positive and negative reviews from critics, and it has been the subject of negative appraisals concerning its portrayal of history. Its writing and historical accuracy were reviewed negatively by The New Yorker,[19]Salon.com,[20] and Maclean's.[21]
Positive
Janet Maslin of The New York Times said that one word "concisely conveys the kind of extreme enthusiasm with which this riddle-filled, code-breaking, exhilaratingly brainy thriller can be recommended. That word is wow. The author is Dan Brown (a name you will want to remember). In this gleefully erudite suspense novel, Mr. Brown takes the format he has been developing through three earlier novels and fine-tunes it to blockbuster perfection."[22]
David Lazarus of The San Francisco Chronicle said, "This story has so many twists—all satisfying, most unexpected—that it would be a sin to reveal too much of the plot in advance. Let's just say that if this novel doesn't get your pulse racing, you need to check your meds."[23]
While interviewing Umberto Eco in a 2008 issue of The Paris Review, Lila Azam Zanganeh characterized The Da Vinci Code as "a bizarre little offshoot" of Eco's novel, Foucault's Pendulum. In response, Eco remarked, "Dan Brown is a character from Foucault's Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist."[24]
The book appeared at number 43 on a 2010 list of 101 best books ever written, which was derived from a survey of more than 15,000 Australian readers.[25]
Roger Ebert described it as a "potboiler written with little grace and style," although he added it did "supply an intriguing plot".[27] In his review of the film National Treasure, whose plot also involves ancient conspiracies and treasure hunts, he wrote: "I should read a potboiler like The Da Vinci Code every once in a while, just to remind myself that life is too short to read books like The Da Vinci Code."[28]
Negative
In addition to literary criticism, the book has received many unsubstantiated insults.
Salman Rushdie said during a lecture, "Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code. A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."[29]
Stephen Fry has referred to Brown's writings as "complete loose stool-water" and "arse gravy of the worst kind".[30] In a live chat on June 14, 2006, he clarified, "I just loathe all those book[s] about the Holy Grail and Masons and Catholic conspiracies and all that botty-dribble. I mean, there's so much more that's interesting and exciting in art and in history. It plays to the worst and laziest in humanity, the desire to think the worst of the past and the desire to feel superior to it in some fatuous way."[31] That is, Stephen Fry was objecting to the genre, which includes critically acclaimed books like Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, rather than uniquely The Da Vinci Code.
A. O. Scott, reviewing the movie based on the book for The New York Times, called the book "Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence".[32]
The New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane refers to it as "unmitigated junk" and decries "the crumbling coarseness of the style".[19]
Linguist Geoffrey Pullum and others posted several entries critical of Dan Brown's writing, at Language Log, calling Brown one of the "worst prose stylists in the history of literature" and saying Brown's "writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad".[33]
Lawsuits
Author Lewis Perdue alleged that Brown plagiarized two of his novels, The Da Vinci Legacy, originally published in 1983, and Daughter of God, originally published in 2000. He sought to block distribution of the book and film. However, Judge George Daniels of the US District Court in New York ruled against Perdue in 2005, saying that "A reasonable average lay observer would not conclude that The Da Vinci Code is substantially similar to Daughter of God" and that "Any slightly similar elements are on the level of generalized or otherwise unprotectable ideas."[34] Perdue appealed; the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the original decision, saying Mr. Perdue's arguments were "without merit".[35]
In early 2006, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh filed suit against Brown's publisher, Random House. They alleged that significant portions of The Da Vinci Code were plagiarized from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, violating their copyright.[36] Brown confirmed during the court case that he named the principal Grail expert of his story Leigh Teabing, an anagram of "Baigent Leigh", after the two plaintiffs. In reply to the suggestion that Henry Lincoln was also referred to in the book, since he has medical problems resulting in a severe limp, like the character of Leigh Teabing, Brown stated he was unaware of Lincoln's illness and the correspondence was a coincidence.[37] Since Baigent and Leigh had presented their conclusions as historical research, not as fiction, Mr Justice Peter Smith, who presided over the trial, deemed that a novelist must be free to use these ideas in a fictional context, and ruled against Baigent and Leigh. Smith also hid his own secret code in his written judgment, in the form of seemingly random italicized letters in the 71-page document, which apparently spell out a message. Smith indicated he would confirm the code if someone broke it.[38] After losing before the High Court on July 12, 2006, Baigent and Leigh appealed to the Court of Appeal, unsuccessfully.[37][38]
In April 2006 Mikhail Anikin, a Russian scientist and art historian working as a senior researcher at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, stated the intention to bring a lawsuit against Dan Brown, maintaining that he was the one who coined the phrase used as the book's title and one of the ideas regarding the Mona Lisa used in its plot. Anikin interprets the Mona Lisa to be a Christian allegory consisting of two images, one of Jesus Christ that comprises the image's right half, and one of the Virgin Mary that forms its left half. According to Anikin, he expressed this idea to a group of experts from the Museum of Houston during a 1988 René Magritte exhibit at the Hermitage, and when one of the Americans requested permission to pass it along to a friend Anikin granted the request on condition that he be credited in any book using his interpretation. Anikin eventually compiled his research into Leonardo da Vinci or Theology on Canvas, a book published in 2000, but The Da Vinci Code, published three years later, makes no mention of Anikin and instead asserts that the idea in question is a "well-known opinion of a number of scientists."[39][40]
Brown has been sued twice in U.S. Federal courts by the author Jack Dunn who claims Brown copied a huge part of his book The Vatican Boys to write The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons. Neither lawsuit was allowed to go to a jury trial. In 2017, in London, another claim was begun against Brown by Jack Dunn who claimed that justice was not served in the U.S. lawsuits.[41]
Possibly the largest reaction occurred in Kolkata, India, where a group of around 25 protesters "stormed" Crossword bookstore, pulled copies of the book from the racks, and threw them to the ground. On the same day, a group of 50–60 protesters successfully made the Oxford Bookstore on Park Street decide to stop selling the book "until the controversy sparked by the film's release was resolved".[42] Thus in 2006, seven Indian states (Nagaland, Punjab, Goa, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh) banned the release or exhibition of the Hollywood movie The Da Vinci Code (as well as the book).[43] Later, two states, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, lifted the ban under high court order.[44][45]
Release details
The book has been translated into over 44 languages, primarily hardcover.[46] Major English-language (hardcover) editions include:
The Da Vinci Code (illustred.), UK: Bantam, October 2, 2004, ISBN0-593-05425-3 .
The Da Vinci Code (trade paperback), US/CA: Anchor, March 2006.
The da Vinci code (paperback), Anchor, March 28, 2006, 5 million copies.
The da Vinci code (paperback) (special illustrateded.), Broadway, March 28, 2006, released 200,000 copies.
Goldsman, Akiva (May 19, 2006), The Da Vinci Code Illustrated Screenplay: Behind the Scenes of the Major Motion Picture, Howard, Ron; Brown, Dan introd, Doubleday, Broadway, the day of the film's release. Including film stills, behind-the-scenes photos and the full script. 25,000 copies of the hardcover, and 200,000 of the paperback version.[47]
The movie received mixed reviews. Roger Ebert in its review wrote that "Ron Howard is a better filmmaker than Dan Brown is a novelist; he follows Brown's formula (exotic location, startling revelation, desperate chase scene, repeat as needed) and elevates it into a superior entertainment, with Tom Hanks as a theo-intellectual Indiana Jones... it's involving, intriguing and constantly seems on the edge of startling revelations."[27]
The film received two sequels: Angels & Demons, released in 2009, and Inferno, released in 2016. Ron Howard returned to direct both sequels.
A Bible conspiracy theory is any conspiracy theory that posits that much of what is believed about the Bible is a deception created to suppress a secret or ancient truth. Some such theories claim that Jesus really had a wife and children, or that a group such as the Priory of Sion has secret information about the true descendants of Jesus; some claim that there was a secret movement to censor books that truly belonged in the Bible, etc.
Daniel Gerhard Brown is an American author best known for his thriller novels, including the Robert Langdon novels Angels & Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Lost Symbol (2009), Inferno (2013), and Origin (2017). His novels are treasure hunts that usually take place over a period of 24 hours. They feature recurring themes of cryptography, art, and conspiracy theories. His books have been translated into 57 languages and, as of 2012, have sold over 200 million copies. Three of them, Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code, and Inferno, have been adapted into films, while one of them, The Lost Symbol, was adapted into a television show.
Robert Langdon is a fictional character created by author Dan Brown for his Robert Langdon book series: Angels & Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003), The Lost Symbol (2009), Inferno (2013) and Origin (2017). He is a Harvard University professor of Religious Iconology and "symbology".
François-Bérenger Saunière was a French Catholic priest in the village of Rennes-le-Château, in the Aude region. He was a central figure in the conspiracy theories surrounding the village, which form the basis of several documentaries and books such as the 1982 Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Elements of these theories were later used by Dan Brown in his best-selling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, in which the fictional character Jacques Saunière is named after the priest.
The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 mystery thriller film directed by Ron Howard, written by Akiva Goldsman, and based on Dan Brown's 2003 novel of the same name. The first in the Robert Langdon film series, the film stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jürgen Prochnow, Jean Reno and Paul Bettany. In the film, Robert Langdon, a professor of religious symbology from Harvard University, is the prime suspect in the grisly and unusual murder of Louvre curator Jacques Saunière. On the body, the police find a disconcerting cipher and start an investigation. Langdon escapes with the assistance of police cryptologist Sophie Neveu, and they begin a quest for the legendary Holy Grail. A noted British Grail historian, Sir Leigh Teabing, tells them that the actual Holy Grail is explicitly encoded in Leonardo da Vinci's wall painting, The Last Supper. Also searching for the Grail is a secret cabal within Opus Dei, an actual prelature of the Holy See, who wish to keep the true Grail a secret to prevent the destruction of Christianity.
The Va Dinci Cod: A Fishy Parody is a parody of the New York Times BestsellerThe Da Vinci Code. It was written by British critic and novelist Adam Roberts under the pen name Don Brine. The character names in the novels are reminiscent of the well-known characters: Sophie Nudivue, Robert Donglan, and Curvy Tash. It was published in 2005 by HarperCollins.
Michael Baigent was a New Zealand writer who published a number of popular works questioning traditional perceptions of history and the life of Jesus. He is known best as a co-author of the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
The Da Vinci Code, a popular suspense novel by Dan Brown, generated criticism and controversy after its publication in 2003. Many of the complaints centered on the book's speculations and misrepresentations of core aspects of Christianity and the history of the Catholic Church. Additional criticisms were directed toward the book's inaccurate descriptions of European art, history, architecture, and geography.
Richard Harris Leigh was a novelist and short story writer born in New Jersey, United States to a British father and an American mother, who spent most of his life in the UK. Leigh earned a BA from Tufts University, a master's degree from the University of Chicago, and a PhD from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History is a book by author Michael Baigent published in 2006. Providing his detailed history of Jesus' life and crucifixion, using papers that were covered up, the book documents the political context of Jesus' birth and then goes on to examine the history of the migration of the family of Jesus, the chronicles of his teachings, and his death. The book was published on the same day that The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown became available as a paperback in the US.
The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 adventure puzzle video game developed by The Collective and published by 2K for PlayStation 2, Xbox and Microsoft Windows. Although the game was released on the same day that the film of the same name opened in theaters, it is based directly on the 2003 novel by Dan Brown rather than the film. As such, the characters in the game do not resemble nor sound like their filmic counterparts.
The Jesus bloodline refers to the proposition that a lineal sequence of the historical Jesus has persisted, possibly to the present time. The claims frequently describe Jesus as having married, often to Mary Magdalene, and as having descendants living in Europe, especially France but also the UK. Differing and contradictory Jesus progeny scenarios, as well as more limited claims that Jesus married and had children, have been proposed in numerous modern books. Some such claims have suggested that Jesus survived the crucifixion and went to another location such as France, India or Japan.
French Israelism is the French nationalist belief that people of Frankish descent in general, and the Merovingian dynasty in particular, are the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, specifically, the descendants of the Tribe of Benjamin.
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail is a book written by Margaret Starbird in 1993, claiming Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were married, and that Mary Magdalene was the Holy Grail.
The Prieuré de Sion, translated as Priory of Sion, was a fraternal organization founded in France in 1956 by Pierre Plantard in his failed attempt to create a prestigious neo-chivalric order. In the 1960s, Plantard began claiming that his self-styled order was the latest front for a secret society founded by crusading knight Godfrey of Bouillon, on Mount Zion in the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, under the guise of the historical monastic order of the Abbey of Our Lady of Mount Zion. As a framework for his grandiose assertion of being both the Great Monarch prophesied by Nostradamus and a Merovingian pretender, Plantard further claimed the Priory of Sion was engaged in a centuries-long benevolent conspiracy to install a secret bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty on the thrones of France and the rest of Europe. To Plantard's surprise, all of his claims were fused with the notion of a Jesus bloodline and popularised by the authors of the 1982 speculative nonfiction book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, whose conclusions would later be borrowed by Dan Brown for his 2003 mystery thriller novel The Da Vinci Code.
Margaret Leonard Starbird is the author of seven books arguing for the existence of a secret Christian tradition that held Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, calling it the "Grail heresy", after having set out to discredit the bloodline hypothesis contained in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.
Henry Soskin, better known as Henry Lincoln, was a British author, television presenter, scriptwriter, and actor. He co-wrote three Doctor Who multi-part serials in the 1960s, and — starting in the 1970s — inspired three Chronicle BBC Two documentaries on the alleged mysteries surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Château — and, from the 1980s, co-authored and authored a series of books of which The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was the most popular, becoming the inspiration for Dan Brown's 2003 best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code. He was the last living person to have written for Doctor Who in the 1960s.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is a book by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.
Rennes-le-Château is a commune approximately 5 km south of Couiza, in the Aude department in the Occitanie region in Southern France.
The Fifth Gospel, first published in Germany in 1993, is a novel by Philipp Vandenberg.
↑ Kelleher, Ken; Kelleher, Carolyn (April 24, 2006). "The Da Vinci Code" (FAQs). Dan Brown. Archived from the original on March 25, 2008. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
↑ Sibly, WA; Sibly, MD (1998), The History of the Albigensian Crusade: Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay's "Historia Albigensis", Boydell, ISBN0-85115-658-4, Further, in their secret meetings they said that the Christ who was born in the earthly and visible Bethlehem and crucified at Jerusalem was 'evil', and that Mary Magdalene was his concubine – and that she was the woman taken in adultery who is referred to in the Scriptures; the 'good' Christ, they said, neither ate nor drank nor assumed the true flesh and was never in this world, except spiritually in the body of Paul. I have used the term 'the earthly and visible Bethlehem' because the heretics believed there is a different and invisible earth in which – according to some of them – the 'good' Christ was born and crucified.
↑ Arendzen, John Peter (1913), "Docetae", Catholic Encyclopedia, vol.5, New York: Robert Appleton, The idea of the unreality of Christ's human nature was held by the oldest Gnostic sects[...] Docetism, as far as at present known, [was] always an accompaniment of Gnosticism or later of Manichaeism.
↑ "India extends Da Vinci Code ban" on the ground that it outraged the religious feeling of Christians. Roman Catholic Bishop Marampudi Joji, based in Andhra Pradesh's capital Hyderabad, welcomed the ban. BBC News, 3 June 2006. Retrieved 3 June 2006.
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