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. The 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 fictional — a 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 Sion — a European secret society
founded in 1099 — is a real organization,” and so on.Scholars
have done a solid job of pointing out the fictions that interweave
Brown’s “facts.” Notably, the “Priory of Sion” is real only in the
sense that it really is the modern invention of Pierre Plantard, a
Frenchman with royalist and anti-Semitic views. It dates to the year
1956, not 1099. Plantard’s 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.I emphasize that 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,
that’s depressing
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