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. 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.Īfter 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. In 2006, a film adaptation was released by Columbia Pictures.
In November 2004, Random House published a Special Illustrated Edition with 160 illustrations. The novel nonetheless became a massive worldwide bestseller that sold 80 million copies as of 2009 and has been translated into 44 languages. The book has, however, been extensively denounced by many Christian denominations as an attack on the Catholic Church, and consistently criticized for its historical and scientific inaccuracies.
The Da Vinci Code provoked a popular interest in speculation concerning the Holy Grail legend and Mary Magdalene's role in the history of Christianity. The book also refers to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated that it was not used as research material. The novel explores an alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The Da Vinci Code follows "symbologist" Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris causes them to become involved in a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene having had a child together. It is Brown's second novel to include the character Robert Langdon: the first was his 2000 novel Angels & Demons. The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery thriller novel by Dan Brown. Joe Nickell is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and "Investigative Files" columnist for the organization's science magazine, Skeptical Inquirer. Perhaps Brown should go on his own quest-for the truth. Meanwhile, despite the devastatingly negative evidence, The Da Vinci Code mania continues. But he is apparently unrepentant, and his apologists point out that The Da Vinci Code is, after all, fiction, although at the beginning of the novel, Brown claimed it was based on fact.
Of course, Dan Brown-with the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation-was also duped by the Priory of Sion hoax, which he in turn foisted onto his readers. Olson and Sandra Miesel, The Da Vinci Hoax, 2004.) Plantard commissioned a friend to create fake parchments which he then used to concoct the bogus priory story in 1956.
By repeating this silliness, Brown provokes critics to note that his characterizations reveal ignorance about his subject.Īlas, the whole basis of The Da Vinci Code-the "discovered" parchments of Rennes-le-Ch?teau, relating to the alleged Priory of Sion-were part of a hoax perpetrated by a man named Pierre Plantard. John in the picture (seated at the right of Jesus) is actually a woman-Mary Magdalene!-and that the shape made by "Mary" and Jesus is "a giant, spreadeagled 'M,'" supposedly confirming the interpretation. Brown seizes on Leonardo-borrowing from "The Secret Code of Leonardo Da Vinci," chapter one of another work of pseudo-history titled "The Templar Revelation." This was co-authored by "researchers" Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, whose previous foray into nonsense was their claim that Leonardo had created the Shroud of Turin-even though that forgery appeared nearly a century before the great artist and inventive genius was born!Īmong the "revelations" of Picknett and Prince, adopted by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, is the claim that Leonardo's fresco, Last Supper, contains hidden symbolism relating to the sang real secret.