BeliefNet has an interview with historian Bart Ehring that details many of the historical inaccuracies of the Da Vinci Code:
What did you think of "The Da Vinci Code"?
I liked "The Da Vinci Code" as a work of fiction. But the thing that troubled me is that the fiction is allegedly based on historical fact. Dan Brown begins the book by laying out what he calls historical facts, and he includes the statement that all descriptions of art, architecture, sacred rituals, and documents are factual. The difficulty I had reading through "The Da Vinci Code" with that in mind was that most of the descriptions of ancient documents, in fact, are not factual—they’re part of his fiction. But people reading the book aren't equipped to separate the fact from the fiction.
What’s another big historical inaccuracy in the novel?
There are several gigantic points that have to do with Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene. Maybe the first thing to say is that it's absolutely false that as [the character] Robert Langdon says, it would have been highly unusual for Jesus not to be married because Jewish men were always married. That's false.
Tell us more about that, because I have heard that on and off over the years.
Yeah, that's kind of a commonsensical claim that isn't true. We know Jewish men from the first century who remained single and celibate. What's most interesting is that the ones we know about are ones with a worldview that's very similar to the worldview ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels—which is an apocalyptic worldview. We know about Jews from Jesus' time from the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And by the way, Dan Brown indicates some of these lost gospels were included among the Dead Sea Scrolls. That's absolutely false.
That was Nag Hammadi Codex, right?
He mentions Nag Hammadi as well, but he indicates the Dead Sea Scrolls contain some of the earliest records of Jesus, and that's false. The Dead Sea Scrolls don't say anything about Jesus.
So that means it's totally possible, if not probable, that Jesus was single himself.
Well, Robert Langdon's point that Jewish men were always married is wrong. And the striking thing about these members of the Dead Sea Scroll community-they're called Essenes-the striking thing about the Essenes is that they believed history was soon going to come an end and that God was going to bring in his good kingdom by overthrowing the forces of evil. And that's what Jesus is said to proclaim in the gospels, that the Kingdom of God is soon to arrive and that God will overthrow the forces of evil. So he had a very similar worldview to these Essenes.
The fact that they were celibate and single suggests there's nothing implausible about Jesus being celibate and single. The other person that we know from antiquity who was celibate and single, a Jewish man, was Paul-the Apostle Paul-who indicates in 1 Corinthians that he's both celibate and single and he also was a Jewish apocalypticist.
And yet it's pretty clear that Mary Magdalene is important. Do you think her role is real?
Well, the first thing to say about Mary Magdalene is that she's not talked about very much at all in the New Testament, contrary to what you would think. Her name occurs 13 times, but a lot of those times are in the same story in different Gospels.
She's only mentioned once during Jesus' entire ministry, that's in Luke 8, and she's mentioned along with two other women, Joanna and Susanna. And she's not singled out as anything special there-she's just one of these women who was accompanying Jesus on some of his travels. She doesn't show up otherwise except at the very end at the crucifixion and resurrection scene; she's one of the women who observes the crucifixion, and she's the woman who discovers the empty tomb.
So how important do you think she is?
She's highly important in the sense that she's the one who finds out the tomb is empty. But there's nothing to suggest that she was important in the ministry of Jesus during his life.
What do you make of the Gospel of Mary?
Well, the Gospel of Mary is misportrayed in "The Da Vinci Code." What Dan Brown has his character say is that Jesus entrusted the church to Mary, based on the Gospel of Mary. But in fact, the Gospel of Mary doesn't say that at all. The Gospel of Mary is about Jesus appearing to Mary after the resurrection and giving her a revelation, and there's a debate among the disciples about whether Jesus would actually reveal something this important to a woman.
The debate among Gnostic scholars is whether Mary was supposed to be co-equal with Peter and was axed out of the history?
Yes, that's right.
Do you subscribe to that theory?
I think putting it in those specific terms is probably wrong. But I think what's right is that the Gnostics understood that these revelations could be given to women, and that there wasn't to be a kind of apostolic hierarchy in which you have men who are making all the decisions and were in charge—that everybody had access to the spirit of God. And that the church hierarchy that was beginning to form was, in fact, misguided.
There are a couple of other things I should point out as interesting mistakes in "The Da Vinci Code." One howler occurs when Teabing is trying to convince Sophie Neveu that Jesus' spouse was Mary Magdalene, and proof for this is one place in the Gospel of Philip where Mary is described as his companion. And Teabing points out that the Aramaic word for "companion" actually means spouse. Now, the problem with this is that the Gospel of Philip wasn't written in Aramaic. (Laughs)
Oh, that's a big problem!
It's written in Coptic. And the word that's used there is a Greek word which, in fact, does not mean spouse—it means companion! And there’s another passage from the Gospel of Philip that Dan Brown quotes, but he doesn't realize there's a problem with the text—which is, like many manuscripts from antiquity that have been discovered, it has holes in places where it got worn out. So we're missing some of the words. There's a passage Brown quotes which says, “Jesus loved Mary and he frequently kissed her on the-
Lips.
No, there's a hole in the manuscript! People often assume the word is “mouth” but we don't know what the word was. (Laughs)
So in a nutshell, what's the fallacy that "The Da Vinci Code" puts forth as it relates to these gospels?
There are several fallacies—but in a nutshell, the fallacy is thinking that these gospels give a more historically accurate view of Jesus than the New Testament gospels. I'm saying this not out of any religious conviction, but strictly on historical grounds—that statement is not true.
