The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in the Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown's anti-Catholic bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, has gone beyond mere market success to become a cultural phenomenon. Indeed, it was the hype surrounding the book which first induced me to read it. After a few pages, I quickly understood that Mr. Brown had written the kind of book that would have resulted in a fatwa issued against him, had he targeted Islam instead of Christianity. However, in the tradition of St. Ignatius of Loyola, we Catholics today use the keyboard, not the scimitar, when rebutting our attackers. Admirably, Olson and Miesel have risen to Dan Brown's challenge and written, in The Da Vinci Hoax, a book which is a devastating critique of Brown's noxious anti-Catholicism and an exposition of the true history of Christ and the Catholic Church. The Da Vinci Hoax is more than just a standard debunker. It is everything that Dan Brown's work isn't. First, it's well-sourced. Dan Brown had the luxury of being able to make outrageous claims about the Catholic Church while using the cover of "it's just fiction" to hide his sources. As it turns out, most of the "history" presented in Brown's book is lifted from a couple of crack-pot pop-conspiracy works of almost no scholarly value. The Da Vinci Hoax on the other hand, provides copious footnotes and allows the interested reader to check the primary sources themselves, if they are so inclined. Second, The Da Vinci Hoax is educational. As Olson and Miesel knock down Dan Brown's spurious claims one after another, the reader is given a wonderful lesson in early Church history and in the history of the various heresies and conspiracy theories that have grown up around the Church from the very beginning. They also address the bogus claims Brown makes about Da Vinci himself, the so-called Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar, St. Mary Magdalene, Constantine, and many others. Third,The Da Vinci Hoax is well-written. It may be dense with facts, but the prose is cheerful and occasionally humorous. A good reader could probably make it through the book in a couple of nights. In attempting to explain the cultural phenomenon Dan Brown's book has become, Olson and Miesel write: "The Da Vinci Code is custom made fiction for our time: pretentious, posturing, self-serving, arrogant, self-congratulatory, condescending, glib, illogical, superficial, and deviant." Given how our 'elites' in the major media and entertainment industry have fawned all over Dan Brown and his book--and how they tend to behave in general--I'd say that Olson and Miesel have hit the nail squarely on the head. The Da Vinci Hoax is a "must-have" for any serious person who is sick of hearing Dan Brown's drivel praised to the heavens by the ignorant.

This is the best response to Dan' Brown's work 'The Da Vinci Code' that I have read. While there are several others out there responding to the Da Vinci Code, this one I believe is the most well researched and documented of them all. First off, I find it interesting that there have been so many 'spin off' works using Brown's tenets and ideas to propagate their own similar beliefs (e.g. 'Da Vinci Code Decoded,' etc.). This does not surprise me, given the popularity of Brown's novel and the response that he has had from his readers. Too many people are falling for the ideas in Brown's work simply because they lack substantive grounding in any belief system or worldview at all. I say all this to set the stage for this review. Olson and Miesel's work has definitely taken to task most of the major ideas or propositions that are presented in 'The Da Vinci Code.' 'The Da Vinci Hoax,' is well formulated and easy to follow. These authors lay out a very simple format and present their research quite well. For instance, 'The Da Vinci Hoax' begins with an introduction to Dan Brown's book, describing what type of impact it has had and why these authors believe it has had the kind of impact it has worldwide. All the while, Olson and Miesel describe certain aspects of Brown's book that have been controversial and in light detail explain why it is controversial. This is all presented in the introduction. From that point, Olson and Miesel take their light detail and give them chapters (or meat if you will). They begin by giving a fairly detailed account of Gnosticism. In fact, for a single chapter out of book that covers a lot of other material, this chapter on Gnosticism is very well presented. The reason so, is one could take that topic alone and write an entire book and still not have exhausted it (and many authors/scholars have done just that). After the chapter on Gnosticism, two chapters follow tackling the issue of Mary Magdalene as she is presented in Brown's work, as she is presented in history via the Roman Catholic Church, and how she has been viewed recently by certain writers of various 'out in left field' works. The same applies in the next chapter where these authors tackle Christ and the 'Da Vinci Code.' These two chapters work very well together and as individual chapters, each complements the other and each could stand on their own. From these two chapters, Olson and Miesel discuss the issue of Constantine, Paganism, and the Council of Nicea. This is a good chapter, however, I believe it to be the weakest in the book (which is not saying much here). I wish they would have covered a little more detail of the Council of Nicea. Because of 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail,' 'The Templar Revelation,' and 'The Da Vinci Code,' the Council of Nicea has, as of late, been so contorted and distorted in these works, that any one who spent any time reading just these works would have no earthly idea as to what really occurred during this council. However, ther

First of all, I want to object to the notion that the Da Vinci Code is "just fiction." It is alarming how many people use this argument, and it shows that they aren't thinking through the ramifications of this position. Just because the book is in the fiction section doesn't give credence to the argument that it's just fiction for two reasons. First, as is pointed out in the Da Vinci Hoax, Dan Brown himself states that everything in the book, besides the characters and narrative, is factual. For example, on his website, Dan Brown states the following: "While the book's characters and their actions are obviously not real, the artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals depicted in this novel all exist (for example, Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings, the Louvre pyramid, the Gnostic Gospels, Hieros Gamos, etc.). These real elements are interpretted and debated by fictional characters. While it is my belief that the theories discussed by these characters have merit, each individual reader must explore these characters' viewpoints and come to his or her own interpretations. My hope in writing this novel was that the story would serve as a catalyst and a springboard for people to discuss the important topics of faith, religion, and history." The same thing could be noted in the first few pages of the Da Vinci Code itself. Furthermore, having read interviews with Dan Brown, it is clear that Dan brown uses his characters as a tool for exerting his own beliefs - beliefs that he wouldn't classify as "just fiction." The second reason to disregard the "its just fiction" argument is that fiction needs refutation in certain circumstances, and this is one of those circumstances. Let me cite a quick example of fiction that has changed the perception of the truth in the past, then I will explain why Dan Brown's book falls into a similar category. In 1963 a play was premiered by Rolf Hochhuth titled "The Deputy." The play was "just fiction," and it distorted the character of Pope Pius XII - from a Pope who helped many Jews escape the Holocaust, to a man who wouldn't condemn the horrors of the holocaust, let alone save Jews. Below is a quote from an examination piece that I found regarding the role Pius had in the Holocaust: "The Israeli consul, Pinchas E. Lapide, in his book, Three Popes and the Jews (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1967) critically examines Pope Pius XII. According to his research, the Catholic Church under Pius XII was instrumental in saving 860,000 Jews from Nazi death camps (p. 214). Could Pius have saved more lives by speaking out more forcefully? According to Lapide, the concentration camp prisoners did not want Pius to speak out openly (p. 247). As one jurist from the Nuremberg Trials said on WNBC in New York (Feb. 28, 1964), 'Any words of Pius XII, directed against a madman like Hitler, would have brought on an even worse catastrophe... [and] accelerated the massacre of Jews and priests.' (Ibid.) Yet Pius was not total

I've read quite a few books of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG) genre over the last two decades, and generally enjoyed them -- not as history, but as a fun, pseudo-historical modern mythos. I enjoyed that aspect of The Da Vinci Code (DVC) as well, (although the book had flimsy caricatures in place of characters, logical errors and a weak story). However, with his great success and his absurd insistence that the HBHG background material is factual, Dan Brown has popularized the HBHG bunk as real history, and done so on a huge scale. So when DVC generated a shelf-load of rebuttals, I was interested in them too. The Da Vinci Hoax appears to be the best of the lot.There are several areas of HBHG lore with which I have more than a little familiarity, so I use those as checkpoints. In those areas, Olson and Miesel cite good sources and say all the right things. Having now checked some of their sources with which I wasn't previously familiar, they too seem reliable. My only criticism is that a few of the early discussions in their book have some Christian apologetics thrown in. It is certainly understandable that many of the people motivated to debunk HBHG and related anti-Catholic materials (like DVC) are themselves devout Christians, as are many who would purchase such debunking books. However, such pro-Christian side arguments tend to obscure main issue, the historical problems with the HBHG lore, making it seem as if the debate were between committed Christians and neo-Gnostic Magdalene-bloodline true believers. However, that is a minor criticism directed to only a few passages, (as opposed to some of the other DVC debunking books, which are swamped by Christian apologetics).Despite the number of other DVC rebuttals on the shelves, this book was very much needed. It provides a serious and documented analysis of all the main historical points of Brown's misleading bestseller, with useful and reliable references.

Up till now, I thought Darrell Bock's Breaking the Da Vinci Code was the best book on exposing the errors of Dan Brown's multi-million selling foolishness. This new book is slightly better, primarily because it's more comprehensive.For one thing, it extensively quotes not only the main characters in Brown's book as they relate their version of "history," it also has quite a few quotes from the author himself from various interviews. These quotes are then examined for accuracy in relation to a wide variety of expert opinion. In every case, the quotes Brown has his characters utter, as well as his own quotes, are shown to be either simply false or the opinions of a tiny minority of authors whose views have been found wanting at the bar of history and scholarship. This book, which is about twice as long as Bock's book (which is limited pretty much to the time before Constantine and the Council of Nicea), also covers a good deal more ground. Topics addressed include Holy Grail myths, the real Templars, the Priory of Sion silliness, and errors in interpreting not only Leonardo's Last Supper but his take on art, the occult, and Christianity in general. If you think The Da Vinci Code--the foundations of which are a synthesis of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Templar Revelation, The Chalice and the Blade, Drawing Down the Moon, and the works of Margaret Starbird and other marginalized and/or discredited books--accurately depicts what really went on in Western history (which no serious person does who has any familiarity with the available materials), then you will not like any of the books debunking Dan Brown's ridiculous book, least of all this one. But if you want to find out what really happened, this gives as complete an accounting as you'll find anywhere.In sum, this critique is extensive, even exhaustive, and in the end entirely persuasive.