Cracking the Da Vinci Code : The Unauthorized Guide to the Facts behind Dan Brown's Bestselling Novel

Rating:
Summary: The Best Of the Code Crackers
Review: After reading The Da Vinci Code I certainly had some questions. Brown makes a compelling argument, he sure doesn't describe the church that I went to Sunday School at. Can the things he incorporates into his story really be true? His 'facts' 'feel' correct to me. But before I went out spouting his facts as the 'gospel truth' I thought I should read some commentaries on Brown's book. There's a lot of them. The theme of The Da Vinci Code is so sensitive that readers come down hard on either side, love it..hate it, and that's the way most of the commentaries are. I found several that were written by theologians clearly writing to protect their turf. The same with the alternative history writers. Both were so deeply into their beliefs, they couldn't tell you background facts with out soaking them in politics. But dear sensitive reader...look no further! Simon Cox is your Joe Friday("Just the facts,mamam").Cox's book is composed of short essays of the obscure names, places, things that a regular reader might be unfimilar with. So if you want to know if there really is disembodied hand holding a knife in 'The last Supper' or if Opus Dei is a real thing you can read a page or two about it,have your curiousity slackened and not have to wade thru religio/politicio b.s. And the price is right!

Rating:
Summary: Shallow
Review: Do you know that some members of the Knights Templar, after the suppression of their order in 1307, moved to Scotland and helped Robert Bruce in his successful battle to force out the English? Well, this books says they did. It doesn't give a source, and the suggested reading at the back is heavily filled with questionable new age works. And you might wonder why an order whose main function before 1307 was international banking would care about a dynastic squabble on the periphery of Europe. But of course, such suggestions appeals to the romantic for whom tales of Clerical treachery, secret organizations and romanticized national myths all uncritically merge together.

As a book this book has little to offer, and hardly provides the facts behind "The Da Vinci Code." It contains padded discussions of the Cathars and the myths of Isis and Osiris, although these elements do not really play much a role in the book. About the dramatic claims Dan Brown makes, such as that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus, or that she appears in Da Vinci's "The Last Supper," or whether there is a secret Priory of Sion with earthshattering secrets that has been led in the past by Da Vinci, Newton, Hugo, Debussy and Cocteau, the book is somewhat wishy washy. Cox doesn't exactly endorse these claims, but he certainly doesn't look at the evidence that would refute these claims. There is a certain sort of disingenousness, which gives Brown more seriousness than he deserves. At one point, for instance, Cox notes, correctly, that thousands of women were killed in the witch-hunts. This differs from Brown's claim that "millions" were killed, but Cox does not point this out. Cox also claims that these witch-hunts were done to stop a revival of Goddess worship. In fact as recent witchcraft scholarship as pointed out by Ronald Hutton has made quite clear, there is no evidence that any of the condemned witches belonged to a satantic or pre-Christian religion.

And Cox continues with other examples of shallowness and misinformation. The New Testament was not "supposedly" confirmed at the Council of Nicea. Constantine was not baptized in 326, but in 337 on his deathbed (oddly enough, this is one fact Dan Brown gets right). The Nag Hammadi material are not "undoubtedly" a product of the Coptic church. If they were, they would have been preserved by them. Arianism denies the equality of Jesus the Son with the Father; it does not deny his divinity altogether. The Christian idea of forgiveness after repentance does not come from Isis; it clearly has its roots in Jewish doctrine. At the beginning of his book Cox says that The Da Vinci Code will no doubt make a great movie, since it will supposedly star Russell Crowe and be directed by Ron Howard. I've both read the book and seen "A Beautiful Mind," and this strikes me as the perfect example of naivetee to start off this questionable book.

Rating:
Summary: Off to a bad start....
Review: I just now started reading Mr. Cox's book and therefore cannot offer a full review. However, There is a passage right at the beginning of the book that demands to be addressed. On page 10, Mr. Cox writes,

"However, what they [the books' detractors] haven't addressed with their reading of the Scriptures and Gospels is one of the central themes of this hypothesis: namely, that this information was deemed so damaging and disruptive to the early Church that it was actually suppressed by the original redactors and editors of the New Testament - being in effect written out of the original texts, to be replaced with a sanitized version that was much more appealing to the early Church Fathers"

This statement is blatantly false, as anyone who has read the other books which critique Brown's book will know. Having read nearly all of these books myself (except for those yet to be published), this statement of Cox's really surprised me. He is either dishonest or ignorant. All of these books, without exception, devote pages (some more than others) to addressing this very issue.
Interestingly, as to Cox's (common) charge that the hypothesis presented in Brown's book was suppressed by the 'original redactors and editors of the New Testament", he betrays an ignorance, not only of how the Bible came to be as it is today [there were never any 'original redactors and editors', as such], but also of the Church Fathers. This hypothesis was far from suppressed. The Fathers dealt with it (and countless other heresies) in volumes of writings (Irenaeus' 'Against Heresies', for example). Indeed, until the discovery of the [Gnostic] Nag Hadmaddi writings in 1945, the near-totality of our knowledge of 'this hypothesis' came from such church literature. Refuted and denounced, yes; suppressed, hardly.
If this is at all characteristic of Mr. Cox's book, then I will leave my rating as it stands. If not, then I will re-review the book and rate it accordingly.
(Yes, I am a Christian, but my problem is not with Mr. Cox's theology, whatever it may be. My problem is with his false statement).
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After finishing this book, I wish I could revise my review down to zero stars. 80%-90% of he content of this book is only slightly related to The Da Vinci Code. More than once, the author prefaces a section with a comment like, "Though this issue isn't found in The Da Vinci Code, it's still important to consider..." Interestingly, though he provides alot of historical minutia, his research could not uncover one of the biggest weaknesses of Brown's book; the issue of the Priory of Sion. Nearly all of the other Da Vinci Critiques delas with this issue. The fact is that Pierre Plantard, who founded the Priory was shown to be a criminal and a forger in a French Court in 1992. He admitted forging the document that alleges that Da Vinci, Victor Hugo, Isaac Newton, et al were past grand masters of the organization. This is the lynch-pin in Brown's theory (which he claims to sincerly believe). It is false, so the rest falls.