FAITH talks to Amy Welborn,
author of Decoding DaVinci
by Elizabeth Solsburg

On May 19, The DaVinci Code film hits the big screen. The movie, based on Dan Brown’s controversial best-selling novel, has sparked debate about what’s real and what’s not in this popular story. FAITH talked with Amy Welborn, author of Decoding DaVinci: The Facts behind the Fiction of the DaVinci Code, The DaVinci Code Mysteries: What the Movie Doesn’t Tell You and De-coding Mary Magdalene: Truth, Legend, And Lies. She travels the country speaking about The DaVinci Code’s myths and misconceptions.

What sparked your interest in The DaVinci Code?

I wasn’t interested in it at all. As far as I’m concerned, the book could exist and be a best-seller and that wouldn’t bother me at all. But the fact is that my experience has shown that a number of readers who are taking the historical assertions within The DaVinci Code seriously. They believe them for good or ill – it either disturbs them or pleases them. I prefer to characterize what I do not as a response to the book or movie, but a response to the questions people have. My e-mails and the calls I get during radio shows clearly indicate that many people believe The DaVinci Code represents serious history, and it doesn’t.

The most common topic seems to be the purported marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalen. How do we know Jesus wasn’t married?

The simplest answer is that there’s no evidence for it. The Gospels are very forthright about many aspects of Jesus’ personal life – perhaps not as many as we 21st century gossip mavens would like, but they present his family. They present very honestly his tensions with his family, who do not understand him. They present his contentious relationship with the people of his hometowns of Nazareth and Capernaum. They describe his circle – all the apostles are named. The women who follow him are named, including Mary Magdalen. And Mary Magdalen herself, aside from Mary the mother of Jesus, is the most prominent female figure to appear in the Gospels. She’s there at very important points and if they’d been married, there’d have been no reason to conceal it. It would have been normal: While there was a tradition of single-minded prophetic figures in Judaism being unmarried, it was normative for Jewish men to marry. There was nothing shameful about it. There are also lots of traditions and legends about the apostolic era, some of which are purely legendary and some of which are not. And there’s not a marriage of Jesus to anybody mentioned in any of them. It’s not only that it’s not mentioned in the Gospels; there’s no extra-biblical tradition of it either. It’s a 20th-century fantasy.

And what would you say to people who cite the absence of a mention of marriage as evidence that Jesus would have been, as a normal Jewish man, married. For example, Paul specifically mentions and explains his own unmarried state. And although Peter’s wife is not mentioned either, we know Peter was married because Scripture says he had a mother-in-law.

That doesn’t work either because, again, you do have this tradition of certain figures, like Jeremiah and the Essenes, who were unmarried. I think that people that people are determined to find fire where there isn’t any. It doesn’t make sense. The evidence is not there from any perspective. I really emphasize the extra-biblical traditions. They’re not all accurate, but the reflect things. For example, the extra-biblical tradition is where we get the names of Joachim and Anne for Jesus’ grandparents. When you search that tradition, there’s nothing in it to suggest that Jesus was married. And there’s another thing that people who call themselves Christian need to think about. I hear people say, “Well, it wouldn’t bother me if Jesus was married. So what? What’s the big deal?” When people say that, they’re revealing their lack of understanding of Christian theology. This isn’t at the level of proof, but rather at the level of how we should be thinking about this: The fact is that Jesus is married. Jesus is married to the church. And to say that Jesus was married to a woman reveals an extraordinarily diminished sense of who Jesus is. To people like that, I guess he really is nothing more than a teacher. Because when you look at the Scriptures, both the Old Testament and the New, marriage is a fundamental metaphor of God’s relationship with his people. And this extends to Jesus. The ultimate moment between Christ and redeemed creation is a marriage. Christ is married to his church; we all have the “holy blood line” running through our veins. It diminishes cosmology and Christology to suggest that Jesus was married to a woman, because it cuts us off from this transformative relationship between God and us, which is embodied in Christ. Even the most liberal scholars do not find any evidence that Jesus was married.

What are some of the other significant errors in the book and movie to which you’d like to draw people’s attention?

Well, I think it’s very important for people to understand that The DaVinci Code scenario in which Dan Brown says that early Christians did not believe Jesus was divine until Constantine forced it on them in 325 is just patently false. The idea that the establishment of what we would call Christian orthodoxy was politically motivated is the same. I hear people say, “All those sources from the early Christianity are of equal value and we can’t know anything for certain. History is written by the winners.” People say that one story “won” because the people involved wanted power, and so we don’t know what really happened. This kind of nihilism isn’t based on anything and is deeply illogical. If the people who won, the “Peter Party,” as Brown called it, were intent on promoting their story to get power, they must have been crazy. Because the power they got was martyrdom. And if the winners wanted to diminish, demean and hide the role of Mary Magdalen, as is claimed, they didn’t do a very good job. As many people have observed, if you were going to make up a story that you were trying to get people to believe, you wouldn’t have the first witnesses of that story be women in that culture. It’s totally counter-intuitive. You have to apply logic to many of these assertions – all I ask is that people think them through.

For 30 or 40 years, we (Catholics and Protestants) have decided that the core of religious education needs to be, “Tell us how you feel about this Bible passage.” And that just doesn’t cut it – because when the first kind of intriguing, authoritative-sounding thing comes along, people buy it.

Any others?

The big ones are this whole Priory of Sion business. The Priory of Sion didn’t even exist. Do we really need to talk about this any more? The Priory of Sion was a fraud.

I’m also very concerned about the way this has impacted people’s experience of art. I’ve had the experience of standing next to people at the touring exhibit of Vatican art, looking at a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Two women came up to it and said, “You know that’s Mary Magdalen next to Jesus – that’ not John. Everybody knows that now.” And they walked away. And I thought, “Poor Leonardo.” This is the way this genius has been tarted up and people are being goaded into this crude, inaccurate way of looking at art – searching for codes. It’s a real phenomenon in Europe – people going on tour clutching their copies of The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons. They’re intent on seeing only what Dan Brown talks about, while ignoring everything else. And because he gets so much wrong, they get irritated with the tour guides when they point out the errors.

Of course, the fundamental problems are his uses of sources and the fact that someone who’s purporting to tell the story of early Christianity doesn’t use the New Testament.

I would also say to people that one of the things to think about -- and this is not uncommon in a lot of the “revisioning” of Jesus that’s been going on since the 19th century – is that The DaVinci Code Jesus is essentially stripped of his Judaism. In terms of the essentials, Jesus is no longer a Jewish rabbi – he’s a wisdom figure who teaches about the nature of the sacred feminine. The early Christian rites of baptism and Eucharist are taken completely out of their Jewish context and I think people need to ask why. Why is so much of this modern revisioning of Jesus so determined to strip him of his Jewishness. A lot of more modern scholarship over the past 20 years has been more oriented to putting Jesus and Paul in context and retrieving that. That’s a huge problem that people have to be honest about and ask themselves why.

As I was reading the book, I came to the bizarre theory of the name Jehovah being a combination of the masculine Jah and the feminine name for Eve, Havah. Since Jehovah is a Latinized form of the name Yahweh, this is clearly inaccurate.

Exactly, as well as his theories about the shekinah, which are totally non-scriptural.

What would you like people to know about the movie?

As far as the film, I’m really not into boycotting, but I would tell people that if you want to use the opportunity of the The DaVinci Code to have dialogue and evangelize, that’s great. But don’t feel you have to give money to the project, especially the first weekend. Don’t go see the movie on opening weekend, because that’s what they’re looking for. You can dialogue on this without seeing it. There is life beyond The DaVinci Code.

The biggest problem with The DaVinci Code is that it’s a massive waste of time. If you’re interested in the nexus of faith and literature, read Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene or Waugh or Dostoyevsky or any number of innumerable writers who are seriously grappling. This book is just parlor tricks; there’s nothing serious about it.