Imagine a popular thriller based on the version of history set forth in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with a secret cabal of Jewish leaders conspiring to destroy Christianity and establish a global government to rule the world. While these books have about as much credibility as the likes of Did Six Million Really Die? or The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, which is to say zero, many people who would find the raving antisemitism of the latter an insuperable obstacle in a thriller seem willing to overlook the raving anti-Catholicism of the former in The Da Vinci Code.
#AUTHOR OF DA VINCI CODE CODE#
Yet the meme that “it’s only a movie” or “it’s just fiction” has largely obscured the fact that the conspiracy-theory conceits of The Da Vinci Code are by and large not novelist Dan Brown’s own flights of fancy, but are based on a lunatic-fringe view of history set forth in “non-fiction” books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation. In terms of early Christian history, this is not incomparable to Holocaust denial, to claiming that it was really the Jews who were oppressing the Nazis (or, at least, “we can’t be sure” who was persecuting whom).
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Nero, Diocletian, Galerius, all those early martyrs - it’s all such a muddle, who’s to say who was really persecuting whom?
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Now, that’s fair and balanced: We can’t be sure who started it. “We can’t be sure who began the atrocities,” he cautions. Luckily, renowned Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is on hand to offer an opposing viewpoint. (Ironically, McKellen starred in X‑Men had he watched the deleted scenes from that film, he might have learned from Storm’s lecture that it was the early Christians being persecuted by the pagan Romans until Constantine converted and legalized Christianity.) That’s right: Constantine’s 313 edict of toleration was intended to defuse intolerance by Christians against pagan Romans - not to end three centuries of pagan persecution of Christians.