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

Before reading the 'Da vini Code' my stance was "It is just a fictional book and I don't really care if I read it or not" as a Christian I didn't think it would offend because it was just a book.
My grandfather read the book (not a christian and not really thrilled that I have now been a christian for three years and not the fad he had thought it would be) and told me to read it with 'an open mind' with a look in his eye that would say that it would shake my faith.
Well to cut a long story short i thought the da vinci code was not a very well written book (too much conversation, too much 'brand dropping' which annoys me so much and the writer didn't describe anything in great detail and so was left to me) and under the 'heading' of fact the book seemed awash with an amazing alternative history and beeing not a great historian or theologian I couldn't see the lines of where fact and fiction blurred accept in a few places. Once I saw one flaw I needed to know where the other fabrications lay.

This book was helpful and readable (on the whole, a few awkward quotes here and there.) It covered the main issues clearly
Mary Magdalen
The Grail
The Art
The Priory of Sion
The Knights Templar
(and other issues brought up in the Da vinci code)

and articulately explained where Dan Brown sourced his material (usually in another 'fiction' novel which seems rather unprofessional to me) and then would go through and site (not verty clearly though) the sources that explained where Mr. Brown had gone a bit wrong.
This bring me on to my warning, it is written by Christians (Catholic if you like to distinguish) so there is always going to be that bias.

Any one who hasn't read the da vinci code will see it as fiction, once read it's a very manipulative novel which takes real people and real places and mixes it with pseudofact. However, as the authors of 'The Da vinci hoax' write, we do have a tendancey to believe what is written if under the premise of fact (not a quote). Even i had difficulties getting drawn in with the 'is that true?!'. This book helped alot to see the lines between fact and fiction, however, I will be looking for an unbiased exposition of the Da vinci code, however, in this age I feel that that will be an impossibility.

Amazing (37/141 people found this helpful)

Its amazing that a work of fiction can inspire such outrage. It makes you wonder what there is to be so upset about, is people's faith so flimsy that Dan Brown can actually shake it with his book? Those that feel the need to take the moral highground should take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what they are running from.

Worth reading for its own sake (142/184 people found this helpful)

The start of this book is, unfortunately, its worst part. The authors do themselves no favours by launching into an extended whinge of outrage at how nasty Dan Brown, author of "The da Vinci Code", is towards the Catholic Church. They aren't wrong, but either they will be preaching to the converted (in which case why bother?) or else they will be liable to discourage other readers by making the book seem a pro-Catholic polemic (which it isn't).
After this, the quality rapidly rises, and the book builds up into a devastating debunking of Dan Brown's farrago of rubbishy conspiracy theories and half-understood, messily-regurgitated, quasi-gnostic nonsense. One by one, they take his claims and, by reference to substantiated facts (something with which Brown is deeply unfamiliar) they either raise serious objections to his claims and theories or else they prove them unquestionably to be false and fraudulent. They also mercilessly expose the inner inconsistencies in his arguments, thereby demonstrating that his is a house of cards waiting to collapse.
Even if one hasn't read "The da Vinci Code", this rebuttal is worth reading as a reasoned denunciation of much new-age, self-obsessed romanticism and as a quick, intelligible trot through the history of the early Church and the Patristic writings. Superficial, inevitably, but lucid and a good basis of understanding for further exploration.
In some ways, it is a sad reflexion on our times that it takes a book like "The da Vinci Code" to encourage wider reading on a subect that has been the dominant factor in the development of Western thought and culture. However, this book is a very good place to start.
Had it not been for the sulky nature of the reaction to Brown's absurd attack on Catholicism, it would have rated 5 stars.

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

Carl Olson, Sandra Miesel

Reader Reviews:

read it as it is (3/3 people found this helpful)

Amazing (37/141 people found this helpful)

Worth reading for its own sake (142/184 people found this helpful)

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