Well, folks, I just saw the Da Vinci Code. The reviews I had read were so bad, I just couldn’t hardly believe them. I had to go see for myself. Suffice it to say, they were right and I was wrong.
As everybody knows by now, the premise is that once-upon-a-time Christ had been intimate with Mary Magdalene and that conjoining, in turn, produced a bloodline that, not only can be traced to the present day, but that also required the assistance of a super-secret society of conspirators to enable it to survive the onslaughts of the church it threatened. The only problem with all this is that it necessarily leads one into an intellectual cul-de-sac that leaves you kind of wanting to go “Huh???”
Okay, here’s what I mean. For arguments sake, let’s assume for just a minute that the Da Vinci Code premise is true. The problem is this: if Jesus was, as the movie tries to point out, just another dude like the rest of us (i.e. not God), then necessarily he was also a fraud. Isn’t that what you would have to call someone who claimed to be God, when he in fact knew that he wasn’t? And, if he was a fraud, he also would have to have been a moron. For, what kind of person other than an idiot goes around saying things like he did directly to the religious rulers of his day when anyone else with half a brain would have known that saying such things were likely to get him imprisoned, if not put to death, for blasphemy. And, on top of all of that, he would also have had to have been a nut case. For who, other than a person with a deep-seated psychosis of some sort, would choose to die hanging on a cross in order to perpetuate a fraud when he could have avoided that fate simply by defending himself (either by denying or repenting of his claims to be God) when the Roman Governor Pilate gave him the opportunity to do so?
Well, the tale told in the Da Vinci Code seems to suggest that, notwithstanding the fact that the real Jesus may have been all those things, it was his followers who perpetuated the cover-up in order to keep a good thing going. We are asked to believe that, starting with the apostles of Jesus, the “church” through the ages has had a vested interest in keeping the fraud that Jesus started going in order to gain wealth and power for themselves. The trouble with this theory, of course, is that few and far between are individuals who can be found who would be willing to sacrifice their own lives to perpetuate someone else’s fraud. Yet, that is in fact what we are being asked to believe that all of the apostles did. All but one of the twelve died a martyr’s death, with Peter being crucified upside down, Paul being beheaded and John being boiled in oil. I don’t care how good this Christian gig was supposed to have been for them up to that point, it’s hard to explain why anyone, much less all but one of them, would be willing to suffer such fates to preserve the secret that the man they pretended to worship was all the while really just a joke. Yet, that is an assumption we are asked to make, if we are to accept the Da Vinci Code’s version of events.
But let’s not stop there. Let’s trip the light fantastic and drive the thesis of the Da Vinci Code home to its logical conclusion. So far, the story has presented us with a Jesus Christ who cannot possibly be anything other than a fraudulent stupid psycho if what they are asking us to believe is true. Now, can you tell me why we are supposed to care that such a person had any offspring, other than perhaps to be able to avoid them at social events and traffic intersections? Yet, the Da Vinci Code suggests that we should care. And, to buttress this suggestion, it asks us to believe that there has even existed a legion of devoted secret-society types over the ages, including among their membership not only Leonardo but Sir Isaac Newton as well, who not only cared about this man’s lineage, but who devoted their lives to protecting it. Again, however, we are left to ask, “Why?” And, while we’re at it , we might also ask why would a museum curator who had already been shot trying to preserve this “secret” then go on to desecrate his own body with cryptic mumbo-jumbo in his last moments on earth in order to attempt a long shot effort to inform the heiress he helped raise to know who she really is, when it appears at the end of the movie there were a bunch of people evidently available at a moment’s notice (including even her grandmother) who already knew who she was and who, being within walking distance of the church where she ultimately learned the truth about her heritage, could have let her know without almost getting her killed several times in the process?
Moving beyond that most improbable imponderable, however, doesn’t logic suggest that the only reason why someone would value a “royal” line descended from a charlatan dunce psycho at all is because, if it were true, it would be proof that Christianity is a fraud? The problems with that, however, are why then keep it a secret while perpetuating their own fraud that the descendants of Jesus are some kind of royalty? For his lineage to be considered “royal” wouldn’t it have to be a prerequisite that Jesus, in fact, had to be a king of some sort? And, based on what we know of his life, wouldn’t that only be possible if he were, in fact, exactly who he claimed to be; namely the Son of God? And, if he was that, wouldn’t that make the entire premise of the Da Vinci Code just a tad blasphemous? At the very least, it’s questions like these that caused me to leave the theatre going, “Huh???”
© 2006 Clifford C. Nichols, Esq.
Cliff Nichols is an attorney practicing criminal defense/entertainment law in Santa Monica, California. He may be contacted regarding this editorial at either (310) 917-1083, cliff@cliffnicholslaw.com or www.cliffnicholslaw.com and you may join his blog at www.thedailystand.com