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ATLANTA -- No one has yet made the claim that "The Da Vinci Code" is more popular than Jesus, as John Lennon famously said about the Beatles in 1966. But it is now more popular than the real da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci's name gets 25.4 million hits on Google, while Dan Brown's super-selling novel - the pop culture phenomenon that purports to rewrite the history of Christianity - gets 25.7 million.
Not bad for a book that blends a little fact and a lot of historical fudging into a mixture that is the very essence of what Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness" - believing what one wishes to be true, rather than what is.
"Is it fact or fiction? The majority could care less because it's what they want to believe," says Dennis Maher, associate professor of theater arts at the University of Texas, who studies "The Da Vinci Code" as an example of modern melodrama.
In a nutshell, "The Da Vinci Code" is a thriller about the alleged true origins of Christianity, claiming that Jesus did not die on the cross, but married Mary Magdalene and had a daughter. Da Vinci (as part of a secret society) knew the truth and hid clues in his paintings. To top it off, the Catholic organization Opus Dei is part of a conspiracy to keep the truth hidden, even if it means killing people.
True or truthy, "Code" has struck a nerve like few books ever, riding The New York Times Best Seller List for 155 consecutive weeks. Now it's poised to permeate the culture even further. On Tuesday, Anchor Books is releasing more than five million paperbacks of "The Da Vinci Code," with thousands of in-your-face displays from Wal-Mart to Barnes & Noble. They join the 40 million-plus hardbacks in circulation worldwide; "Code" is the biggest-selling hardback novel in history that doesn't have the words "Harry Potter" in the title.
On May 19 the film version, starring Tom Hanks, kicks off the summer movie season and will expand the "Code" audience by millions more.
The book even got an extra boost of publicity recently with media coverage of the British plagiarism trial, in which the authors of a previous book about Jesus marrying and fathering a child, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," sued Brown's publisher, claiming he stole ideas.
Most experts are more concerned with the falsehood of Brown's version of history (and how many millions of readers now believe it) than with whether he stole his ideas from another book.
"He makes a number of claims about ancient texts and most importantly about the origin of the Christian Bible that either distort the facts or are demonstrably untrue," says Brian C. Jones, assistant professor of religion at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.
Although experts generally condemn a lot of the book's allegations, readers often wonder how much of it is true. On an opening page, Brown writes, "all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate," which many fans have interpreted to mean that all the events are true. Brown almost never gives interviews, but he addresses that on his Web site, saying the page in the book "makes no statement whatsoever about the ancient theories discussed by fictional characters."
Criticism of "Code" has scarcely slowed its sales. Since its publication in 2003, it has inspired more than 50 books that discuss - and frequently dismiss - the book's history. Although Catholics have been more in the forefront of countering the book's claims, since the Vatican comes off particularly badly, Protestant critics have also been vocal.
Sony, the studio that is releasing the movie version, has even taken the remarkable step of starting a Web site with solicited articles that attack the accuracy of its own movie. On www.thedavincichallenge.com, scholars and religious leaders have been invited to pick away at Brown's history. It either shows Sony's great chutzpah, sensitivity or just a realization that in this case there's no such thing as bad publicity.
Douglas E. Cowan calls the novel "spiritual tripe" in his "Da Vinci Challenge" essay. "Very little in the book is 'true' in any historical sense," writes Cowan, assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Why this book, at this time, has sold 40 million copies is open to interesting conjecture.
"It taps into the distrust that some people feel about the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in the wake of the recent abuse scandals," says Richard Hays, associate professor of New Testament at Duke University's Divinity School.
Hays adds that the way in which "Code" promotes what is sometimes called the "sacred feminine" has increased its readership. "There is some sense in which it is true that established Christianity has been a patriarchal institution, and the voices of women have not always been given due attention."
There's also the attraction of a good conspiracy theory, particularly one that says some powerful "they" have been working against the interests of regular people. (Another huge best-seller recently, also big on truthiness, has been the book "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About.") In "The Da Vinci Code," "they" is the Catholic Church.
"When our lives are out of whack, it's easier to get 'them' than to fix ourselves," says Maher of the University of Texas. "This is a simple technique, indigenous to melodrama, and one of the reasons that melodrama is popular."
A subtler point that Brown makes in the book may be what Hays calls the "psychological driver" of its popularity. "The book deeply taps a kind of narcissistic hope that our own sexuality is going to be the source of what is truly and deeply spiritual," he says. "There's a notion that the way we get in touch with the divine is through getting in touch with our own sexual nature."
Cowan believes the appeal of "Code" can be traced largely to the growing number of people who call themselves "spiritual, but not religious." These people may or may not identify themselves as Christian, he writes, but are "far more dedicated to their own religious search" than they are to any institutional church.
"If men and women are fascinated by 'The Da Vinci Code' because they want it to be true," Cowan writes on thedavincichallenge.com, "what does that say about the ways in which the Christian story has been presented by those who claim to be Christ's followers, and the way those who dare to ask questions have been treated?"
Phil Kloer writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: pkloer AT ajc.com
Cox News Service
