Or not. That's one of my conclusions after reading "The Da Vinci Code," a book that has born the unfortunate brunt of a terrible Newsweek cover story.
Let me just start by saying I figured out each and every cryptographic clue, each instance of backwards writing, each plot twist about the family history of the elegant, burgandy-haired (eww! Talk to your hairdresser about that!) heroine before the main characters. Except the very last one, and had I ever been to the Louvre or read anything about Paris, I would have known that one. Was everyone else like me? Was this a reader-flattering book? Or is it because I have done all those crytpoquotes with GMR and BDW? If so, I did not realize that would qualify me to be a cryptologist with the Paris PD.
Still, the coherency of the crypto-analysis was about a million leagues above other airplane books and the writing was far more lively to boot.
Which brings me to my next point. If I was laughing about the implausibility of a "world renowned Harvard symbologist" I was really laughing about some of the other improbabilities in the book. The biggest being that a man has a cellphone that only one person knows the number to and keeps it on and charged. I still, to this day, get calls to "Amber Graves (Gray?)" on my cellphone. Also that Isaac Newton was the head of a religious cult that had fertility rites. But fiction needs some willing suspension of disbelief. Otherwise the book makes me feel pretty smart and entertained. On the other hand, part of the plot twists makes sure the Catholic Church has clean hands of the whole murder thing, not to mention Opus Dei, which may be necessary but leaves the actual villain a little wanting in the influence department.
Perhaps the most distressing thing about this book is that it gives Jesus a "royal bloodline" and posits Mary Magdalene as the mother of his baby. This isn't distressing because I'd care if Jesus had a girlfriend, it's because whether or not he had children seems to be the least important thing he did. Obviously, this conception of Jesus is threatening to virtually any church that is orthodox, whether Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or "Bible-believin'". But it seems to me that most problems with religion come from a powerful focus on textual details. The idea of four weighty coffers of proof of Jesus' DNA inheritance — and the corpse of Mary Magdalene — seems to me a much less interesting bit of information to study than gnostic scrolls that describe him as human and, ultimately, less scientifically convincing anyway. Where are you going to test Jesus' actual DNA? The Priory of Sion is ultimately only interesting to conspiracy buffs.
But Jesus is interesting to lots of people. And His lessons of compassion and peace and love — even the ones we don't know about because they were lost — even He would say are far greater in importance than the birthright of his offspring. And wasn't it Jesus who approached the outcasts of society? What on earth would he want a pampered lineage for?
Anyway, these are the questions that I left "Da Vinci Code" with. For all its insight into Mason culture and Grail quests, I didn't feel there was much spiritual insight, as opposed to symbolic insight, into the revelation of Jesus having a wife and child. The reaction of Jesus-y institutions is all that matters. What matters about Jesus' teachings is completely left out of the book. It would have given this potboiler a nice dimension to have included it. It might have given this reader, whose spiritual faith isn't textually bound, a reason to care about the relevance of Jesus as babydaddy. Much less what it means for someone descended from Jesus living today (how Jesusy can they possibly be DNA-wise? What would it matter?)
At any rate, although ultimately I wanted this book to take some sort of spiritual position, have some sort of moment like in Indiana Jones, where he takes a literal leap of faith, I guess the idea of Jesus as pere is probably compelling enough to non-freethinkers to just let it slide.
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