Book Review: The Da Vinci Code, Fact or Fiction?

May 4, 2006 Posted by Roger Overton

Of the books responding to the claims of The Da Vinci
Code, this is one of the shortest, weighing in at 81 pages. After a
foreword by Hank Hanegraaff, historian Paul Maier offers a chapter pointing out
why many of the claims of the novel are false. Though The Da Vinci Code
is fiction, Dr. Maier believes this sort of response is necessary because “many
readers assume that all of the supplementary contextual and background detail
involving Christianity is true when it is not.” (9)

Dr. Maier’s chapter responds to claims about the Priory of
Sion, Constantine, whether Jesus married Mary, the Knights Templar, the sacred
feminine, and art, music, and architecture. After covering those issues, he
goes through a series of quotes from Dan Brown’s novel showing the inaccuracies
of each claim.

After Maier’s critique, Hanegraaff asks, “But what is
truth?” He focuses in on the historical evidence for the authenticity of the
Bible, and then explains the Biblical evidence for Christ’s deity. Hanegraaff
also responds to the claims that Christianity barrowed from pagan religions and
offers evidence that Jesus did rise from the dead.

Paul Maier closes with an interesting thought in his
afterword. “Perhaps there may even be a benefit in all of this. Strange as it
may seem, heresy had always been good for the church, since it forces a renewed
attention to the central doctrines of Christianity in order to counteract
error. Without heresy, we would not have the great creeds of Christendom. If,
then, this latest attempt to subvert history forces widespread study of Jesus,
the Gospels, the origins of Christianity, and how the church developed across
the centuries, so much the better.” (68)

The best thing about this book is that it’s incredibly
readable. The technical points are available, but they’re in footnotes in the
back so they don’t distract from the main text. It covers a wide range of
questions raised by the novel and provides a great list of resources for
additional study. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really cover Gnosticism, which is a
rather prominent issue.

If you’re looking an a quick and easy, yet incisive
response to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, The Da Vinci Code, Fact or
Fiction? is the book for you. Hank Hanegraff and Paul Maier have supplied
an accessible book that’s short in length, but not in answers.