Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code

On July 22, 1209, the anniversary of Mary Magdalene's death, armed Crusaders descended on the French town of Béziers and massacred more than 20,000 people. Their crime? Sheltering heretics who believed Mary Magdalene was the concubine of Jesus. Imagine how Pope Innocent III, who sent the attackers, would have reacted to The Da Vinci Code, the modern thriller based on the same incendiary idea.

The thesis of the bestselling novel is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child whose descendants later founded the Merovingian dynasty. Mary's womb, not the chalice of the Last Supper, was the real Holy Grail, and a Catholic sect is killing people to hush it all up. The book also makes Leonardo da Vinci the past leader of a shadowy order sworn to protect documents proving the existence of Jesus's child. Da Vinci depicts not the disciple John next to Jesus at the Last Supper, the book says, but Mary Magdalene, a symbol of the "divine feminine" principle that the church is determined to obliterate.

The book has spawned heated speculation: Why did the church wrongly label Mary a prostitute? Was she marginalized by a patriarchal church afraid of female leaders? How intimate was she with Jesus? Does the debate over the child obscure a more profound role for Mary in the future of Christianity? "Most people who read The Da Vinci Code have no way of separating historical fact from literary fiction," says Bart Ehrman, chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina and author of Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code.

Celibate. Take the book's notion that Jesus had to be married because celibacy was condemned according to Jewish custom. The Essenes, a sect that shared Jesus's expectation of an apocalypse, were unmarried, celibate men, Ehrman points out. Furthermore, there is no mention of Jesus's wife in the Bible or in any ancient sources.

The book's main character, Leigh Teabing, says the Gnostic Gospel of Philip calls Mary a "companion" or spouse to Jesus. But the Greek word the Gospel uses, koinônos, means simply friend or associate, Ehrman says. The text says Jesus kisses Mary, but Jesus kissed all his disciples; the gesture was not considered sexual. Still, the Gospel of Philip does not completely dispel the possibility that Jesus and Mary had a sexual relationship, says theologian Bruce Chilton.

Ehrman also disputes the novel's claim that Jesus intended for Mary Magdalene, not Peter, to lead the church: In the second-century Gospel of Mary, supposedly the source of these instructions, Jesus discusses the soul's salvation, Ehrman says, not who will guide his mission. Indeed, in another Gnostic text, the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus seems to pronounce that Mary must be made male to enter heaven.