Ehrman does not concern himself with the modern component of the Grail conspiracy theory. In fact, the Priory of Sion element of the theory has received little attention in America, which is surprising when you consider that this organization is supposedly still extant, possesses proof positive of Jesus' bloodline, and could settle the matter once and for all. The fundamentalist vein in American culture makes a fetish out of scriptural legitimacy and, as a result, quarrels over the exact nature of Jesus and his ministry attract all the heat.

But the latter-day aspects of this conspiracy theory are important. After all, both "The Da Vinci Code" and "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" begin with a contemporary puzzle that leads investigators down a long, twisted path to the biblical past and the "truth" about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In Brown's novel, the murder of a Priory of Sion master draws his granddaughter and the hero, Robert Langdon (a professor of "symbology" -- a nonexistent discipline -- at Harvard), into the story. In "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," the question of how a priest in a provincial French town suddenly acquired a lot of cash and posh social connections sets the authors on the trail.

So, in both the novel and the "nonfiction" work, there is a mystery that, when pursued, leads to evidence of a secret society dedicated to protecting yet another secret. Unless the secret society actually does exist, the persuasive litany of "clues" ostensibly alluding to its existence and the nature of its closely guarded secret is meaningless. If Leonard da Vinci had not been privy to the secret that Mary Magdalene stood foremost among Jesus' disciples and bore his child, he would not have planted "codes" in his paintings intimating as much. And then there would be no reason to read great significance into the fact that the figure Leonardo painted to right of Jesus in "The Last Supper" is pretty and beardless with long flowing hair and that this figure's left arm, with Jesus' right arm, forms a V shape, symbol of "the sacred feminine"!

If you point out to a "Da Vinci Code" buff that there's plenty of artistic precedent for depicting the disciple John as young and beardless, he will talk about the Gnostic gospels that supposedly hint at intimate relations between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. And if you point out that other suppressed scripture suggests exactly the opposite, he can point to the weird and ominous carvings in a church in a tiny town in southern France, which surely support the idea that a terrible secret was buried there. This is how conspiracy theory works: Build a big enough pile of suggestions and to some people it will look like truth. "Evidence" of a secret society in turn becomes "evidence" of a secret that the society protects; each phony scenario props up the next.

The Priory of Sion did exist -- sort of -- but not in any form even remotely resembling the fantastical claims of the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" or Brown. (In one of his few unqualified claims to nonfiction, Brown includes the sentence "The Priory of Sion -- a European secret society founded in 1099 -- is a real organization" on a page labeled "Fact" placed before the prologue of "The Da Vinci Code.") In reality, the Priory of Sion was the invention, in the 1950s, of a man named Pierre Plantard who had a history of fraud, embezzlement and membership in ultra-conservative, quasi-mystical and virulently anti-Semitic Catholic groups. These tiny extremist groups sought the reunification of Europe under the dual leadership of an orthodox Roman Catholic Church and a divinely ordained monarch, somewhat like the Holy Roman Emperor and preferably French.

Plantard learned of rumors surrounding a town in southern France, where the late priest's unexplained affluence led to talk of buried treasure in the local church. (The priest's wealth actually came from charging superstitious Catholics to have Mass said on their behalf, and he was censured for it by the church.) Plantard capitalized on the "mystery" of Rennes-le-Château by insinuating into the grapevine further rumors: that the priest had discovered evidence of an explosive secret and was being bribed to keep it under wraps.

Plantard wanted to pass himself off as the descendant of the Merovingian dynasty, a family of medieval French kings and, ultimately, of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. (In reality, he was the son of a butler and a cook.) With his accomplice, a genuine but dissolute aristocrat and expert forger, Phillipe de Chérisey, he produced a set of fabricated parchments full of encoded and suggestively prophetic verse alluding to this Merovingian fantasy. With a restaurateur interested in drumming up tourist business for his establishment (located in the priest's former villa), they disseminated a story that the priest had discovered these parchments in the church, inside a hollowed-out pillar of Visigoth origins. (The pillar was later determined to be solid.)

The parchments and a variety of other faked documents pertaining to the Priory of Sion and the Merovingians -- including that list of past Grand Masters, featuring Leonardo and Newton -- were planted in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This institution, alas, cannot be said to run a tight ship, and there are apparently no records indicating who exactly deposited the infamous "dossiers secrets" in their collection. However, investigators eventually determined that the printing press used to produce them was the same press used by Plantard to print his right-wing newsletters and broadsides.

The entire case for the existence of the Priory of Sion and the bloodline of Jesus extending into the French monarchy rests on this cache of bogus documents. There is no other "proof" anywhere that the Priory of Sion ever existed. A third confederate of Plantard and de Chérisey's, Gérard de Sède, who seems to have bought the story initially, published a lurid bestseller about the "mystery" of Rennes-le-Château. At this point, once a truly interesting sum of money entered the picture following the book's success, the three men fell out, quarreling over who deserved how much of the proceeds.

They began to tell outsiders of the scheme and eventually, de Chérisey confessed on camera, displaying the forged parchments and explaining the methods used to produce them to the French journalist Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who has devoted himself to exposing the hoax. Plantard tried intermittently to sustain the fable, but in the 1980s, he got into trouble with French authorities when a financier who Plantard had claimed was a member of the Priory of Sion committed suicide. In the subsequent police investigation, Plantard was forced to admit he'd invented the whole thing.

Although the Priory of Sion hoax had been debunked within France, the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" were still able to pass it off as authentic in their book and in subsequent media appearances. (Insiders swear the authors knew all along that the story was phony.) Even today, with "The Da Vinci Code" and its preposterous conspiracy theories on the lips of 8 million American readers (and more worldwide, now that translations are appearing), the truth about the Priory of Sion -- a major component of the novel -- isn't widely known. (An excellent summary of the case by Amy Bernstein, based on French sources, can be found in "Secrets of the Code," a collection of writings of varying degrees of gullibility, edited by Dan Burstein. Exhaustive documentation of the multifarious frauds of Pierre Plantard can be found at the Web site maintained by Paul Smith.)

Without the Priory of Sion to hold the Grail conspiracy theory together, most of the provocative "evidence" Brown presents in "The Da Vinci Code" crumbles. Take that supposedly ambiguous figure to the right of Jesus in Leonardo's "Last Supper." If there's no real reason to suspect Leonardo of believing in a special relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, why should we see that figure as a woman? Yes, the figure looks somewhat feminine but, in addition to following established conventions in representing the disciple John, Leonardo was quite fond of painting androgynous-looking young men. His reason for doing this was the same one that Michelangelo had for painting lots of muscular male nudes and Botticelli had for depicting long-limbed, ivory-skinned lovelies. You don't need a degree in symbology to figure that one out.

This emphasis on Leonardo is one of the few original additions Brown has made to the Grail conspiracy theory. (Plantard and the authors of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" focused on Nicolas Poussin, an important French painter who is relatively little known to Americans, but whose "Bergers d'Arcadie" is a node of significant kook fascination elsewhere.) Brown's other contribution is the introduction of the idea that the Priory of Sion is a champion of "the sacred feminine," a foggy spiritual principle with roots in "paganism," supposedly purged from early Christianity by the dastardly Constantine.

Although this notion is so vaguely conceived that it approaches stupidity -- What "pagans"? People who have worshipped multiple gods range from the ancient Greeks to Hindus to the Norse and the Aztecs, and their religions have little in common and are certainly not free from patriarchal values -- the intention is hard to argue with. A significant portion of the fan base for "The Da Vinci Code" consists of women who are uncomfortable with the male-dominated, slightly to very misogynistic nature of the Christianities they were raised in and who see Brown's version of early Christian history as a corrective.

As Ehrman points out, it does appear that women had a more prominent role in Jesus' ministry than might be expected of a religious movement at that time and place. Some of that status is apparent in the canonical texts. The New Testament, most notably, holds that women, particularly Mary Magdalene, were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. Yet Ehrman also concludes that while some of the early Christian texts excluded from the New Testament honor Mary Magdalene and Jesus' women followers, others emphatically do not.

The early Christian scriptures -- the earliest having been transcribed from oral accounts 30 years after Jesus' death, and some a century or more later -- were written by people who were the product of a patriarchal culture that subscribed to many values we abhor today -- slavery, for one. Most of Jesus' followers assumed the world as they knew it was about to end very soon, to be replaced by an earthly kingdom of heaven. They were wrong about that and a lot of other things. To try to recast them as people with egalitarian attitudes about the sexes is to imply that we can't improve our own society without some kind of precedent from them. This idea could be even sillier than anything in "The Da Vinci Code."

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