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04/10/2006
Dan Brown's Legal Victory Doesn't Protect Reputation but Calls Attention to a 'Hoax' SAN FRANCISCO -- Dan Brown and Random House won a victory in a British court of law but the civil suit tore Brown’s reputation into “teeny, tiny tatters”, the author of a critique of The Da Vinci Code said. Random House ducked paying civil damages to authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh who alleged that Brown "appropriated the architecture" of their 1982 nonfiction book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in writing The Da Vinci Code. However, Brown’s court testimony and resulting publicity exposed as pure hype Brown’s much praised historic research, say two Catholic scholars. Brown’s historic research is actually “the Da Vinci Hoax,” say Sandra Miesel and Carl Olson, authors of The Da Vinci Hoax, published by Ignatius Press. Miesel says Brown’s testimony displayed something she has believed since she started paying attention to the Code phenomenon: “He's a stranger to scholarship.” “The biggest revelation of this trial was that the vaunted research of Dan Brown was heavily hyped but non-existent,” Hoax author Olson said. “The revelations from this court case only confirm what we have shown in our book: The Da Vinci Hoax was that Brown relied on a small number of books that no serious historian would ever consider.” “Dan Brown’s image as a zealous and meticulous researcher is in teeny, tiny tatters,” Miesel said. “It never was anything more than a product of Doubleday’s publicity machine.” Among the books Brown relied upon was Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Miesel and Olson demonstrate in detail in The Da Vinci Hoax. While the judge did not find Brown liable for intellectual property theft for lifting themes and ideas from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, it is obvious many key ideas and passages were taken from the non-fiction book by Baigent and Leigh, Miesel and Olson show in Hoax. Olson and Miesel wrote their book to debunk the historical claims of The Da Vinci Hoax, and to answer the many attacks on the teachings of the Catholic Church included in Brown’s book. Unfortunately, Olson said, Brown’s Code intuitively taps into a desire among many who want to believe the Catholic Church is part of a vast conspiracy. “Anyone who has any doubts or animosity to the Catholic Church, it plays on it very well. This thing pushes buttons on an incredible level,” Olson said. The book feeds on a desire to believe the myths Code promotes: that Mary Magdalene married Jesus, and that Christians only began believing Jesus was the Son of God after the Catholic Council of Nicea proclaimed it in 325. Christians were being fed to the lions for centuries before that, so Miesel notes: “Obviously, they were dying to keep the secret that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.” San Francisco-based Ignatius Press, founded in 1978, is one of the largest Catholic publishers in the U.S. Ignatius Press is the primary publisher of Pope Benedict XVI’s books in the U.S. It is likewise dedicated to publishing and distributing genuine information on the Catholic faith, and publishes over 40 books each year (with over 1000 titles in print). Its author-roster includes some of the foremost names in the Catholic Church. Ignatius is also the publisher of Catholic World Report and Homiletic & Pastoral Review magazines. Ordering can be done through: www.ignatius.com, or by calling: 1-800-651-1531.
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