Inaccuracies in The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code, a popular suspense novel by Dan Brown, generated criticism and controversy after its publication in 2003. Many of the complaints centered on the book's speculations and alleged misrepresentations of core aspects of Christianity and the history of the Catholic Church. Additional criticisms were directed towards the book's inaccurate descriptions of European art, history, architecture, and geography.

Charges of copyright infringement were also leveled by the novelist Lewis Perdue and by the authors of the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which puts forward the hypothesis that the historical Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and that their children or their descendants emigrated to what is now southern France, and married into families that became the Merovingian dynasty, whose claim to the throne of France is championed today by the Priory of Sion. Brown was cleared of these copyright infringement charges in a 2006 trial.

Brown prefaces his novel with a page titled "Fact" asserting that certain elements in the novel are true in reality, and a page at his website repeats these ideas and others. In the early publicity for the novel, Dan Brown made repeated assertions that, while the novel is a work of fiction, the historical information in it is all accurate and well-researched. For example:

Martin Savidge: When we talk about da Vinci and your book, how much is true and how much is fabricated in your storyline?

Dan Brown: 99 percent of it is true. All of the architecture, the art, the secret rituals, the history, all of that is true, the Gnostic gospels. All of that is … all that is fiction, of course, is that there's a Harvard symbologist named Robert Langdon, and all of his action is fictionalized. But the background is all true.

Matt Lauer: How much of this is based on reality in terms of things that actually occurred?

Dan Brown: Absolutely all of it. Obviously, there are—Robert Langdon is fictional, but all of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies, all of that is historical fact.

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