The Da Vinci Con: 
    Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

Truth

  Even Da Vinci’s enormous output of breathtaking Christian art only furthered the artist’s reputation for spiritual hypocrisy. Accepting hundreds of lucrative Vatican commissions, Da Vinci painted Christian themes not as an expression of his own beliefs but rather as a commercial venture – a means of funding a lavish lifestyle. (p. 45)

Leonardo da Vinci did not have a prodigious output and had only one uncompleted commission from a pope.  Moreover, art historians refer to him as "Leonardo," not "Da Vinci" (the latter appelation was not his last name, but meant he was the illigitimate son of Ser Piero of Vinci).

See  Does 'The Da Vinci Code' Crack Leonardo?," by Bruce Bocher, Curator of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.  The article originally appeared in the New York Times (and is now on a New Age website!).

Merovingians were French kings descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene and, among other things, founded the French capital, Paris.

Merovingian was a term learned by every student in France. "The Merovingians founded Paris." (p. 257)

The first Merovingian king of the Franks was Clovis I, who ruled from 481 to 511.

Paris was inhabited since the 3rd century B.C.  Its name was changed to Paris in the 4th century A.D., and Clovis I made Paris his capital in 508.  The city already existed at the time the Merovingians came to power.

"Fortunately for historians," Teabing said, "some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert." (p. 234)

Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1947.

Between 1949 and 1956, in what became a race between the Bedouin and the archaeologists, ten additional caves were found in the hills around Qumran, caves that yielded several more scrolls, as well as thousands of fragments of scrolls: the remnants of approximately 800 manuscripts dating from approximately 200 B.C.E. to 68 C.E.

"Teabing located a huge book and pulled it toward him (sic) across the table. The leather-bound edition was poster sized, like a huge atlas. The cover read: The Gnostic Gospels. . . ."

"These are photocopies of the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea scrolls, which I mentioned earlier," Teabing said. "The earliest Christian records. Troublingly, they do not match up with the gospels in the Bible." (p. 245-6)

Dead Sea Scrolls are exclusively Jewish, not Christian, in content.  They contain no mention of Jesus, no Gnostic gospels at all, and most pre-date his life.

The manuscripts of the Qumran caves include early copies of biblical books in Hebrew and Aramaic, hymns, prayers, Jewish writings known as pseudepigrapha (because they are attributed to ancient biblical characters such as Enoch or the patriarchs), and texts that seem to represent the beliefs of a particular Jewish group that may have lived at the site of Qumran.

Even a Gnostic website feels it necessary to distinguish the Nag Hammadi Library, which contains gospels, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which do not.

The Jewish tretragrammaton YHWH – the sacred name of God – in fact derived from Jehovah, and androgynous physical union between the masculine Jah and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, Havah. (p. 309)

Jehovah is a erroneous conflation of two Hebrew references to God: using the vowels from Adonai (Lord) with the consonants from Yahweh ("I AM": God's declaration to Moses in Ex 3:14).  Ancient Hebrew was normally written without vowel marks, and since the name for God (YHWH) was not spoken by pious Jews, they wrote the vowels for its substitute (Adonai) above it.  Scholars in the 16th century, not knowing this system, rendered the name for God "JeHoVaH" [using J for Y and V for W]. Below are some etymologies confirming this.

• Jehovah (Online Etymology Dictionary)
• Jehovah (Merriam-Webster Online)
• Jehovah (MSN Encarta Dictionary)

Langdon held up his Mickey Mouse watch and told her that Walt Disney had made it his quiet life’s work to pass on the Grail story to future generations. (p. 261ff)

Brown really expects us to take his "history" and musings about the nature of the divine seriously?!  I guess anything is possible "When You Wish upon Ishtar"!  At this point it is apparent that Brown in The Da Vinci Code is just making stuff up and calling it a secret truth hidden by the Catholic Church.