Someone Said Dan Brown Was Right About Jesus and Mary Magdalene Having Been Married

I disagree. I'm not certain that either Jesus or Mary Magdalene existed, let alone that they were married, let alone that they had children and that their descendants survive today. And even if they did I don't assign any special qualities to anyone just because of their ancestors. And the Grail was invented in the 12th century by Chretien de Troyes. And a grail is a cup or chalice. And the business about "san graal" ("holy grail") being a misreading of "sang raal [sang royal]'" ("royal blood") which Brown borrowed from Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, although it's miles more clever than anything Brown will ever think up on his own, is still just clever silliness. And the Priory of Sion was invented in the 1950's by a Frenchman trying to pass himself off as a descendant of the Merovingians and a figure prophesied by Nostradamus. And besides the factual errors Brown insists are facts and which are crucial to the plots of his stories, his books are riddled with errors which are unimportant for his plots. For example, there actually is no academic discipline called symbology, which is practiced by Brown's protagonist Professor Robert Langdon. There is, however, an academic discipline which studies symbols. It's called semiotics, and, ironically, there is an actual Italian professor of semiotics named Umberto Eco who writes fanciful novels, often having to do with wild speculations about the history of the Roman Catholic Church, which are much, much, much better than Brown's, and although Eco's fiction is infinitely more realistic and informative about the reality of both the present and of bygone ages than Brown's, he doesn't have the bad taste to try to pass any of it off as factual, as Brown does with his unfortunate piles of awkward sentences.

Just in case this wasn't already clear: I think Dan Brown's books are badly-written and that people could get a lot more entertainment as well as lot less misinformation from books written by -- well, from books written by just about anyone else.

Is That You, Dan Brown?

No, actually this is someone else. But It may be someone who has read some of Dan Brown's stuff and thought it was non-fiction.

Let's see how many mistakes we can spot:

"The NT is not written evidence, its a compilation of writings/myths from much later than the supposed historical Jesus lived that were picked over by 4th century Italians combining pagan rituals and newer Christian beliefs into one unifying state mandated religion forming the basis of the Roman Catholic church that has been the center of greed, power and corruption in the world ever since and has spun off over 30,000 sects of Christianity that disagree with each other about the details."

Dan Brown's Inferno

Okay, Dan Brown is going to publish a novel about Dante. I suppose it's the duty of The Wrong Monkey to do something, to not merely take this lying down. And so I'm going to suggest some authors you might want to consider reading instead of Brown. (Search for posts labelled "dan brown" to see reasons not to read Brown.)

First of all, Dante comes to mind. Preferably untranslated. Part of the reason such a fuss is made about him to begin with is that his writing really sings. It's beautiful in ways which can't be translated. And I'm talking about the Latin works as well as the Italian ones. I was lucky enough to find a volume in a second hand book store years ago, containing Dante's complete works ("Tutti le opere"), edited by a certain Dr Moore, published by Oxford in 1897, pre-acidic paper, for seven freaking bucks. Or maybe that was just normal, not freakishly lucky. I'll probably never understand book pricing. Anyway, "tutti le opere" is what yr lookin for, happy hunting.

Another thing I stumbled a cross in a used-book store is Guido Da Pisa's Commentary on Dante's Inferno. Written in the 14th century, published for the first time in its entirety in 1974, and according to its editor, Vincenzo Cioffari, it was in 1974 "by common agreement among Dante scholars" the most important commentary on the Inferno which hadn't yet been published. I'm not a Dante scholar, I'm just telling you what Cioffari said. For myself I can only say that I found Guido's commentary (written in Latin) to be quite fascinating. Lots of detail about the political and social background of the Inferno, many edifying references to ancient and Medieval Latin authors who were always in the air which bookish lads like Dante and Guido breathed. Good stuff. Really helps you enjoy the Inferno more.

Unfortunately, as I said, I'm not a Dante scholar and I only stumbled upon that volume of his works and upon Guido's commentary. So I don't have much more to tell you about Dante. I can't even tell you who would be some of the best people to tell you all about Dante. So instead I'm just going to leave the subject of Dante now, and instead just list a bunch of authors who have nothing in common except that I think they're all miles better than Dan Brown, and beg you -- beg! -- if you are planning to read a novel by Brown, to just consider looking at at least one book by at least one of these other people instead, and who knows, you might just be glad you did. I'll list them by genres of writing and by their native languages and by other categories. And if you haven't already discovered the joys of multiligualism I'll just mention that it's great, and urge you to try to learn new languages. (It's a really great thing to do in so many ways. Very difficult, for most of us -- but so worth it!)

Writers of fiction, either contemporary or recently-deceased, writing in English: William H Gass, Walter Abish, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood (also a poet), Richard Powers, Barry Unsworth, Evan Dara, Salman Rushdie, William T Vollmann, Steven Bollinger, William Gaddis, Padgett Powell, Barry Hannah, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Cormac McCarthy

Writers of fiction in English further back in the past: Henry Fielding, Herbert Melville (also wrote poetry), Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Flannery O'Conner

Poets writing in Engliah: Alexander Pope, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, W H Auden, Wallace Stevens, Allan Ginsburg

Historians, English: Edward Gibbon, Steven Runciman, Samuel Eliot Morison

Historians writing in German: Leopold von Ranke, Theodor Mommsen

Wrote in German, partly an historian, partly an essayist, partly a philosopher, partly an art critic, entirely awesome: Jacob Burckhardt

Wrote in English, even harder to classify than Burckhardt: Edmund Wilson

Philosophers writing in German: Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W Adorno, Elias Canetti (Canetti also wrote novels and several volumes' worth of autobiography and published fascinating diaries), Herbert Marcuse

More novelists and/or playwrights writing in German: Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, Lessing, Goethe (also a philosopher, geologist, biologist, discredited writer on optics and publisher of slightly-fictionalized memoirs), Doeblin, Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann

An Italian novelist: Italo Svevo

Philosophers writing in French: Leibniz (also wrote in Latin. Underrated mathamatician and possibly not a liar as is often claimed by fans of Newton), Voltaire, Sartre, Derrida, Barthes, Gorz

And, well, I could go on, but you get the idea. Just let me point out: I'm vouching for each one of these guys and gals personally. I've read their stuff and liked it, I'm not just copying names from lists of famous authors. Okay, that reminds me: I've read a few famous authors whom I recommend you don't read. Overrated, and not sorted by language: Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, Robert Grosseteste -- okay: every theologian I've ever had the misfortune to read, with the exception of Kierkegaard, who wrote brilliantly in genres besides theology but who also became unspeakably dull whenever his theological tendency emerged -- Hegel, Thomas Carlyle, John Updike, Ernest Hemingway, Christa Wolf, Lord Byron

There's no need to read Dan Brown. Honestly, you'd be much better off even reading any of those overrated schmucks in the preceding paragraph.

Sincerely,

Your Pal