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."

Help Me Defeat Dan Brown's War On History

As Randall Munroe famously pointed out years ago, someone was WRONG on the INTERNET! Tell me about it, Randall! And despite years' worth of heroic effort on the part of Munroe and other well-informed and occasionally sleep-deprived people, someone is still wrong! Several people are wrong! ...Well, let's face it: many people are wrong.

And it's usually Dan Brown's fault.

A few days ago, within the space of an hour or so, I believe I contradicted four people separately, each of whom had asserted that the Bible had been altered at the Council of Nicea. Even if I wanted to, even if I had nothing else to do, I don't think I could correct every single person who makes that mistake in a reader's comment on the Huffington Post alone, let alone the rest of the Internet. Even if I corrected that one mistake every time it appeared in the readers' comments on HP, even if I hung in there with multiple replies, I doubt I could convince all of those readers all by myself that they were wrong about even just that one thing. If I'm going to convince everyone in the world about even just this one thing, I'm going to need help. And of course it's not as if this is the only thing that people are wrong about on the Internet.

Who's with me? Who will stand up beside me and shout, "I'M SPARTACUS!" ?