1. What does Leonardo da Vinci have to do with the story?

The original Renaissance man is portrayed as a former head of the conspiracy guarding the “truth” about Jesus Christ. In the novel, Leonardo is said to have planted various codes and secret symbols in his work, particularly in his painting of the Last Supper. According to the novel, this painting depicts Jesus’ alleged wife, Mary Magdalene, next to him as a symbol of her prominence in his true teaching.

In reality, the figure that Dan Brown identifies as Mary Magdalene is really John the Evangelist – traditionally regarded as the youngest of the apostles and often pictured in medieval art without a beard.

2. What does The Da Vinci Code claim regarding the origin of the Bible?

The book states: “The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. . . . The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great” (pg 231).

This is false. The process by which the Bible was formed took time; it was not collated at any one time. Nor did Constantine have anything to do with the process, either before or after he converted to Christianity.

The Old Testament canon was formed over centuries. Jesus and the apostles already recognized the authority of the Old Testament writings that existed in their time. In the first century, the apostles and their associates wrote the books of the New Testament, which were then passed down to succeeding generations of Christians and read in the church communities.

In the second and third centuries, Gnostic heretics began to manufacture writings that falsely claimed to be from the apostles, but since they had not been passed down in the churches from the beginning, they were rejected. In response to these new and false writings, the churches drew up lists of the authentic books that had been handed down from the apostles. A famous list of the sacred writings from the mid-second century is known as the Muratorian Canon.

This process, by which the canon of Scripture was formed, was largely complete by the time of Constantine (the early fourth century), and he made no contribution to it. There were a few Old Testament books (known today as the Deuterocanonical books or “Apocrypha”) that continued to be discussed after Constantine’s time, into the late fourth century – in fact, further illustrating that the Emperor did not collate the Bible.