Master of the Temple
• Christian Pop Culture , • The Da Vinci Code
His book systematically plucks every thread from Brown’s tapestry. Although the Knights Templar have been so traduced over the centuries that they probably have no reputation left to lose, he explains carefully that they accumulated their wealth during the Crusades as, in effect, one of the first international banks, not by blackmailing the Pope with heretical proofs. ...
Another chapter deals with Opus Dei, an unsavoury outfit even in Griffith-Jones’s balanced account, but not one that included monks (so Brown’s assassin Silas, with his self-flagellating cilice under his habit, could not exist). Another section analyses The Last Supper: the figure next to Christ does not have breasts; it just looks that way because of how his shirt is gathered. Since The Da Vinci Code does not purport to be anything more than fiction, Griffith-Jones cannot really object to any of this. What he can object to are Brown’s claims at the front of the book printed under the word “Fact”. Brown asserts: “The Priory of Sion — a European secret society founded in 1099 — is a real organisation.” It was, says the master, actually founded in the 1950s by a French con artist named Plantard. As for the “parchment known as Les Dossiers Secrets” it was just a batch of typed documents, no more ancient than the typewriter.
Unvarnished reality is usually more interesting than fantastic tosh.