Debunking the Da Vinci Code

today uh we're talking about the da vinci code so i'm excited for this one this is um a topic that has been requested actually by several people who've come at different times to a lecture group they've either asked me questions about the davinci code or said you got to talk about this particular topic since some of the background history does or some of the stories or the named things in the story that are actually refer to actual historical names i wouldn't call it history but anyway some of those are real historical things that we talk about so everything like from mary magdalene and the gnostic gospels to constantine to the templars and other folks like that those are all historical things and those are among our different kinds of themes and so um i hadn't previously read the novel or seen the movie so i took that bullet for you guys so anyway recently um i hadn't read it so we don't have to if you did already did it already good for you if you don't have to if you didn't want to and you don't even you didn't have to um don't bother no you can't it was so good but um uh i did read an article before i before i put it on the schedule had read some articles on the on the central on the history of the central conspiracy theory of the book which is not original to uh the novel so there is a pre-existing set of conspiracy theories that are at the heart of the thriller uh in the mystery and so i having read that i knew there was enough to do a lecture on the topic and so that's why i put it on the schedule so the main thing that i knew um going in in terms of my expectations was the big secret and so this is where we should all mention that if you were here and you didn't want spoilers this is a problem for this lecture for you so um uh is that you know the secret which is the central idea holy grail the holy grail um from medieval christian uh uh uh if not epic is what it's um romances uh this idea of it is is not actually then uh a cup but rather is a person's and specifically mary magdalene and specifically then her bloodline as she was the secret wife of jesus and then she had a child by him after he was crucified and then that child then is that whose descendants have lived on to this day that's the idea that i had known going into this and i was aware anyway that there that that secret was encoded uh you know in the top title here right so in in leonardo da vinci's painting so in other words leonardo was aware of the secret and he had worked that into codes in his paintings somehow and so so that's my that's my the little bit of knowledge i had going into this um based on that then my expectations were uh you know that the history included in the story would be bad because i just assumed that usually with hollywood anyway but i was pretty sure because of the mary magdalene stuff that this was gonna be pretty bad uh and that there would at least be um but at least would be some patterns or uh symbols hidden for example in the works of leonardo da vinci who actually does have all kinds of really interesting stuff that he does that maybe dan brown the novelist uh misinterpreted but it would at least at the minimum be pretty cool because you know da vinci does cool stuff and who knows if there isn't all kinds of cool stuff in there that were that you could at least pretend was in there you know so so i figured that would be true and of course davinci also wrote all these journals and he wrote them in mirror cursive so which is to say he's if you hold it into a mirror yeah he's left-handed i'm using the wrong hand here anyway but then you hold it into a mirror then you could see it like like normal cursive but he's writing you know the other way around um anyway that was just my expectation about what might be in there okay so for example just to take an analogy so if we go this is not mike this is not leonardo da vinci this is michelangelo so you know contemporary renaissance painter and maybe you have seen somebody do this before you know where they have superimposed for example a modern cross section which you could do if you had cut one brain apart of a brain and so then that would be like you would say more or less that you're talking about so you're trying to have found let's say a secret code within this you know particular painting and so at the minimum this is a cool idea right because at the minimum it looks like this modern theory that there's a symbol hidden michael painting while it's quite debated by art historians and in fact more say more would think i think would suggest that the drapery is representing uh a womb maybe or something like that the image anyway has the benefit of being intriguing and cool right so i looks neat so don't take me on this this is supposed to be a brain so you have to read what art historians have to say okay but contrary to my expectations prior to seeing the movie i don't think that there's anything as cool as that in terms of a symbol of like because that really looks like a brain as far as i'm concerned so we're not going to get that we're not going to get that as um in the da vinci code and although i really didn't think the history was going to be good it's really really bad okay so it's super bad okay so we'll get to it okay let me do a little bit of a summary of the movie for those of you and have not seen the movie read the book so lead character tom hanks is robert langdon who is a celebrity professor of symbology at harvard who is on this massive book tour of france and although symbology is not actually an academic field which which harvard has professorships it's apparently essential for the story to establish langdon as an authority on symbols in order to inject what i think is actually false information about the basic symbols that are at the heart of the movie so when we get to that point where we have to find the codes and the symbols it's going to be helpful that he's an expert on simple so that his authority can explain them to you because they don't immediately make common sense so what's happening right at the beginning of the movie there's a guy jacques sonier sonnier who is curator of the louvre and he is murdered in the museum his body is then laid out like da vinci's famous vitruvian man sketch so that sketchy scene and with a pentagram on it on his uh chest as opposed to what i think probably based on the later symbols it should have been a star of david but i don't know they probably were afraid of and doing that because of the the actual historical background of this conspiracy theory which is anti-semitic but anyway um we'll get into that so although we don't know at the time sanier is the head of a secret organization known as the priory of zion so his killer is this freaky catholic zealot monk guy named silas and silas is also a flagellate so one of the after he's done murdering the guy he's takes off all his clothes and starts whipping himself and he's anyway bizarrely portrayed as being part of this catholic organization opus dei which is an actual organization and since it was founded in the early 20th century opus dei has been sort of controversial for kind of either reactionary conservative or revolutionary or any other number of world views but the catholic organization that opus dei do not wear monastic habits they're not monks it they uh they're it's a lay membership some of them maybe do practice mortification of the flesh but i presume not in anything like this way um and they're certainly not a cabal of assassins um anywhere outside the davinci code so this is really a very weird um little digression that for some reason that that got put in there and it's not particularly maybe maybe the author here does not like the opus dei for some reason i don't know why so anyway uh and it turns out then that's the guy's boss the assassin's boss who's the head of opus dei bishop aaron garrosa uh is also a guy who in addition to heading up this actual real catholic group is also part of a secret catholic cabal a council of uh prelates who apparently has spent the last 1700 years successfully keeping the secret of the holy grail secret but somehow being woefully unsuccessful at hunting down and wiping out the priory of zion which has been uh maintaining this uh uh trying to expose the secret or at least protect the bloodline for two thousand years so the catholic church um uh it is explained will disavow this secret council if their secret gets let out so so it is like um like in star trek it's section 31 they're doing all the federation's dirty work but if the federation you know gets caught you know that they broke the prime directive all this stuff so the catholic church does officially doesn't know about these guys but they're still a catholic cabal so um the main story arc then as we follow the movie along has uh langdon and then the nephew i'm sorry the granddaughter of sanier or the a woman raised as his granddaughter uh sophie nevo who is trying to work out all the conspiracy theories they're trying to stay ahead of the opus dei freakis acid monk as well as the french police uh the leader of whom is also a member of opus dei and his seems to be acting under the bishop's orders so it's a big old catholic conspiracy seeming thing that's happening all the time uh and so they at some point or other uh find ian mckellen which is always nice so and he's a uh conspiracy theorist friend who is uh english uh dilettante historian sir lay teebing who has worked out almost the whole secret of the priory of scion including the identity of its assassinated leader sanye the guy the murderer at the beginning the grandfather supposedly of of sophie and um and i just point out as an aside on the comment of the movie here since sonia was hiding by being curator of the louvre you know a bigger question is why it has taken the secret catholic council so long to track down the priority of science since he's not hiding too too hidden in a two hidden form here so what is this priority of science so we've talked about it a couple times so although presented in the da vinci code is an organization with an ancient history it is actually very well established that the priory of zion is they created in 1956 in france as part of a hoax by the sky pier plantard who was a you know convicted as a confidence man at a certain point so plantar had previously attempted to found anti-semitic county fraternities uh during the vichy period of france although uh he didn't get he he wasn't approved by his his anti-semitic confraternity wasn't approved by the the nazis so anyway i don't know so anyway he's not a successful not a successful a secret society guy because of presumably because of telling a lot of lies all the time you know but anyway so plantar then um uh had a bunch of associates who created forged parchments that created a false or secret history that linked the merovingian king daggobert the second so from the 7th century a.d to his modern priory of cyan hoax and so the mayor of engines are the royal house of the frankish empire the frankish kingdom prior to the carroll engines right the charlemagne's realm and so beginning with uh the old the original king of the franks who was converted to christianity clovis or which is to say the front modern would be louis right the first louis of all so included in this um in this these documents these forage documents were forged genealogies which made plantar then the secret heir to the frankish empire so by try this line from dagobert and then by extension obviously to all of europe right so there should be a unified idea that they'll unify europe again under kind of this holy bloodline of the mayor of indian um dynasty okay that didn't go anywhere but it made it you know got published and things like that and so somebody but anyway at some point or other couple english guys found it and uh found it very interesting they then took that hoax which they either believed was real or they decided to build on for their own kind of additional hoax purposes made this very well-selling book called the holy blood and the holy grail adding that into the ideas of this merovingian bloodline which had essentially a um a franco-israelite thing that plantart had had which is to say that the franks are actually the true um house of israel or something like that you know i mean there's a lot of that kind of thing so it's like anglo israelitism where people who were english racists think that they were the true israel or something and so this is what the song jerusalem is kind of about if you've heard that anyway it's also which is also a poem right anyway so so taking that away so these english guys are not interested in in in plant uh yeah in plantars franco israelitism and his catholic kind of um uh merovingen like idea for of a restored kingdom instead they are since they're protestants and have the whole anglo-protestant um anti-catholic bias they succeed in injecting a whole bunch of anti-catholic bias into the hoax and they also add into these genealogies the idea that these um that these merovingian kings are actually descended from uh the secret child of mary magdalene and jesus christ and before that all the way being heirs then to solomon's kingdom and so therefore essentially they're the air you know the the it's the essentially this this expected king future king is the heir to i don't know the entire divine kingdom right so so anyway that's what happened in this book and that book is directly then you know used by uh the da vinci code so the um as we say then the origin of this prior of zion hoax doesn't go back to before the middle of the 20th century it's very well established so there is no existence of this before that along with the added details from the 80s of the royal bloodline the secret marriage of jesus and mary magdalene and it might as well throw in the templars since if you don't have the templars what's what's what kind of a conspiracy theory theory is this you know so okay so as a result of it what you just say here the secrets at the heart of the da vinci code therefore have zero possibility of being historical nor are they even original fictions uh fiction's original to dan brown right because he's adopting most of these from pre-existing uh hoaxes okay so back to the back to the story line so at a certain point after following a lot of different codes and trails and things like that they find the actual secret hiding place of the priory of scion which according to the clues is rosalind chapel in scotland and according to the story the chapel was built by the templars who according to the story were founded as the military arm of the priory of science so then again we again have to ask why has this all-powerful ruthless city catholic council never even bothered to look here because it does seem like a fairly obvious place it's one of the few remaining templar chapels according to the story and this kind of a thing right it is in fact 100 made 150 years after founded 150 years after the dissolution of the templars there's no connection with this chapel and the templars that matters to the story so okay so protecting the secret archives of the priory of science so they come to this this abbey which is right where you think and it's really guarded um essentially there's a guy who they kind of walk right past they walk right down the the steps into the crypt and then there's this this very forbidding little chain with a sign that says private which they duck under and they get in there and they find essentially the um priceless archives of the priority of zion that have been hidden all this thousands of years um the priory then has 2 000 years of manuscripts so right there is a there's the section that you just see the the manuscripts that date from 35 to 62 a.d so they're unguarded archive of christian manuscripts that are pretty pretty much just you know open to the weather here in this the most priceless documents that would exist so this would be the most important manuscript collection ever found in all of history of course we have you know these are christian documents and so we have no eyewitness accounts of g you know of jesus nor any contemporary manuscripts at all or earliest writings or by paul who didn't even know jesus and so that that's in the 50s or late 40s at earliest and so or 40s anyway the and so this is all the way back right to the lifetime of jesus and so it's right afterwards right so anyway but our hero can't even be bothered to look at that because what would that be what would be the point of looking at those kind of documents what would those be worth because he's only interested in looking for the remains of mary magdalene which had previously been housed with the documents right there but now has been moved and so now where is it and so the mystery is still ongoing um like again if it had if she had if she had been here in this very obvious hiding place all this time what is this all-powerful secret catholic council doing you know all of its time okay just flagellating okay all right so this is because uh langdon here has already realized and i by the way i think i hope everybody else did too before this that sophie who has been raised as the granddaughter of sonia the murdered head of the priory is obviously not his actual granddaughter but it is actually the heir of this royal line that he's he and all of his predecessors have been uh protecting all the way back to you know she her ancestor great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather jesus and grandmother mary magdalene and obviously the the reason why they can't bother to read the most important historical texts in all of the western station is that because you know if they could just get a hold of mary magdalene's sarcophagus and her dna then they could do dna tests and it would prove you know everything is false all once and for all and we would be able to scientifically prove everything that's why i put our exclamation marks on everything here sophie's the holy grail that's dna tester okay so um then at the end of the movie then um we actually do figure out where the sarcophagus is so they don't have the they don't have the sarcophagus but langdon's able to figure it out and so he goes here and he sees this pyramid and there's an inverted pyramid and then there's another pyramid and of course it's at the pyramid at the louvre and so again even if we hadn't you know i haven't mentioned here about the pyramid symbol and everything like that and inverted pyramids and but we'll get to that even without that it seems like the secret catholic council might check out the spot given that they knew that the curator of the louvre is in fact head of the priory of science since they assassinated him so anyway the one it's immediate guess what secret council she's right under the where the pyramid marks the spot so anyway these are where right you know again right where you'd expect okay so what if it were true so let's for the sake of argument let's say we had the sarcophagus we actually had the remains of mary magdalene and sophie is actually her soul descendant of mary and jesus and we tested the remains of mary magdalene here or the remains here and we tested sophie's and we did the dna analysis what would that prove nothing nothing that would prove absolutely nothing meaningful at all it would have i mean there would be no no point in doing that because dna testing could prove that sophie is descended from the person in the sarcophagus and the carbon dating might show that the ancestor had died in the in who's in the sarcophagus this person had died in the first century and the dna testing might show that sophie's ancestors of jewish descent but it certainly wouldn't be able to identify her as mary magdalene or prove that she had any relationship with the historical jesus i mean i know that people think of dna testing as just this magic thing but if you that's your dna it doesn't have your name written on it you know so we can't actually identify that okay what if we had jesus's dna then so so what if we had jesus's blood for example if we go to the basilica of the holy blood in belgium you know that preserves a relic that was brought back from the actual crusades here there's a question from tim what about the holy foreskin what that's what i wrote there or what if we had the holy foreskin or what if we had the holy umbilical cord which we do and we have multiple ones so they have one of the one of the holy umbilical cords that saint john lateran so that it's right there you know go get you know so these are relics that have been claimed so even if we had um jesus's dna we would not still not be able to prove that it was his right so just because we have a um we have a witness from the 12th century in the crusader states who brought back a vial of blood and made it to a church in belgium and the church in belgium has been holding on to the remains of that blood for a thousand years and we could probably document that fairly well that doesn't prove that it goes back to jesus uh you know before that you know again we have no provenance same thing the holy foreskin you know there's no nobody was holding on to that as far as we know i mean again it's something that they found in the crusade time period so that's what the um it wouldn't go back any further so yeah tim again and with regards to the dna would you even be able to tell that would jesus's dna have passed down because the only thing i thought that really transferred through was the mother's dna and the mitochondria no the mitochondrial dna if there was if there were if we had that father and then if he could match the holy foreskin's dna and mary magdalene's dna into that woman than the owner of the foreskin and yeah you would you'd start to have a bunch of circumstantial evidence at that point so let's say we had that that would be there would be something but you still have to believe all this provenance right so then you have to trace the different provenance of the holy foreskin and of the priority of zion right okay so it so it still didn't necessarily prove that so again carbon dating could confirm that the relic came from somewhere in the first century the dna testing might show that the person was of jewish descent but it couldn't be proven that the dna belonged to the historical jesus either and in fact if we did testing it would almost almost certainly prove that it it all dates from from the middle ages right like the trout of turin so these are things that when you actually do the testing on them they when they found the artifact that's kind of about how old it is this is often just a little bit older than that uh so anyway so it is this is where that's where the mary is if you ever go to prayer so you can go see her no yeah this is a real this is a real pyramid this is the louvre is you know has that pyramid on the in front of it oh the new bit of it yeah and then that's under it and then that's under it and then that's this is showing the central symbols of the dna of the da vinci code right these these triangles we'll see we'll get to that okay so so theologically i'm going to argue that even if we had all of that and we showed that we accepted that there was jesus and mary magdalene and and sophie um the conspiracy and by the way and that also assumes then that they have successfully um had this monarchical line produced just one generation uh you know worth of people who've reproduced this entire time under normal circumstances um we are pr you know whether if there was a historical king david we are all descended from king david because you know once you get back that far it's spread out like like crazy right you know eventually it gets if it gets that far anyway it's the same thing i mean i'm i can do because of my mom as a genealogist we can trace the line to charlemagne but everybody in western europe has descended from charlemagne you know it's just that you can't trace it necessarily you know so anyway at least you almost everybody so the point of it is is that you go this far back it's not that you only have one charlemagne only has one descendant you know like sophie here is the only descendant of mary magdalene and jesus you know i mean the only way that you can have that happen is if they have successfully um always produced an air which usually doesn't happen in a royal line um almost always though you'll get to a point where they don't reproduce you know what i mean this is what happened to the the georgian kings and they had to go to the hanoverians and all this kind of thing in the um in the british royal line right and so that oh it'll come back on um anyway and so you have to essentially kill i mean maybe the secret catholic council has successfully been killing everybody except for one and the other guys have been just very lucky for 2000 years to keep just one person alive so anyway okay so theologically though i'm going to say that this doesn't really make any difference uh because if we prove then that jesus was a human being using dna testing the idea of the da vinci code is that that would totally undermine the authority of the catholic church which would then collapse right and all of its oppressive power uh in this sense that the catholic church has oppressive power so anyway but it's already church doctrine that jesus was fully human and would therefore have had fully human dna for as far as i would understand they didn't talk about they didn't know about dna back when they made the doctrine but anyway it's fully human so um and in fact actually um so if we take the sixth century portrait of jesus um unlike the code that uh brown imposes on the da vinci's code davinci's last supper there isn't actually an ancient code in portraits of christ pentacrite or like this one the earliest one that's in mount sinai and saint catherine's monastery from the 6th century and so we can see it if we divide the face in half and if we just take this half and then if we just take that half and we do this thing where we reflect them so if we do that mirror thing like we were talking about so that's what the left side reflects as and that's what the right side reflects as if you were just have two halves of the left side together and two halves of the right side that a person could make i think that the majority argument of art historians is that this is representing a very particular christian theology which is hypostatic union that jesus is fully human and hopefully divine that's all i'm trying to say here and so in other words jesus is fully human and holy fully divine so since he's fully human and since christian theology nor already teaches that god transcends matter there's no reason to imagine that christ's divine nature in this hypostatic union would affect his dna at all which would be entirely a part of his human nature right and so as a result if there were evidence actually that jesus sired a child this would not actually affect orthodox theology since there was nothing theologically that precluded jesus from siring children so it's not that he couldn't have sired children being a fully human fully divine being or whatever but it's just that historically there is no evidence whatsoever that he did okay so anyway i just want to talk about the theology first so the theology here is in fact actually backwards so um so surly t being here uses quotations from the gnostic gospels and we've had lectures on these before and we're going to again including the gospel of mary magdalene to show that gnostic christians believed he said he asserts that mary was jesus's wife but in fact the gnostics are the ones who denied that christ ever had a human nature so the gnostics believe that christ was a divine being who only appeared but to observers to be human and so this was with the gnostic position and so all of these texts um far from saying that uh that mary and jesus were having a physical relationship it's talking about uh mary's relationship with a fully divine being who was not human and who therefore would not have been able to desire it would not have desired a child with her so um proto-orthodox christians which is to say what what eventually becomes nicene christians catholic orthodox protestant believed christ uh was fully human and fully divine as i say they argued strongly against this gnostic and other other um christians who had this kind of belief which is they called docetism which is me believe that divine jesus is a divine being who only seemed and then the greek here is you know doking so you know cases or something like that is docetism so he only seems human and so the text showing that jesus had a wife and children if there were texts showing that that would argue against the gnostic position and actually in favor of the nicene catholic orthodox position but there are no such texts um so so gnostics just to have an example here had the opposite theology so if we go to the gnostic uh uh coptic apocalypse of peter and just talk about uh its description of the crucifixion um so it in according to this text uh when he jesus had said these things i peter so peter's the person supposedly writing this gospel saw him seemingly being seized by them which is to say the roman soldiers and i said what do i see o lord that it is you yourself whom they take and that you are grasping me or who is this one glad and laughing on the tree which is to say the cross and and it and is it another one whose feet and hands they are striking you know into the tree and to the cross the savior said to me he who you saw him who he whom you saw on the tree glad and laughing this is the living jesus but the one into whose hands and feet they drive the nails is his fleshy part which is the substitute being put to shame the one who came into being in his likeness but look at him and me so in other words there's just a substitute simulacrum that is not even you know that they thought that they had because there was never any real physical jesus here and i saw someone about to approach us resembling him even him who was laughing on the tree and he was filled with the holy spirit and he is a savior and there was a great ineffable light around them and a multitude of ineffable and invisible angels blessing them so the gnostic position is that jesus the real jesus is entirely a creature of light a creature of spirit the whole idea of the gnostics is that is like plato which is to say that there is this this realm of the forms the immaterial realm that transcends the material realm which is mere shadow of the actual transcendent reality of the forms and so therefore the um the true christ is actually even laughing uh at in the gnostic gospels because there's no no crucifixion actually happens there's no physical incarnation so uh the gnostic gospels so we're gonna have a lecture on this march 19th including the gospel of mary and mary magdalene as what is uh portray mary magdalene among jesus inner circles of disciples who was taught special knowledge or gnosis which is where the name gnostic comes from by him but none give any hint that the two were married so so she one all all one of the things in iconography so this is a more recent icon of mary magdalene this is the question about this one and she's holding an egg because mary magdalene often uh in her almost all and always in iconography if you have a picture of like 12 apostles or if you go to a a cathedral and you see them carved in the stone above the in the tympanum or whatever is you're going in the door um you wonder wait a second what how can i tell which one of they all are well they're all carrying like a different thing and that shows based on what they're carrying which apostle they are or they have different characteristics or that kind of a thing and so the characteristic of mary magdalene often is that she has an egg which represents resurrection and so eggs represent rebirth that's why easter has eggs with it and things like that and it's because in the canonical stories she is always among the the either the first or among the first who are the witnesses of the risen christ and so um in according to that tradition then she is essentially the apostle to the apostles because she announces the good news to the apostles who then go forward from there um so t bing quotes the gnostic gospel of philip um he doesn't quote this whole quotation but this is where you get this one word from there were three who always walked with the lord mary his mother and her sister and the and magdalen the one who was called his companions in other words there's three mary's that were always companions a sister uh uh a mother a mother and um the magdalen so uh there's the word companion there langdon then asserts that the aramaic scholars all know that companion means wife but of course we have no aramaic text of this particular gospel that is being quoted the gospel of philip is in coptic which is to say uh egyptian uh ancient egyptian not the ancient one but the roman era egyptian uh translated from a lost uh greek original so um anyway i was just saying it was aramaic right so in other words aramaic companion means wife according to this and i always led this do hey it's a what language is that it's aramaic of course joseph of arimathea of course you know so anyway that's just part of the whole holy grail story you know that um this the language that jesus speaks is aramaic joseph of arimathea who is part of the the kind of medieval grail legends and things like that um hasn't the word arimathea has nothing to do with arab the language aramaic so anyway so but neither does this uh gospel of philip so companion in the gospel of philip is a gender-neutral relationship it's like men could have been called a companion or or not and so it's probably like disciple and indicates the gnostic view that mary magdalene is one of the very important disciples or even an apostle of jesus there is no particular reason the early church understood their women could be apostles as men could be apostles uh there's very famous early apostle legendary apostle feckler uh who is a woman uh there is a apostle uh junior who's mentioned in the canonical letter paul to the romans so um anyway the view is consistent with mary's portrayal in the canonical gospels uh which he credited her as i said as being one of the first the first or among the first to see the risen christ right okay mary magdalene is jesus's wife this is a very popular modern idea so people ever since everybody somebody thought of this they like it there is no ancient basis onto which to build this modern idea so arguments that the historical jesus must have been married because of later rabbinic interpretation of jewish law would require that he be married so in other words when the rabbis got going that is the law and that that would have to be but that overstates what we know about the way that jews in the galilee and the early first century observed the law so we simply don't know because of lack of evidence what kind of what's happening there and part of the reality is is that the milieu is very rapidly changing the whole reason why all of the gospel accounts are recording jesus arguing with pharisees and scribes and sadducees is because they are all arguing over interpretation of law which is very much in flux because it's actually changing fairly rapidly right at that in that century and the centuries that follow so i would just suggest that we don't know for sure that he would have had to have been um even so however um if there's another argument too that if only a wife or family members would be allowed to dress the body under jewish law again i'm saying that overstates what we know about jewish observance in the galilee in the 30s but it also assumes historicity of a canonical narrative so in other words this idea that mary magdalene went and dressed the body or went to go dress the body um that the body was even known any of those things that that narrative isn't necessarily historical so the fact that we read gospel narratives and we just assume it's historical or something like that very much mistakes uh overstates it it could be very well be that since the gospels are written late by greek speaking christians who may not have been very familiar at all with uh jewish practice of the of the 30s um or even of their own time you know we can't say for sure what that story was you know in other words if that story says anything about about this kind of thing so so what i'm just going to suggest is that we can't that this this doesn't argue it to elizabeth's point it's also completely possible rather than assuming that there must have been a wife and that the wife is the uh this uh one particular character in the accounts mary magdalene we could just as easily assume that there had been a a marriage and he was a widower and uh something like that because his wife had died earlier and that's why no such character appears in the story but also with mary magdalene every other there's a bazillion mary's in the gospel and every other mary is named in relationship to uh some man if they're married so mary the mother you know mary the mother of jesus mary the mother of james and john uh in all these kind of different marys and that kind of characteristic only mary magdalene is named for her town and so therefore if she was named you know if she was married to jesus she would more likely be mary the wife of jesus i've read that actually there were rabbis that were not married a time of christ and actually even christ was not an official rabbi of the system you might call it right there's no rabbi system i mean so and actually you get a lecture on rabbis after because like i mean because i think there's a big change in the whole judaism after that right so that that's a misconception that they all had to be married right well the reality about it is that our stuff on the rabbis is way less good in the in this time period of jesus than our stuff on jesus so i sometimes complain about um you know like or i say i'm honest here or whatever about what we don't know about the historical jesus we're actually wildly close to the historical jesus in terms of some of these documents are within 30 40 years the rabbinic stuff is written it's like way over it's like a cent centuries later so so there may be traditions that are reasonable but they're all everything you always have to look to the context of when it's written and so so that's really referring to the second third centuries you know and so we don't know what's going on in the 30s and that's what i would say okay this is a popular idea so they keep forging stuff so if you don't have any evidence that you can you can always make it so there's this um uh little scrap of papyrus that was called uh it got called the um gospel of jesus's wife because it mentions jesus's wife on it it's though a um been shown subsequently to be the coptic is taken directly from the the gospel of thomas the nakamati one including because it's copied uh there includes the errors that are that were introduced in an early printing of the of the gnostic gospel so anyway at first they weren't sure about it it's pretty clearly a forgery um people you might have found people like the fan jesus's family tomb or something like this this is nonsense stuff so i mean there's lots of people that have these names jesus i'm sorry you know joseph essentially and uh and uh jesus is yeshua uh and uh miriam you know in other words these are very common names and the historical jesus there's no indication that they would be this kind of elite class that they would be able to have a family tomb like that kind of thing i just think it's anyway not not a credible thing um okay and it may well be a forgery too so who was mary magdalene so um let's just look at her in the canonical gospels so what we have in the new testament she's the pro most prominent of the female disciples of jesus she's named 12 times in the canonical gospels as i said she's a witness of the empty tomb in all four canonical gospels uh mark and john specify she's the first person to see and testify of the risen christ so which is to say two completely different traditions and then that's why i say given the title apostle to the apostles in luke's account we hear that jesus has exercised seven demons from her um it's also in the longer edited ending to mark which is probably dependent on luke uh maybe not i don't know anyway so different mary from mother jesus's mother obviously and mary and bethany called the magdalen i mentioned because of the galilean town of magdala or mary the tower um from the amer aramaic word magdala so anyway so not in other words having a name from a familial relationship with uh one of the male one of her male relatives um so in christian tradition or myth mary magdalene was frequently conflated with the sinful woman in luke's account that anoints jesus's feet and so this is a senseless identification because luke elsewhere you know names magdalen jesus and tells the center to go and not to follow there's no um so in other words there was no reason why luke wouldn't have said that was mary magdalene if it was why would she have mentioned that why wouldn't why would luke have not said you know been using identify the character that luke already talks about so by the fourth century christian tradition portrayed mary as a prostitute he would repent it there is no basis for that myth and uh they wrongly that's one thing it's mentioned in the da vinci code but they have wrongly said that the catholic church is still says that as doctrine or something like that there's a um pope gregory the first made that um uh identification i think but it's not um anyway it's it's something it's not like it's doctorate or something like that and all all scholars don't don't make that identification now um the best explanation of mary magdalene's role in my opinion is coming from luke so jesus traveled about from one town and village to another proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of god the twelve were with him and also some women mary called magdalen joanna wife of chuza manager of herod's household susannah and many others these women were helping to support them out of their own means so jesus and all of his disciples are um call their their movement is called the poor blessed are the poor for theirs is the kingdom all of those kind of things and they are considering the lilies who sow not neither do they they reap they are praying to to god to give them this day their daily bread uh and anyway and so they are not thinking of the morrow in that way they are living in this uh shared community where they have all kind of things in common and are begging for their means and so they have wealthy probably wealthy patron women who support the movement right and mary magdalene is probably one of them so although little can be said with certainty about any of the figures associated with jesus then we can say she's likely then among the wealthier women who supported the movement financially not a former prostitute not jesus's wife was among uh prominent disciples and is credited uh with the first vision of the risen christ and is therefore a founder possibly the founder of christianity since before that it was the jesus movement that wasn't about the risen christ uh the the last supper so this is a woman right [Applause] looks like a woman that's kind of like that the heart of the whole thing right okay so i just want to look at this iconography of last supper paintings right and so what we all often have whenever they're doing the last supper i mentioned that you know a lot of times we'll have the different people who we identify the different ways i think we're someone who's seen the traditionally peter has the knife but i don't know exactly with the um he normally has a key but it last supper he doesn't hasn't gotten the keys yet right no he already has but not here at the supper anyway this young person or woman here which is obviously not a woman either is as a common feature right and so all the disciples all have beards except for this one there's another one with no beard oh yeah there's another one going over there okay so there's two in this case there's a two without beard there's another one so last supper and the same kind of iconography these are all earlier obviously uh it's kind of a thing the last supper is usually pictured with uh on the opposite side of the table often uses judas is on the opposite side table is like you see sometimes they do it differently and the earliest ones they're kind of actually the earliest ones they're all reclining because they knew they knew that that would have been how it big dinner would have happened in roman times or whatever at least that's how the romans pictured it but yeah sometimes like you say that sometimes they don't but you know like it became a thing it's certainly in the in this one they're all on the one side of the table except judas right and this is the next one the person on the table yeah the person laying on the table laying on the table i guess in this particular one is also judas i think yeah because he's being fingered if he really was over there then they would probably that they people probably would have had a better clue as to which one was going to betray him when he brings it out you know but anyway that's just how it's shown symbolically in art right okay so uh lots of images of the beardless um person at the table no see so that way you pick out judas right and pick out judas okay so here's another painting of this particular uh figure from um the disciples so um this is john the beloved is the character um and this in this case you can see what some of john's other symbols which is like the eagle and so which i think is kind of like like ganymede but actually the idea of it is that um that the four evangelists each have a have a symbol so if you see that um venice's flag if you think about it has the lion the winged lion on it and that's because the venetians in the middle ages went and stole the remains of saint mark from alexandria and then they brought it back and that's why that's called saint mark's cathedral venetians are really good at stealing stuff so they've got lots of wonderful things there in venice but anyway that's why they still have that on their flag because so the winged lion is is mark the eagle here is john the um and then the other one is a winged winged bull and the other one is a just a guy and so what is it is it the bull is is luke yeah and the will is luke and the guy is matthew so anyway it's because of those those visions of those four uh heavenly beings are in the book of revelation and then it gets assigned to the evangelists okay so all of these paintings then are the standard iconography portrayals for the disciples and john the beloved is traditionally portrayed as a feminine looking young man to differentiate him from the other disciples and if he's all by himself he often has as an eagle since he's the evangelist he's often got a book and he's writing right here's another one of him so this character is a composite of several different christians in the new testament so for example there's an actual historical figure whom the apostle john i'm sorry who called the apostle john whom paul met so we can say paul since he's our earliest writer who we actually have texts from and he himself as an eyewitness said that he met john and he met peter and he met james the brother of jesus and he calls all three of them the acknowledged pillars of the church and he's having fights with them so so anyway so because of all of that we can understand that anyway that a living disciple of of jesus at the time we didn't know that for sure that he had seen jesus but anyway that's what that's the understanding peter yes and jesus's brother for sure anyway whereas one of the leaders of the church at the time when paul was also writing and active so then there's also in the gospel of john which is an anonymous text that is attributed john we had a lecture on this there is a character in that text called the disciple that jesus loved and so and so it's often called the beloved disciple so very early on um christians traditionally have made the traditional connection with the apostle john and the beloved disciple and so he becomes called john the beloved but that is not explicitly meant made in the text uh as a connection but that's where you started to get the character composite portrait and then finally john the revelator the author of the book of revelation uh often it's under uh christians then traditionally believe that uh the guy who is the beloved disciple of jesus who wrote the book of john according to tradition later in life at the end of his life wrote the book of revelation when he's off on prison on patmos but again the book of revelation doesn't say that it just is a guy named john who is writing so if you're just looking you might think that this is just one of the women that is hanging around the cross right but you know because you see that he's got feet near the feet are being you know or you can see his sexy naked feet you probably wouldn't get to see the the saintly women's feet right and so in all these cases um the character on the right here is is john right so it's not a woman this is not a woman it's a guy so what i'm going to say here jesus this is jesus's beloved and is definitely a dude so although he's deliberately portrayed with the traditional iconography as a feminine looking youth the character jesus side and the da vinci's last supper is john the beloved and not mary magdalene da vinci's work is entirely in keeping with the traditional portrayals of john that we've seen all the way through and also at the last supper so what about the rest of the code uh the photoshop code so um first of all so we have to ask what's the symbol for mail fortunately we have a symbologist to tell us what the universal symbol for male is because we otherwise wouldn't know probably ourselves what the symbol for male is right we don't even have any idea what it could be so apparently it's this according to the symbologist robert langdon the answer is a triangle so i thought okay well i'll look in my dictionary of symbols when i saw that and guess what according to um anyway lingman here who wrote the dictionary of symbols that is a book i happen to have on my on my shelf the triangle has lots and lots of meanings as you'd imagine for example in alchemy it denotes the element of fire and that's true both in western alchemy and i guess in tibetan alchemy for some reason the hittites for example used it to mean good and healthy and it's on fire extinguishers too well it's also yeah it has a bunch of different meanings i mean so um i mean it's on it's on caution signs and things like that so it means also warning and stuff like that to modernly um it's also though first and foremost associated with the number three so you know anciently it was used to denote the number three which is generally speaking a holy number a divine number so pagans like zenocrates stated as a symbol for god as a result of that so he's not a christian three centuries four centuries before christ uh in the fourth century what yeah so it's a platinum i mean it's one of plato's you know it's certainly um the pythagoreans loved this the triangle and also the different iterations of the triangle it's one of their holy numbers right and so in christian symbolism you know which presumably da vinci would be accessing if he was thinking about it you could imagine this holy divine number is representing what the trinity right so anyway so this is one of the what the idea means and so that's certainly what um the dictionary says here so you want to make it into male what you have to do is you have to add a pole uh to the triangle in order to make a symbol and those are male symbols traditionally right and so these are um uh you know the arrows and of course the the you know the male symbol we use for bathrooms and things like that which is you know you can see kind of the iteration how that would work how they developed so this was also the astrological symbol for mars it's related to the ancient astrological or astronomical symbol for venus and both of them we can kind of see physiologically where the ideas come from for these they're also alchemical symbols that you know that are related to again and astronomical exactly so um yeah so mars and venus are planets still and so they're still used in astronomy and those things and so okay so those we definitely we're aware of we don't need the symbologist to know with a symbol for male anyway in female so i will mention that the inverted one of the triangles the triangle this direction anyway um while it is also um you know for example the element of water uh and it you know you the yield sign all kinds of different things that it does it is apparently anciently prehistoric times and also sumerian times uh with a line like this you can imagine why uh has been used to represent women right or to mean women symbolically but not this way as much so that said triangles are not um particularly complicated symbols to find so i mean in terms of when we're looking doing space it is not like we have found you know like a you know like some kind of a very complicated letter or a figure eight or whatever some kind of a much more complicated thing than this particular thing and i'm also going to argue that the letter m i don't think is also very impressive here because for one thing that there's it doesn't come down the same like on the sides and there's no empty space there so just the idea that this is saying really big it's supposed to be mary mary magdalene or something like that um i don't find that code to be anywhere near as impressive as i was thinking it was going to be like like the michelangelo brain thing which i i think is pretty neat i don't i don't think it's real but i think it's neat okay somebody thought of something pretty smart there when they thought of that okay so i just picked a painting i just thought i'd look at one for another one of these things so this is raphael so another renaissance painter with one of these kind of paintings and i thought okay well what is the what is the space there is there a code in the is it a raphael code and i thought well there's a y right there and why why not why because we love you there's a why you know but let's say let's take it further let's say if it's not just a letter or whatever a code for why look it's the holy grail that's right there and so in this painting of jesus giving the keys to saint peter it turns out that the true holy grail is not the womb of mary magdalene but raphael's code has shown us that it's actually saint peter's petrine keys of authority and so uh and so obviously the successor then and who has a true holy grail is the pope himself and so that's the holy grail now so anyway this painting too because it's renaissance period has the single point perspective so if they were going to hide something it probably wouldn't be up front it probably would be in the back well there are all kinds of neat stuff for the backspace i mean we've seen it before i've shown you before when we show our painting at the beginning raphael's painting of uh the school of athens and we see you know aristotle and plato and all the other philosophers and and everything like that i've shown how the background image of the of the athenaeum or whatever the whatever the lyceum or whatever school it is supposedly in ancient athens that is in fact the new st peters that they've built you know so the actual architecture behind there is uh is uh new saint peter's rome but anyway so uh so what i want to say here is that anyway you could find symbols in all these kind of things and i don't really think that we've really particularly found one in uh da vinci's works that constitutes an actual code there's lots more i can say about all of the all of the history but i've decided i limited it to all of this because anyway so anyway thank you very very much [Applause] this is plenty so i think we've i think we've covered it but there's plenty more we could say i mean about any number of the other things the amazing part of the back story history when ian mckellen starts to go on his rant is that essentially um essentially there's really no difference in time between when da vinci's alive and when mary magdalene is alive i mean it's almost like you know this this whole time of is so telescoped you know uh as if you know everything immediately happens because essentially they say as soon as constantine you know was able to uh make his you know uh as a phony pagan maybe his political deal to to reform you know to take control of the church and all this kind of a thing in in the in the way it works is that immediately the whole goal of that was to suppress uh suppressed women and so the church immediately um it says right at right after that the church published the malafiquirum malavias malaficorum which is to say right away in 1550 or whatever that is you know and so it's like there's like a 1200 year jump that happens you know to witch trials or something like that which has nothing to do with the middle ages so it says there's this giant kind of crazy conflation yeah there's a yeah i i just find it interesting because i mean i knew this stuff when i saw the movie years ago and i knew this was all kind of garbage honestly yeah but i was amazed how millions of books were sold oh yeah and many people i met were so stupid and gullible like i just i was amazed like when i talked to them like i would talk to them they have no conception of what you said like they they they just drank it whole like coca-cola they drank it whole right well and the weirdest thing again i know the weirdest thing about it is what would it actually prove at the central of the central thing is like i said just even logically what is what what's the idea of it i mean not only is it completely impossible and there's no historic history behind this and we can see the roots of the fraud which is very recent you know and yet even if it were all the case it wouldn't say anything i think it's kind of like uh to uh defame the church or christianity and yeah i've seen so many movies like uh dimension one about these when the russians invaded poland and they went to this uh nunnery and they raped all the nuns yeah and i saw the movie and the movie is completely unreal the woman the person in charge of the expedition was actually a woman and in the movie the woman is a second in command and she's almost being raped half the time i mean the person the feminist took that that incident and completely rewrote the entire history yeah and who gets me is people see that and they actually believe it yeah and this is why we are where we are because there's so little history because you never hear the other side all you're always hearing is one side of the story right yeah well in this case what we really are i mean it's definitely playing into these kind of crazy anti-catholic biases that you know date back to the protestant reformation essentially in england because i mean here this uh i'm not a catholic of course i have a my roots as in the is is through protestantism um but all through this there's the bishops are a cabal and they all have the secret thing and they just give people orders including the french police and it's causing you know in order for all this corruption and money corruption and they're caught in their the monks are are just assassin squads because they are their whole thing is blind obedience and so i mean it's just this big anti-catholic screed in that way my question relates to the the idea of mary magdalene being the holy grail like why would they get this idea that she somehow like where did this idea come from that she married jesus and they had kids like did did it just fall on his head like the outfit fell on newton like well but in a very fake way so it's been a modern it's been a modern idea that is not doesn't only date to the 1980s so for example um you know as as it's i think it's again part of this kind of anti-clerical anti-medieval catholic thing which is like um protestants wanted to not have their clergy be celibate anymore right so the priests or ministers get married you know and um and so having jesus be kind of modeling like a catholic style priesthood of being a celibate guy you know has started to be maybe uncomfortable for some people so for example i know for as it was taught as a doctrine in utah the mormon church when they were um uh when they were promoting plural marriage when they're promoting polygamy brigham young taught that jesus had many wives including mary magdalene and so um you know and so that obviously didn't affect uh mormon christianity in a negative way that's what sounds good that means that's why we should be doing that but anyway the um uh so i don't so i think that maybe it's kind of you know there's been it's been in the air and so i don't think that the um the guys who uh took the original um french marovinjian tail and then upgraded it by adding mary magdalene and jesus you know like made up that mary magdalene jesus thing i think that that's an idea that is just floating around in the last couple centuries but it doesn't go back into antiquity at all it's just something that maybe more recently people have been liking this idea that jesus was married for some reason and like i say they keep trying to find forged documents that prove it you know so because people like the idea anyway i mean what i mean you could do it completely the i mean if you want to make the case uh you know for uh jesus with somebody uh it's you know in antiquity yeah we have all of this disciple that jesus loved kind of thing you know so again this character of john the beloved is gonna you know we have actually i'm not saying that jesus i'm not saying that there would be any such thing but that is something that has antiquity because you can actually talk about that and from the canonical gospels and things like that as opposed to um this marriage thing which they talk about i mean the these early accounts that we have that they talk about peter being married they talk about all the you know all of these different uh family members of different people and they just why wouldn't they mention the jesus you know in in any of these accounts we have not only the canonical gospels but we why wouldn't if there were any descendants i mean we have all of this stuff about jesus's brothers you know and and everything like that we have stuff even about jesus sisters so why um if there was a kid you know anyway obviously it'd have to be there'd have to be some secret because she she's being reserved so that she can be the mayor of indian king of you know queen of france or something but i mean it doesn't mean it's just one of these crazy things i mean if if there was somebody in antiquity they would be meant they would be known you know so there would be a mention that's i mean that's an argument from silence but we have so much text with that where there's no mention certainly you can't make the identification of mary magdalene it's just that you did so other questions about any of the history or symbols or anything from you remember from the davinci code all right oh yvonne just to mention the inverted triangle symbol with a line through it yes the latin for a wedge is kunais and that's where we get the infamous four-letter word beginning with c oh okay i didn't know that so it's an etymology i did not know i will mention in terms of etymology the idea that um uh that san graal which is to say french for holy grail um if you match the words together and divide the letter off so it becomes sang real no etymology works like that in in all of human history you can't do that you know so so essentially this is one of the proofs another song real which is blood royal right you know is supposedly because you've mashed the words up and divide them in a different place anyway that doesn't have any etymology doesn't work that way and indeed the grail story isn't even important to the middle ages it doesn't exist back for antiquity or mary magdalene it's a it's a medieval crusader uh era era thing there's a character in a lot of sake stories clovis sangria okay he is not the least bit holy i'm here to tell you he's very mischievous well thanks everybody uh we will go ahead and have snacks and we'll say bye to everybody who's joined us by streaming we appreciate it so much [Applause] [Music] you

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Id: PlyLYuXG3wU

Length: 65min 17sec (3917 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022