109 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Even More Fun Than the Novel, April 24, 2004
This review is from: de-Coding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of the Da Vinci Code (Paperback)
I greatly enjoyed Dan Brown's *Da Vinci Code* but I have to admit that Amy Welborn's book was even more fun. With a delightful style and large doses of irony she analyzes Brown's claims:
--That Constantine selected the books of the New Testament and invented the divinity of Christ.
--That the early Church covered up Jesus' marriage to Mary Magdalene.
--That Jesus originally designated her as the leader of his movement and that she in fact is the Holy Grail.
While these claims seem quite exciting, Amy shows that the truth is even more startling. The controversy over *The Da Vinci Code* provides an opportunity to learn the facts about Christian origins. Skepticism is good both for Christians and non-Christians. Amy's book will help any honest inquirer. Read it and decide for yourself.
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65 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Death By A Thousand Cuts, August 7, 2004
This review is from: de-Coding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of the Da Vinci Code (Paperback)
Unless my aging memory deceives me, I recall a story from Catholic school days about an ancient Christian teacher who suffered a peculiarly painful martyr's death: he was pierced hundreds of times by the styluses or pens of his hostile pagan students. In this work we get the martyr's revenge: from an articulate, scholarly, and dismayed author who administers a death by a thousand cuts to the premises and biases of the best selling "Da Vinci Code."
There are many ways this antidote to DVC could have been mishandled: the author could have written an ad hoc attack upon Dan Brown, or a cosmic wail against the anti-Catholic bias of the work, or a "preaching to the choir" methodology of uncritical defense of those areas of Catholic life and history that Brown played upon so well. The author successfully avoided these pitfalls, for the most part, with a terse but thorough dismantling of the major historical and theological flaws. Welborn, who did her graduate history studies at Vanderbilt University, clearly holds the upper hand.
The author addresses about a dozen topics that DVC manhandles with distressing consistency: the identity of Mary Magdalene, the determination of the canon or texts of the New Testament, the Roman Emperor Constantine, the Holy Grail, Leonardo Da Vinci, feminism in the Church, mystery religions, and Opus Dei. Each separate critique is deadly to a novel which depends upon an intricately developed puzzle. It would require only a few threads to unravel before the plot line becomes irrational. Welborn works with a tailor's shears. To cite just one area of critique, Welborn devotes a chapter to Brown's depiction of Da Vinci himself, and discovers that the moniker "Da Vinci" is not the artist's name. He was known then, and to experts today, as Leonardo. For those familiar with the story line of DVC, such a corrective makes quite a mess out of the intricate maze of word clues that Sophie Neveu seems to revel in.
I cannot find the exact word to describe the author's literary style, but it is distinctive. At this point in her career I get the sense that her avocation is the communication of "Catholic common sense." It does help the reader to know that Welborn is the author of a successful series of religious works for Catholic high school students, traditionally a notoriously difficult audience; and her blog site, "Open Book," is a daily watering hole for Catholics across the country that rivals Chris Matthews for hardball repartee. Welborn's avowed literary inspiration has long been the take-no-prisoners Flannery O'Connor, who would probably have weighed in herself on DVC, were she alive today.
At times I felt the author was almost annoyed that she had to do this book, disconcerted that basic tenets of Catholic history were unknown to so many readers of her faith, or that a best seller with such historical and theological flaws could go unchallenged. But in the final analysis, Welborn wrote this work because, in her own words, "culture matters," [p. 20] and she is correct. To pretend that music, art, literature, and film do not have agendas and influence is naive. Recently it has come to light that much of the technology employed by investigators on the popular television series CSI [Las Vegas and Miami, presumably] does not exist in real crime labs. Real life prosecutors are having difficulty making cases because juries expect levels of technical evidence they have come to expect on television. And I trusted Gil Grissom and Horatio Cane. Mon Dieu!
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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Provides the big picture, April 28, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: de-Coding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of the Da Vinci Code (Paperback)
Very readable book that should appeal to believers and agnostics alike - anyone honestly interested in the truth. Early church history is something most know little about, and the author (who has a BA in honors history and MA in Church History) has done an excellent job helping to fill that vacuum. She explores the sources of information Dan Brown used for his book and seeks to unravel fact from fiction in an fair-minded way.
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