Well these are my thoughts on the DaVinci Code, but as Megs said earlier - it is just a work of fiction and isn't to be taken literally. The Christian circle gets it's panties in a bunch probably because it discredits the Bible and treats Christ as non-divine. For my purposes of reviewing this book I am not going to argue what is true in the book and what isn't, except in relation to history and the preconceived principles embraced by the book; which means this is more of a book review than a truth review. To borrow what another review on Amazon said of the book: 'I like my historical fictions historically accurate and my mysteries suspenseful.'
The book is one dimensional, to say the least, and the characters are less than one dimensional, if that were possible. In reading this book I had no caring of the characters, I did not perceive their motivation from a point of understanding. That is to say in many cases during the reading of a book you may understand that the character is doing something dumb and you want to reach out and shake them, but you care about the character and you understand why they made that choice. This book carried no character development or dimension of characters. They were clearly split into three camps: good with bad motivation, bad with bad motivation, and good with good motivation.
Onto the historical accuracy, it was not the divinity of Christ was put to a vote at the council of Nicea in 325 CE. It was the Arian (lead by Arias and thus named for him) belief that the Christ had a beginning and therefore there was a time when He was not. There were no Christians who believed he was not fully God, Arias would not even have embraced such a foreign view. He believed Jesus to be God, but also unlike God; created by God as a God, if that makes some sense. Most of the arguments in the early church were regarding whether Jesus was fully man, not fully God. This is why most of the existing heresies, like the Monophysite/Coptic tradition in Africa, believe that Jesus was fully God (not fully man) and does not still act as a mediator between us and God Almighty, that he was absorbed back into the God after the sacrifice and there is no Holy Spirit. Here is a link about the vote in 325 CE.
There are some other random historical inaccuracies, like Emperor Constantine picking the books of the Bible… um, does anybody remember Augustine? He picked out those books, which brings up its own conundrum since we don’t hold to his belief of baptism. The fact that Emperor Constantine was also responsible for incorporating pagan beliefs into Christianity; I don’t think it was so obvious, if you were being told what to believe you probably wouldn’t believe it. Hence the reason most pagans didn’t commit to Christianity and chose death instead following Christianity after it’s inauguration in 385 CE as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity naturally became incorporated into native pagan rites and rituals. There is a long tradition of believing certain places to be holy; when I was in Carmarthen (Wales) the first church in the area (built circa 1100/1200 CE) was built onto of a henge (akin stonehenge most likely) because that area was ‘more holy’ than the surrounding countryside. Also there was a cult of Catherine, one of the Celtic goddess, in Wales which the church tried to absorb by making her a saint. They absorbed the cult, but also succeeded in absorbing the pagan beliefs associated with the cult and it existed within the Catholic Church for hundreds of years following that.
My only other main problem with the book is that it purports that following the ‘goddess’ Mary Magdalene and claims the Catholic Church has denied the cult of the goddess when it is in fact the truth. A) The Catholic Church does have a cult of a goddess, the ‘goddess’ is Mary, the mother of Jesus and B) why is it better or more right to follow naturalistic religion with sexual rites than to follow Christ? If only listening to the message, was not Christ more correct? I am, of course, looking at this from a historian’s perspective… I need both reasons and support for those reasons to believe something. This book gives neither and as a work of fiction falls far from the tree of ‘good literary work’ even for light reading…