An Analysis of
Sir Leigh Teabing’s Jesus in The Da Vinci Code

By Barbara Murphy, MA in Theology
May 17, 2006

It is Leigh Teabing’s (Ian McKellan) discourse that most reveals The Da Vinci Code’s image of Jesus. To set the scene: A clue left by Sophie Neveu’s (Audrey Tautou) murdered grandfather Jacques Sauniere ( Jean-Pierre Marielle) sends her and Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) on a quest for the Holy Grail. In their search they seek out Leigh Teabing who is a world expert/fanatic when it comes to finding the whereabouts of the legendary chalice that Jesus supposedly drank from at the Last Supper.

Teabing begins by saying that the Bible is a product of man not God, that it is purely a historical record, which eliminates the possibility of the supernatural. He claims the Gnostic texts reveal the true story of Jesus. The Bible is fiction, he says, written by the conquerors of the sacred feminine, who seek to crush any memory of the goddess – though he fails to define what her role is. But Teabing’s position belies Jesus’ ministry as recounted in the four Gospels that were written by the end of the first century. The Gnostics reserved knowledge for a few, when Jesus instead offered salvation to all people. Jesus said that any who believe in him and walk in the world as he did can have eternal life. His message is to love God and love one another. Jesus made no secret of this. He practiced it in his human life; the part of his life Teabing claims was eliminated from the texts in favor of accounts of his divinity, in order to satisfy an empirical agenda of a few men in the early Christian community. All of Jesus’ healings and miracles were done during his human life. The Gospels tell the story of the time Jesus dwelt among us; the Gnostic texts, instead, offer sayings and proverbs and leave out Jesus’ miracles, his own testimony to his divinity, and the greatest miracle of all, the resurrection.

Author Dan Brown’s fictional character Teabing possesses narrow vision. He fails to recognize the unity of God and humanity that the Gospels reveal. He sees only one side in that he does not seem to understand the relationship with God that Jesus brought us: that by following in his way we can be one with God.

Teabing argues that the true focus of Jesus’ identity is strictly historical. He holds that the teaching of the Church about Christ is false. Jesus is only a man according to Teabing, he is not God. This idea is actually a declaration of the Arian heresy that the Council of Nicea refuted in 325AD by issuing the Nicene Creed that we pray together every Sunday at Mass. Teabing, and the Priory of Sion members, believe that Jesus’ divinity was a decision made on the part of the bishops at Nicea. According to Teabing, instead of Constantine calling the Council to settle the theological debate about the true nature of Jesus, Constantine had Jesus deified by the Council in order to consolidate his political power and control his now Christian empire. However, Catholic Christians believed then and now that Christ as Messiah maintains and guides the Church through the power of the Holy Spirit and his vicar on earth, the successors of St. Peter.

Teabing continues by saying that Jesus’ life story was stolen from his followers and manipulated to secure the position of the Church of Rome. (Teabing makes an interesting claim here: he says that more than 80 gospels were written, but relatively few chosen. He says that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were among the gospels chosen. It is curious that Teabing does not know the gospel canon but easily denounces it as a political tool.) Because he has dismissed the Gospels Teabing does not give any consideration to the Prologue of John (John 1:1-18), which was written at the turn of the second century and expresses an understanding of Jesus as the divine Word of God. Teabing’s claim is that the early followers of Jesus saw him as human, not divine. He said it was at only at Nicea that the divinity was declared, voted on, and accepted. He does not take into account that Docetists and Gnostics already believed at that time that Jesus was only divine, and not true flesh and blood. Thus the divinity of Jesus was not a new notion as Teabing claimed.

For Teabing Jesus was a mortal prophet, a husband and a father. Teabing tells Sophie and Langdon (in the book, not the movie) that there is among the Sangreal (Holy Grail) documents one called the “Magdalene Diaries,” that is, a personal chronicle of Mary Magdalene’s “relationship with Christ, his crucifixion, and her time in France”. There is conspicuously missing any reference to the resurrection in Teabing’s account because the Gospels he conveniently denies state that Mary Magdalene was the first person to encounter Jesus after his resurrection and therefore the first witness to his resurrection from the dead (John 20: 15-16). Teabing creates a huge credibility gap for himself by leaving out this information about Mary Magdalene and the resurrection.

Paul tells the Corinthians that if Jesus did not rise from death then we are not saved: “…if Jesus did not rise from the dead then our faith has been for nothing (1 Cor 15:14).” Teabing ignores this testimony of Paul implying that it (as part of the New Testament) is utterly false and therefore irrelevant. It is too bad that Teabing discounts Paul; Paul would have helped Teabing make his point about the Christian faith having been a waste because in Teabing’s theological universe Jesus did not rise from the dead. Therefore any faith Teabing might have in Jesus truly would be in vain. Teabing dismisses as myth the belief that without the miracle of Christ’s resurrection there is no salvation. According to him, Christians are deluded by the indoctrinated ministers of the Church to believe a lie that has endured for twenty centuries.

Mary Magdalene, who is alleged in The Da Vinci Code to be the wife of Jesus, is claimed to be from the house of Benjamin, a royal house. With Jesus being of the house of Solomon and David, the marriage laid political claim to the throne of David. During his life many people tried to make Jesus into a secular Messiah and make him king (Jn 6:15) as well. But the claim to earthly royalty is precisely what Jesus shunned. Teabing’s refusal to accept the resurrection causes him to make the same mistake the people of Jesus’ time made. Jesus’ followers did not understand the meaning of kingdom or true throne of David until after he rose from the dead. His is a kingdom not of this world, but beyond and above it. This character Teabing will never see that without the resurrection there can be no full understanding of the end of time and the new kingdom being ushered in. (Teabing’s eschatology, the theology of the end times, is limited to the turn of astrological ages.) The old kingdom of the world that values money and power and fame will be replaced with a new kingdom that holds mercy and justice as its banner.

The Da Vinci Code’s Jesus is a man who lived an extraordinary life and gave thousands of people a better way to live. He was a prophet like all the other prophets before him. He was married to Mary Magdalene and had children with her. He died on a cross, and his family line continues. He is the historical Jesus, a man like any other man. He is a royal Messiah anointed to take the throne of a new earthly Davidic kingdom. Above and beyond all else, he was a mortal. He was a great teacher and prophet, but merely a man.

We Christians believe Jesus to be a prophet, a man who walked the earth, a royal Messiah who is both human and divine, and will usher in a new kingdom in the fullness of time. While it may sound that we hold some of these things in common with Teabing, any commonalities are in name only. Because we have this on the authority of Jesus and the Church he founded on Peter (Matt. 6: 18, Jn 21:15-16), we as believers know that the resurrection takes us beyond the mundane into the world God promised through Jesus. Teabing’s version of Jesus’ exists in his imagination and, ultimately leads nowhere.