PHILADELPHIA — It isn’t every day that a copyright-infringement trial leaves tens of millions of dollars hanging in the balance. But the lawsuit in a London court against Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code,” does just that.
At stake are more than $3 million in legal costs, which must be paid by whoever loses the suit, dividends from book sales of more than 40 million copies, and box-office returns from a soon-to-be-released film directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou.
Justice Peter Smith is deliberating after hearing final arguments Monday and is expected to rule in the next few weeks.
Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent contend that the central idea of Brown’s book — that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, by whom he had a son whose descendants created the Merovingian dynasty of French kings and whose bloodline survives to this day — was lifted from their 1982 nonfiction book, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” (most of which has since been exposed as being based on a hoax).
But the parallels between the two works — both the arguments and the mistakes — are there for all to see.
Brown refers to Leigh, Baigent and their book. The name of one of the principal characters, Leigh Teabing, combines Leigh’s name with an anagram of Baigent’s. Moreover, at one point in the narrative, Teabing takes down a copy of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” and declares its “fundamental premise” sound despite its “dubious leaps of faith.”
Testifying last week, Brown acknowledged that “the whole Teabing section of the book — those are the sorts of snippets of information that ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail’ is very good on.” In fact, the similarity — in substance and tone — between Chapter 13 of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” and Chapter 55 of “The Da Vinci Code” is striking. In a 2003 interview, Brown called his book “meticulously researched and very accurate.” But even the most basic research shows that this information is incorrect.
What the Council of Nicaea established, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was “the absolute equality of the Son with the Father” — in other words, Jesus was already believed to be the Son of God. The council failed to set a definitive date for Easter and did not establish the authority of bishops — the 318 bishops were there not to establish their authority, but to exercise it.

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