Sherlock Holmes goes.... Da Vinci?


I came across an interesting line in my Sherlock Holmes story

Reading through my Sherlock Holmes collection, I was quite surprised to come across this passage. It seems that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had something close to a Dan Brown moment. Don't worry, Doyle's prose could never decay to the point of resembling Brown's, but he did throw this little dig at religion into to The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez. This quote from Professor Coram, who's assistant has been murdered:

"Yes, sir, it is a crushing blow," said the old man. "That is my magnum opus - the pile of papers on the side table yonder. It is my analysis of the documents found in the Coptic monasteries of Syria and Egypt, a work which will cut deep at the very foundation of revealed religion. With my enfeebled health I do not know whether I shall ever be able to complete it, now that my assistant has been taken from me."

Now I will admit that it is a rather minor plot point, tossed out as a portion of dialogue, but it intrigued me a great deal. The question I was wondering is did Doyle simply make this up, or was he referring to some specific texts that had been found at the time?

The Nag Hamadi library would be a good candidate, as it was discovered in Egypt and I believe it was Coptic, but it was discovered at the end of 1945 and wasn't publicly released until a while later. Doyle died in 1930, which we can safely say rules that idea out. Along the same lines, the Dead Sea Scrolls also contained some similar texts, but they fall prey to the same problem, having been discovered in 1947.

So what other manuscripts are there to which he could be referring? Well, with a little more intense Googling, I stumbled across this quote from Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels via ReligionFacts' summary of gnosticism:

"The first emerged in 1769, when a Scottish tourist named James Bruce bought a Coptic manuscript near Thebes (modern Luxor) in Upper Egypt. Published only in 1892, it claims to record conversations of Jesus with his disciples - a group that here includes both men and women. In 1773 a collector found in a London bookshop an ancient text, also in Coptic, that contained a dialogue on "mysteries" between Jesus and his disciples. In 1896 a German Egyptologist, alerted by the previous publications, bought in Cairo a manuscript that, to his amazement, contained the Gospel of Mary (Magdalene) and three other texts. Three copies of one of them, the Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John were also included among the gnostic library discovered at Nag Hammadi fifty years later."

Now we're getting somewhere. The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez was part of The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which was written in 1905, according to Sherlock Holmes Online. This would definitely mean that Doyle could have been aware of these texts while writing Pince-Nez. In addition, they certainly fit the description - two are from Egypt, all are in Coptic, and the 1773 one could have conceivably been from Syria. Not only that, but their relative newness would fit the idea that the professor's analysis might really uncover something hidden. I think we've found the mysterious texts to which he referred, and solved the mystery of the day that Holmes went Da Vinci Code.

Incidentally, another mystery which gripped me while I was reading this - though for the most part simply due to my ignorance - was what is a Pince-Nez (and how the heck do you pronounce that?). It was obvious from the context that they were glasses, but what distinguished them enough to use this name? It turns out they are glasses that do not use ear pieces; they simply clasp the nose tightly enough to stay on the wearer's face. This is where they get their name as well - literally French for "pinch-nose." As usual, there is an excellent wiki on this, which even has a picture of Morpheus and his pince-nez sunglasses.

Posted: Wed - July 5, 2006 at 08:03 PM | | | | | | |

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