Citizen Columns
Question
Why do you think The Da Vinci Code has spurred so much public reaction?
Answer
Spirituality, Jesus, church scandals, sex and "scholarship" wrapped up in a fast-paced whodunit makes a great combination in a book or a movie.
But it is offensive to many Christians, and I'm surprised how little public reaction there has been, in comparison with the cartoon controversy a few months back. Can you imagine if the subject of Dan Brown's book was not Jesus but Mohammed?
The negative reaction has come from Christians outraged at the book's seductive misrepresentation of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and the early history of Christianity. The book is not merely offensive; it is libelous, at least by a common definition of the term: "a statement or representation published without just cause and tending to expose another to public contempt."
Is this just a case of Christian hyper-sensitivity?
I don't think so. Christians from the beginning have been accustomed to having their faith in Christ maligned. But there is just enough truth in some of Dan Brown's claims to make the overall lie about Christianity seductive. And this is what is so irritating. So readers who have a genuine interest in truth need to look beyond The Da Vinci Code for their history and inform themselves about where the book gets it wrong.
There are many books and websites now devoted to debunking the book's pseudo-scholarship. The most even-handed, to my mind, is Bart Ehrman's Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: a Historian Reveals What we Really Know About Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine (Oxford University, 2004). His conclusion is that at every contentious point, Dan Brown's book really is fiction, even when it claims to be telling the truth.
Father John Jillions
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