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After church on Easter Sunday, my wife and I hosted our second annual "Easter Musicians Meltdown" for a few exhausted organists and choir directors. One guest told me that his congregation was in an uproar over The Da Vinci Code. People who had joined the church the previous Easter were already talking about leaving it because of what they had "learned" in Dan Brown's bestseller. When the novel was published in April 2003, most Christian leaders dismissed the book's fabrications, because it was, after all, fiction. But as stories like the one above started circulating, scholars and pastors began to feel the need to reassure the rattled.

A front-page article in the April 27 New York Times announced that 10 books were being released "with titles that promise to break, crack, unlock or decode 'The Da Vinci Code.' " Pre-publication copies of four of those books have come across my desk (two with requests for endorsements).

The Da Vinci Code is full of fabrications, ranging from silly interpretations of Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings to unsupported charges that Constantine brutally repressed competing gospels. (Read Ben Witherington's "Why the 'Lost Gospels' Lost Out" on page 26 for the details on that claim.) In addition, Brown's book alleges that:

• Mary Magdalene and Jesus got married and had a daughter, and that they settled in the south of France and became the progenitors of the Merovingian kings;
• The real Holy Grail that bore Jesus' blood was not a chalice but Mary Magdalene's womb;
• The Catholic church has harshly suppressed this truth that would en-danger ecclesiastical power by proving that Jesus was merely human;
• A secret organization called the Priory of Sion guarded the truth about the Magdalene and the evidence to prove it (documents once thought to prove the Priory's existence are now known to be forgeries);
• The church suppressed "the divine feminine" in order to keep sex dirty and the church masculine.

The Antidote Brown's calumnies against Christianity are toxic, and the history and theology in these new books can serve as an antidote to the novel's poison.

Leading the pack in generating publicity is Dallas Seminary's Darrell Bock, whose book weathered a pre-publication legal challenge from The Da Vinci Code's publisher. Bock has also garnered publicity in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, where John J. Miller called his book "the best of the bunch" and concluded, "Mr. Bock shows that Mr. Brown's central contentions are based on evidence so thin that calling them conjecture would be a compliment."

Bock gives careful consideration to Jesus' supposed marriage to Mary Magdalene. Although he concludes that Jesus was not married, Bock makes the important point that marriage would not have posed a theological problem. Brown claims that marriage would prove Jesus was human. But that is indeed orthodox teaching. Jesus was not, as the Docetists taught, a spirit being who only appeared to be human. His humanity was full and complete, as was his divinity.

Curiously, Brown seems also to think that the (allegedly suppressed) Gnostic texts would have favored a sexy Jesus. But Gnosticism consistently devalued bodily existence and stressed the inherently evil nature of material creation.

Bock reveals the agenda Brown and revisionist scholars promote with the Gnostic gospels: "The real secret … behind The Da Vinci Code … is nothing less than a conscious effort to obscure the uniqueness and vitality of the Christian faith and message."

Those who promote the Gnostic gospels as an alternative among a chorus of varied voices in early Christianity play on hypermodern cultural themes of diversity and subjectivism. Brown and his friends, however, cannot have it both ways: they cannot argue that the canonical Gospels were wrong and the Gnostic message was right, while also promoting the essential equality of all points of view. Such is the inner contradiction of the gospel of diversity.

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June 2004, Vol. 48, No. 6