Like a few million others, I’m reading The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown.
US News & World Report did a cover story a couple of weeks ago titled Jesus in America that details the phenomenon around the book. (Full text no longer available for free there but it can be found on Dick Staub’s site.) Staub’s site has plenty of quotes and links that trash the book, and one source that’s frequently quoted is Dismantling The Da Vinci Code by Sandra Miesel.
I’m enjoying the book as a thriller and it does make me curious about the historical research that Brown used.
My initial reaction: those who are screaming that Brown’s theory is preposterous — that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’s wife and chosen successor; that the Holy Grail was Mary Magdalene; that she bore him a child who went on to found France’s Merovingian dynasty — should consider that the story of Jesus as we’ve been taught could be considered preposterous, too. If you’d never heard of Christianity and someone told you there was this guy, born of a virgin, who walked on water and rose from the dead, what would you think?