Thanks Bill for exposing Brown’s fallacies in the DVC farrago. It’s amazing though how ill informed some respondents to your article are. Brown’s nonsense is but the latest of attempts in 2000 years to debunk Christianity. Soon he’ll be forgotten, but Jesus’ Name will continue to be heard everywhere. The fact is, Brown is a buddy to the anti-historical theories of Australian religion writer, Barbara Thiering. Her idea that Jesus never died on the cross, that he was married and lived another 40 years, is in the DVC tradition. Now even non-Christians know of the historicity of Jesus and the Gospel’s origin. Take French historian Guigneburt, who said, “there would have been no Christianity if belief in the resurrection had not been founded … the whole essential teaching of Christianity rests on the belief of the resurrection.” Or Oxford historian Thomas Arnold: “I have been used for many years to study the histories of other times and to weigh the evidence of those who have written about them and I know of no one fact in the history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort to the understanding of the fair inquire than that great sign given to us … that Christ rose from the dead.” Or HG Wells, in his ‘Short History of the World’ . Published by Penguin, he had little space for any subject, let alone Christianity. Yet, though he was not a Christian, he devoted eight and half pages to Jesus Christ as an historical person, who lived, and died as the Gospels tell. But he had none of the anti-intellectual baggage of the DVC.

I challenge any critic to be honest enough to read the New Testament for themselves, before they relax into agnosticism. But they had be ready, for when lawyer Frank Morison tried to debunk Christianity, he ended up writing Who Moved the Stone, one of the best capitulations to the truth one can read.
D .Clarnette

In a novel history doesn't matter but in real life it does. That is why we have birth certificates, title deeds and sales contracts.

If the Bible is wrong about Jesus Christ's life, death and resurrection, and Dan Brown is correct, then it is absolutely stupid for people to get steamed up about the novel.

But if the Bible is correct, then Jesus Christ really is the Creator God come in human form, he really has conquered death, and he really will judge the living and the dead.

That has consequences for every one.

In that case it would be serious to encourage people to dismiss it. A bit like someone wanting to ignore mine safety. Lives are at stake.

Does Dan Brown know what he's talking about?

Probably not really.

Can the article author or the masses of outraged Christians (condemning a work of fiction) prove their own points of view via a process of fair and rational historical inquiry?

Hell no.

Have fun fighting it out, guys.

There are long established rules for establishing the truth of anything. Christians do not reject Brown for writing fiction, but doing it with claims as to the truthfulness of his ideas. They are wrong historically; wrong logically, wrong factually. But that makes his stuff more dangerous, for many will accept his ideas and justify their morals (or lack of them)on the assumption that Brown may be right, he just may be. Too many rest their hopes for life here and in the world to come on mere assumptions. The New Testament is truth.
Read it to see if you are a genuine seeker after pace of heart and mind. I hope Dewi and others who share his views might just do a read of the New Testament.

Methuselah,

There certainly are rules for establishing the truth of something. By advocating the exclusive use of The Bible - one secondary source document - you and most Christians have failed in following these rules as much as Dan Brown (perhaps moreso, since you are much more insistent than he is that you know the truth).

I was once a Christian, and both then and now I spend far too much time reading the Bible and scholarship thereof. I encourage all of you to read widely and judge the documents and ideas on their own merits... convenient starting points are Google and http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/

The Da Vinci Code has one great familiarity with the tories here in Australia - it's fiction but people want and do believe it. Very much like Howard's Govt; they feed us fiction and we believe it, at the same time making them and big business richer.

It all comes down to
Values
Values
Values
Values