An N.C. expert joins critics of claims in 'Da Vinci Code'

Dan Brown's historical thriller "The Da Vinci Code" continues to be a sales smash, with a movie version to follow.

Among those exploiting the popular interest is U.S. News & World Report, with an ill-informed "collector's edition" pastiche in which one contributor even revived the canard that there's no evidence Jesus ever existed.

Meanwhile, the novel has provoked unprecedented protest from serious scholars. First, it was Roman Catholic and Protestant conservatives, protesting that Brown's characters inaccurately malign Christianity. Now, more liberal thinkers likewise say Brown's claim to present facts through fiction is itself fictional and misleads readers.

The leader of this second wave is Bart Ehrman, religion chairman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in "Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code" (Oxford University Press). Ehrman is an expert in early church documents that are central to Brown's plot.

Ehrman says he wants "to separate the fact from the fiction, the historical realities from the flights of fancy, for anyone interested in knowing about the historical beginnings of Christianity."

He says Brown's "numerous mistakes, some of them howlers," are add-ons that weren't needed for the plot and he wonders, "Why didn't he simply get his facts straight?"

The most important contention of the scholarly characters in "The Da Vinci Code" is that Jesus was considered a mere mortal but then voted into divine status by bishops at the fourth-century Council of Nicea, for political reasons.

"Absolutely not true," Ehrman asserts. "As far back as we have Christian writings" it was "commonplace to understand that Jesus was in some sense divine." The controversy decided at Nicea was how to define that divinity alongside Jesus' humanity.

The novel also stumbles in claiming that the four Gospels chosen for the New Testament treat Jesus as divine only, Ehrman says. Any "straightforward reading of the Gospels will make clear" that he was fully a human who ate, became tired and experienced suffering.

It wasn't the Gospels but apocryphal writings outside the Bible that made Jesus so divine that he was barely human, the exact opposite of Brown's scenario.

Moreover, contrary to Brown, "the oldest and best sources we have for knowing about the life of Jesus" are the first century's Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Ehrman says. That's "the view of all serious historians of antiquity of every kind, from committed evangelical Christians to hard-core atheists."

As a good liberal, Ehrman adds that the Gospels must be read cautiously as historical sources because they were compiled from a strong viewpoint, decades after the events.

He comments that some people will believe anything read in a canonical source, whether it's the Bible or Julius Caesar, but equally warns against the opposite tendency "to believe anything that contradicts a canonical source," and finds that a particular temptation for people titillated by conspiracy theories.

Speaking of which, Ehrman objects vehemently to the novel's version of how the New Testament books were selected over other writings.

Did Christianity perpetrate a massive censorship conspiracy to conceal the truth about Jesus? Ehrman says "we have little evidence of mass burnings of 'dangerous' books in antiquity. If a book was thought to be problematic," it simply wasn't recopied and thus didn't survive.

One of Brown's intellectual characters says "the Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine."

Oops! Apart from Constantine's paganism (Brown is basically incorrect), Ehrman says that most of the books in the New Testament were chosen by church leaders long before Constantine's time. Nor did the emperor order destruction of gospels that were left out.

Brown's plot involves Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene, so the novel says it was unthinkable for a Jewish man to remain unmarried. But Ehrman says historians agree the Dead Sea Scrolls disprove Brown's claim.

Ehrman's wry conclusion: "There's something to be said for knowing what really happened."

Brown declines interviews to answer his critics, but says the arguments "are healthy for religion."

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On the Net:

Ehrman biography: http://www.unc.edu/depts/rel-stud/faculty/Ehrman1.html

Brown publicity: http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci-code/reviews.html