OTTAWA, ON-A new book galloping across the best-seller lists and making headlines everywhere should be described as "hate literature," says Peter Flint, a Dead Sea Scrolls expert and biblical studies scholar.

The Da Vinci Code, a fast-paced suspense thriller, has sold more than 5.5 million copies in hardcover and is now slated to become a Hollywood movie directed by Ron Howard.

Its author, Dan Brown, says the novel is based on historical "fact," and uses his novel to create the impression that any claims the New Testament and the historical creeds of the Christian Church make about Christ’s divine nature are false and the Christian faith is, except for its usefulness as metaphor, a "fabrication."

For example, Brown writes that the Emperor Constantine, almost four centuries after Christ, created the myth that Jesus was God, and after that the Church outlawed "thousands" of documents that showed that Jesus was a mere mortal.

He also contends that Jesus was married to Mary Magdelene, and that her womb is the real Holy Grail because in this "human chalice" she preserved Christ’s blood through the offspring they produced. One of the main characters in the novel is purported to be a descendent of this union.

Those statements have some Christian scholars mounting a growing offensive against The Da Vinci Code.

Flint, co-director of Canada’s Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C., says The Da Vinci Code is the subject of discussion less for its story and characters than for the claims that the author makes that the novel is based on historical fact.

"If someone is a violent killer or a pornographer, we can see that it is repulsive. We can see that it’s bad," says Flint. "[The Da Vinci Code] is far more dangerous. This is deadly poison in the garb of candy. It tempts people by something that looks attractive then screws with their mind. It undermines people’s faith and people are easy prey."

Flint, one of Canada’s two editors of the famous scrolls found at Qumran, goes further. He says that if a similar collection of "lies" and "blasphemies" were written about any other revered religious figure such as Mohammed or Buddha or any other faith such as Judaiism or Sikhism, there would be "pandemonium."

Flint says Christians need to stop "lying back and taking it." He’d like to see lawsuits and charges under Canada’s hate laws because "no other religious group would tolerate this kind of treatment."

Bogus claims

Many evangelical Christians, brought up to be suspicious of Roman Catholicism, are vulnerable to the bogus claims in Brown’s book that the Vatican has been engaged in a "conspiracy to conceal the truth of the Gospel," says Ward Gasque, who taught for many years in Canada and now serves as president of the Pacific Institute of Theological Studies and who founded the Institute for Innovation of Theological Education in Seattle, Washington.

"Most lay Christians who have read [The Da Vinci Code ] have found themselves ill-equipped to deal with the alleged ‘facts’ mentioned by Brown," says Gasque.

"I have read testimonies of people who claim to have been evangelical Christians who have ‘seen the light’ as a result of reading Brown."

Lindsay Harrison, a Roman Catholic priest at St. Patrick’s Basilica in Ottawa, is all too familiar with popular images of the Roman Catholic Church and Christianity.

"The Church is seen as a malevolent, power-hungry organization seeking to control people’s lives and historically not averse to using force and deception to do so," he says. "Christians are uncritical dupes for believing what they do and that the Church has a grossly negative attitude toward sex and women," he says.

Harrison says the negative view of the church and the gullibility to the claims like those in The Da Vinci Code comes from the fact that North America is not really a secular society, but a "lapsed Christian society."

"Some are quite comfortable with their decision to leave the Church. Others have a bit of guilt," he says. "They have to rationalize it. There’s usually some kind of victim story. ‘Sister so-and-so yelled at me.’ The teachings of the Church in the areas of sexuality are contrary to the culture. To silence that voice, they look for the fault of moral failure in the Church."

Flint agrees. "[People] don’t want a traditional morality. They want a Jesus who sleeps with women and takes drugs. A lot of people want sensation, esoteric knowledge. They don’t want an ordinary God who has morals and expects us to obey Him. They want a New Age Jesus who makes no demands on us. They want the pleasure of God without the demands of God."

Biblically illiterate masses

Flint says the one good thing about the Da Vinci Code phenomenon is that it shows that people have tremendous interest in spirituality and the past. The problem, he says, is that churches, especially mainline churches, have "failed miserably in their duties" and left their adherents "biblically illiterate."

"We have a smarty-pants guy in America making lots of money," Flint says. "It’s all been said before. This is the old Gnosticism in a new guise."

Flint, Gasque and Harrison blast the non-fiction sources upon which Brown bases his claims to fact. Flint compares them to supermarket tabloids. Gasque describes them as pseudo-history and points out that scholars like Princeton’s Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels-also cited by Brown-has distanced herself from the conclusions in The Da Vinci Code.

Brown based much of his "research" on books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a non-fiction bestseller in the 1980s by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. In a New York Times article on February 22, journalist Laura Miller describes the book as "one of the all-time great works of pop pseudo-history."

Miller says Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Brown’s novel are both "based on a hoax." The Priory of Sion, a secret organization alleged by Brown and his sources to be the guardians of the secrets about Mary Magdelene, was invented in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, a man with a criminal record for fraud.

Plantard’s hoax, Miller writes, was exposed in as-of-yet untranslated French books and a 1996 BBC documentary, but she writes that these "shocking revelations" haven’t proved as interesting as the sensational claims made in the hoax.

"The only thing more powerful than a worldwide conspiracy," Miller writes, "is our desire to believe one."

Find out for yourself

Gasque has developed a seminar on The Da Vinci Code to teach churches about the "misleading" claims in the book, and to equip them to respond. He says he also hopes to prove that "Christianity has more going for it than [Brown’s] pseudo-research into Christian origins."

The seminar will take place March 21 at Westridge Community Church in Mississauga, Ontario and at Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto. On May 22, Gasque will speak at Regent College in Vancouver, and on June 12 at Granville Chapel in Vancouver.

Gasque hopes the topic will attract non-Christian participants as well as encouraging Christians "to make a serious study of the history of the church as well as the Bible itself."

Meanwhile, at least three evangelical Christian publishers will soon release books that refute the novel. In May, the Victor imprint of Cook Communications will publish Cracking the Da Vinci Code: Separating Fact From Fiction by James Garlow and Peter Jones.

Thomas Nelson is putting out a book called Breaking the Da Vinci Code: Answering Questions Everybody’s Asking by Darrell Bock. Intervarsity Press has contracted with Ben Witherspoon to write a book tentatively entitled, The Gospel Code: Investigating Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdelene, and Da Vinci.

Deborah Gyapong is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Contact her by e-mail: dhgyapong@rogers.com