Lemme just beat a dead horse. At Salon, Laura Miller has written a nice explanation of why the Da Vinci Code sucks (watch the ad and get a day pass to read the whole thing if you don't have a subscription). Having been interested in Christian history in a previous life I caught a lot of this stuff, though not all of it. I guess the one thing that I appreciated about the book (certainly not the plot or the writing; even Angels and Demons was better) was that it made people think about Church history. Unfortunately, the information that was making them think was patently wrong. Too bad, because there is a lot of right information about the historical Jesus etc. that could also give a thinking person pause.
Oh, and did I mention that nobody in the business refers to Leonardo as "da Vinci?" Did I? Man, you'd think he could've at least figured that part out.
While reading Brown's book I was reminded of another pulpy write-up of the Real Story of Jesus, Clysta Kinstler's The Moon Under Her Feet, which I enjoyed WAY more than Brown's clunker. Kinstler sets up Mary Magdalene as a priestess of the Goddess (you see where this is going) and makes Jesus into the random man chosen for a sacred marriage. It's an interesting angle because she tries to put non-Jewish, non-Roman religion back into the story...with varying degrees of success. A fun if cheesy read with a nice bibliography at the end.
Posted by Heather at December 29, 2004 09:13 AM
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