The marvelous Dr. Larry Hurtado, who specializes in early Christian views of and devotion to Jesus has an article in Slate on the major scholarly errors in DVC. Good for passing on.

It’s also important to emphasize that this question of which writings to treat as scripture, which to treat merely as edifying reading, and which to regard as heretical, was not decided at a single point by a church council, a pope, or a Roman emperor. Once again, in service of its conspiracy theory, The Da Vinci Code gets it wrong. The canonizing of scripture involved circles of believers spread across the many lands of the Roman Empire and beyond. The result wasn’t a fiat foisted upon the Christian world. Essentially, the writings that commended themselves earliest and to the largest number of Christians came more quickly and securely to be part of the emergent New Testament. Some other writings, such as Revelation and the second book of Peter, were accepted later. A few writings, such as Didache or Shepherd of Hermas, were contenders that lost out in the end. They enjoyed favor in some circles but just didn’t have sufficiently wide endorsement.

In the book and the movie, Teabing asserts that other texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary, were cast out of the New Testament because Constantine and those mean old Nicaean bishops wanted to impose their beliefs on the rest of Christendom. These texts, however, reflect an elitist attitude disdainful of ordinary Christians and their beliefs. It is unlikely that their authors ever sought to have them included with the writings of the emergent New Testament. In any case, they weren’t chucked from the canon in an act of suppression. They just never won the confidence of a sufficient number of Christians to make the grade in the first place.

An art historian comments in the UK Guardian:

Anyone involved with Leonardo over the course of the past 30 years, as I have been, becomes accustomed to the legends and nonsense – and can even relish them for their bizarre charm. However, Dan Brown’s book is very much another matter.

After initially welcoming The Da Vinci Code as another piece of cult nonsense, and seen my book sales rise to unusually healthy levels, I have come to regard its impact as wholly pernicious. As I have been besieged by the media, including private TV production companies that value sensation above any vestige of historical accuracy, it has become clear that Brown’s book has perverted not only any proper sense of who Leonardo was and what he did, but also proper conceptions of history and fiction.

I concur that one of the ill-effects of this novel is how it has become a massive group project in missing the point. Our favorite expression around these parts relates to the JC-MM marriage business, which distracts from the more profound Christological reflections of well, all of the Christian spiritual tradition. The same could be said for the impact it has on some readers’ views of art.

Andrew Sullivan:

Secondly, the last two decades have seen the unearthing of ancient evidence of real Christian debate and division in the early church. The discovery of the so-called Gnostic Gospels and the more recent discovery of the Gospel of Judas, has helped ordinary Christians see that the doctrinally correct history of the church as an unbroken arc of orthodoxy from St Peter to Benedict is historically false. This doesn’t mean you junk the four Gospels. They remain by far the most authoritative account of Jesus’ life. But once you realize that even those who knew Jesus offered radically different interpretations of what he meant and said, your faith shifts a little. The certainty diminishes. Curiosity grows. And this is a good curiosity. It’s focused on what Jesus meant and might have meant. Suddenly the literal interpretations of an inerrant Scripture – the Christianist version of Christianity – seem a little ridiculous.

Sigh. Christians have been living dissension within this Body since the beginning. Christians haven’t just discovered the Acts of the Apostles ove the past twenty years. They haven’t just recently happened upon Paul scolding the Galatians or calling the Christians in Corinth to task. This idea that Christians were historically naive until 1986 is…historically naive. And this? But once you realize that even those who knew Jesus offered radically different interpretations of what he meant and said,….

And who would that be? In what Gospel did Jesus rise from the dead and in which did he not? In which Gospel does Jesus preach the Kingdom of God and in which does he preach something else?

A few years ago, after being fully formed in the "Let’s fixate on the DIFFERENCES in Scriptual accounts" school of study with its subcategory of "Now let’s discover who Jesus REALLY was by shaving off those differences and seeing what’s left," I had this epiphany.

It (finally) hit me that…those involved in establishing the canon of Scripture over those early centuries ….could read. They realized that, say in Matthew there’s a "Sermon on the Mount" and in Luke there’s a "Sermon on the Plain." They read the various, distinctive beginnings to each of the Gospels. They could probably pick out the differences between the various post-Resurection appearances as well as any newly enlightened college sophomore.

But…it didn’t matter. And they didn’t try to harmonize it all. They just…let it be.

What did they understand that I didn’t? What did these "differences," which loomed so large in the formation I was getting, communicate, in their very presence in the Canon? You could come up with many different answers to that, but the main ones that struck me were that this indicated that no one seemed to be trying to make stuff up, and that in some sense, it all fit the apostolic witness to who Jesus was and how they experienced him. And that (getting back to Sullivan) – those who knew Jesus did not disagree about the essence of their experience of him (although how to define that became problematic and still is a challenge – it’s called "Christology") or what he was about – the Reign of God, entering into the world, mysteriously, via him.

My point? Divisiveness in Christianity is as old as the conflict between Peter and Paul, between Paul and Judaizers in Galatia, between the Christians themselves in Corinth, those who would use the Eucharist for their own ends, and those who came with nothing, between those who gloried in the immorality in their midst and those who evidently wrote to Paul, worried about that same immorality.

But…the fundamentals? My argument is specifically with Sullivan’s claim that there was radical division between those who knew Jesus – it’s just not there.

Finally (I think) – Frank Rich. It’s behind the Times Select wall, but Jeffrey Overstreet gives us a taste:

The Machiavellian mission for the hit-deprived Sony studio was to co-opt conservative religious critics who might depress turnout for a $125-million-plus thriller portraying the Roman Catholic Church as a fraud. To this end, as The New Yorker reported, Sony hired a bevy of P.R. consultants, including a faith-based flack whose Christian Rolodex previously helped sell such inspirational testaments to Hollywood spirituality as "Bruce Almighty" and "Christmas With the Kranks."

Among Sony’s ingenious strategies was an elaborate Web site, The Da Vinci Dialogue, which gave many of the movie’s prominent critics a platform to vent on the studio’s dime. Thus was "The Da Vinci Code" repositioned as a "teaching moment" for Christian evangelists — a bit of hype "completely concocted by the Sony Pictures marketing machine," as Barbara Nicolosi, a former nun and current Hollywood screenwriter, explained to The Times. The more "students" who could be roped into this teaching moment, of course, the bigger the gross.

Ms. Nicolosi remains a vociferous opponent of the film. On her blog she chastises Sony’s heavenly P.R. helpers for coaxing "legions of well-meaning Christians into subsidizing a movie that makes their own Savior out to be a sham." But you do have to admire the studio’s chutzpah, if the word may be used in this context. It rivals Tom Sawyer’s bamboozling of his friends into painting that fence