The Da Vinci Code is a novel written in 2003 by author Dan Brown, published by Doubleday. It quickly went to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and it has remained on it since. It is a thriller story involving secret societies, conspiracies, the Catholic Church, and the fictional "truth" about Jesus Christ. A major motion picture is scheduled to be released in May, 2006. The book - complete with footnotes of source materials - is a novel, but in a controversial introductory note, Brown writes that "all descriptions of documents and secret rituals are accurate." Are they?

Dubious doctrines like Goddess worship and neo-Gnosticism, critics charge, provide the core of Brown's acclaimed novel (although Brown makes egregious errors even within those, e.g., Gnostics would be repulsed by the idea of physical relations between Mary Magdalene and Jesus). Given the book's liberal use of long-debunked heresies and flashy but baseless theories on everything from church tradition to architecture to the heads of a secret society, cataloguing Brown's scholarly infractions will exhaust the casual reader.

Critics assail Brown's appeals to scholarship and history, which range from questionable to outlandish to (some say) outrageous. Yet, hot sales and fawning reviews by the press and readers alike indicate that many are buying into this brew of conspiracy theory, romance novel and pseudo-scholarship. Perhaps postmodernists, given to thinking via emotions and wide-open to conspiracy theories surrounding empowered groups, have found the perfect mix.

Do Brown's claims and implications line up with evidence, historical fact or truth? Does this matter or is "truth" only a bargaining chip for the empowered group of the day?

Although a work of fiction, the book claims to be meticulously researched, and it goes to great lengths to convey the impression that it is based on fact. It even has a "fact" page at the front of the book underscoring the claim of factuality for particular ideas within the book. As a result, many readers - both Catholic and non-Catholic - are taking the book's ideas seriously.

The problem is that most of the ideas that the book promotes are anything but fact, and they go directly to the heart of the Christian faith. For example, the book promotes these ideas:

• Jesus is not God; he was only a man.
• Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
• She is to be worshiped as a goddess.
• Jesus got her pregnant, and the two had a daughter.
• That daughter gave rise to a prominent family line that is still present in Europe today.
• The Bible was put together by a pagan Roman emperor.
• Jesus was viewed as a man and not as God until the fourth century, when he was deified by the emperor Constantine.
• The Gospels have been edited to support the claims of later Christians.
• In the original Gospels, Mary Magdalene rather than Peter was directed to establish the Church.
• There is a secret society known as the Priory of Sion that still worships Mary Magdalene as a goddess and is trying to keep the truth alive.
• The Catholic Church is aware of all this and has been fighting for centuries to keep it suppressed. It often has committed murder to do so.
• The Catholic Church is willing to and often has assassinated the descendents of Christ to keep his bloodline from growing.

But does anyone take these ideas seriously? Yes; they do. This is partly due to the way the story is written. If one reads The Da Vinci Code, the first word he will encounter, in bold uppercase letters, is the word "FACT." Shortly thereafter Brown writes, "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." And the average reader, with no special knowledge or training in these areas, will assume the statement is true.

There are two sets of reactions among Christians. One is a group that senses there’s something wrong about what’s being said about Christianity, but they don’t know what the response is. So they aren’t embracing or even entertaining the idea, but they are curious and want to know what the facts are. Then there’s the second group that reads the book, who when they walk away ask, “Could this possibly be?” They’re actually entertaining the possibility that it might be true.

And what about all those who will now see the movie?

Christians should be concerned about the book and the movie because they not only misrepresent the Catholic Church as a murderous institution but also imply that the Christian faith itself is utterly false.

Only some of the offensive claims of The Da Vinci Code pertain directly to the Catholic Church. The remainder strike at the Christian faith itself. If the book's claims were true, then all forms of Christianity would be false.

G. K. Chesterton reminded us that orthodoxy is not only true; it is infinitely more interesting than heresy. It is alive and compelling and life-changing. Heresies come and go by fashion. The truth is unchanged and unchangeable.