The Code

Since people are waiting with bated breath (whatever that means) for the movie of the DiVinci Code, I must comment.

At Otter we are watching the DVD Discussing the DaVinci Code by Lee Strobel and Garry Poole. I missed the first one, but joined in on Wed. night. and was impressed with the content. Strobel spent quite a bit of time in this second installment interviewing Scot McKnight, well-known Jesus scholar and author of The Jesus Creed which our small group just finished reading. The topic of the second installement was "Can We Trust the Four Gospels?"

A telling question which came out of the discussion was "Why are people so ready to believe Dan Brown, not a historian, not a researcher, not a scholar whose book is so rife with errors that many books have been written on the subject and not to believe the Bibilical account?" Maybe, someone said, that those who do believe the biblical account do not represent it well. Others weighed in with this reason: we all have such an obvious ignorance of church history that we are taken in by reported "facts" which are, in fact, fantasy. A recent article in the Tenessean recounted this reason too--and said perhaps, that churches might think about offering church history in classes. My particular fellowship doesn't even know much about its own church history, muchless history of the church generally. Others said the culture is in a suspious mode right now of all cultural icons--church, government, education, etc. and this is just a carry over. And of course, the recent cover-ups by the Roman Catholics don't help.

Why do you think people believe Dan Brown?