The Vatican is going a little too crazy about The Da Vinci Code, it seems. The Vatican’s claim [1] is that the movie is “full of calumnies, offences and historical and theological errors regarding Jesus, the Gospels and the Church.”
It would seem that in a work of FICTION, errors of this sort, even flagrant errors, wouldn’t do nearly the damage to the Vatican as would the constant earnest claims (by other religions) that Rome is in error. If this is the problem, though, the future promises many more senseless holy wars.
Or maybe the Da Vinci Code does something even worse than contradict the Vatican. Perhaps The Da Vinci Code will suggest to movie-goers that the Bible itself has a history.
In my mind, that would be a good thing. The thought that the Bible didn’t drop out of a cloud, pre-translated to English, might send a lot of people back to actually investigate that history. It might convince some believers to investigate the history of the Bible with the same vigor that they display when they investigate vacation packages, insurance rates or Barry Bonds’ physique. Instead of just pecking away at the literature within, a random verse at a time, the movie might stagger Believers to take a big picture look at the Bible. Perhaps movie-goers might even get serious enough about investigating Bible history to read works such as Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus : The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005).
Once the movie prods them into beginning personal evidence-based inquiries, Believers might start to seriously question the unquestionable truths of the Good Book.
That could explain why the Vatican is so incredibly angry.
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