Dan Brown Strikes Again

I like a good yarn just as much as the next guy. A good plot with good characters told in an interesting way can go along way to winning my consumer dollars. And Dan Brown is admittedly good at winning many other people's dollars. But Dan Brown is also a historical revisionist and has an insidious plan to reconstruct his own religion on the American masses. Don't believe me? Believe the New York Times:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

There you have it: Brown is writing a theology he wants and trying to make you like it. And he's doing it again. The Lost Symbol is out next week. What's the problem with this? Well, what Brown does just isn't true. Don't believe me? Read the New York Times:

But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s any thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

I must be honest and say I didn't think it possible to read such a thing in the New York Times, but an honest intellectual pursuit will often get you honest answers. What liberal theologians such as Bart Ehrman have been doing for decades now continues to get beaten back by good historical research and archeology. The Ehrman and Brown arguments are tired and false. The New York Times sees this, but does America?

And it also seems like the Times is actually reading the Bible. Jesus is "jealous, demanding, and apocalyptic." Darn right. Is this the Jesus you're following? Or are you following your own version of Jesus, one constructed by Brown or yourself, to make yourself feel better?