Maybe you’ll believe Bart Ehrman, Prof. of New Testament at UNC-Chapel Hill. The Teaching Company is giving away downloads of two of his lectures on The da Vinci Code; I haven’t heard them yet, but I have full confidence that Bart will bring to bear his vast erudition and sober historical reasoning to the farcical fictions of Dan Brown.
I don’t remember mentioning this to you before, so I will now. Several months ago I heard Nick Perrin give a lecture on DaVinci that was astounding. Nick was Tom Wright’s research assistant and quite a scholar in his own right.
The lecture really ended up being a defense of the priority of the canonical gospels (in the temporal sense of priority) over Gospel of Thomas and the other early gnostic-christian lit. The part I remember most clearly was the research he did showing that whenever Thomas presented sayings from the canonical gospels, he did so following the word order and word choice used in the Diatessaron, which places Thomas very definately after 135.
Was interesting watching a lecture about some specific points of the Syriac translation of the NT being presented to a crowd of generally elderly church ladies. Nothing against elderly church ladies.
Ehrman gave away two of his lectures as Teaching Company promotionals last year — on The DaVinci Code (in two parts) and an overview of the Gnostics. Pitched at the layman, of course, but did not insult anyone’s intelligence.