Accuracy of Books About Bible Debated

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Accuracy of Books About Bible Debated

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Accuracy of Books About Bible Debated

http://www.planetnetopia.com/forum/topics/id_3/

The lesson from this week’s best-seller list is simple: God sells.
But what worries some scholars is that the hottest religious books
depart from traditional Christian teaching or distort the faith’s
origins.
The latest pulse-pounder in the “Left Behind” series about the end
of the world - “Glorious Appearing” - couldn’t have appeared more
gloriously, at No. 1 among Publishers Weekly’s fiction best sellers.
It edges out another religion-themed novel, “The Da Vinci Code,”
which has ranked among the top three for 54 straight weeks.
American’s fiction market has never seen such a juxtaposition, says
Publishers Weekly religion editor Lynn Garrett. Combined with the
success of Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” - now
eighth on the U.S. all-time box office list - it makes an obvious
statement.
“Whether they feel negatively or positively about religion, people
in American culture think about and care about it,” Garrett says.
Jerry Jenkins, co-author of “Glorious Appearing” with Tim LaHaye,
calls the phenomenon “God hunger - people looking for something
beyond themselves.”
Yet the success of the books troubles some critics, largely because
the authors have made unusual claims that - though they employ
fiction - what they’re writing is true.
Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” is a thriller whose characters malign
traditional Christianity as fraudulent. But both liberal and
conservative writers say it’s rife with errors.
Among inaccuracies they list: The characters’ claims that belief in
Jesus’ divinity appeared in the 4th century rather than the 1st
century; that the four New Testament Gospels became authoritative in
the 4th century rather than the 2nd century; and that the Dead Sea
Scrolls and Gnostic writings (deemed heretical by the church)
contain the earliest Christian records - though one Gnostic text
does have some scholarly promoters.
“Da Vinci” also supposes that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired
a royal Judeo-French bloodline that still exists - and that sinister
Christians suppressed this. That plot comes from the 1982 book “Holy
Blood, Holy Grail,” which a New York Times reviewer called “rank
nonsense.”
At first, “Da Vinci” drew little religious opposition because
people “didn’t subject it to the same kind of scrutiny they would a
nonfiction book,” Garrett says. But when Brown told NBC
that “absolutely all of it” is true, the Rev. Darrell Bock of Dallas
Theological Seminary decided the novelist wasn’t just having fun but
was undermining Christianity.
Bock wrote the first of several Protestant attack books, “Breaking
the Da Vinci Code.”
Roman Catholics will soon pile on with “The Da Vinci Hoax.” In the
foreword, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George says Brown’s history
is “preposterous” but must be countered because it,

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