As a Catholic, I have always felt that their was more to the relationship of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. As I read the book I realized that it could be possible. Secret societies in the church have been known as always being there. PM Andersen It was a fast-paced novel that made you think, and think about things that you might have believed in your whole life. The questions it brought up were valid, even when done in fiction.
LaDonna Carrington The intrigue and fun of following deciphering the codes in famous art and architecture. Noreen Brown I think so many have read it because it was exciting, and not your run of the mill mystery. It offered lots of unusual takes on the Bible. I felt it was written in the style of Robert Ludlum, but Ludlum would have done a better job of it.
There were too many "o my" moments in the book for me. I think the biggest appeal has been word of mouth, and a liking for setting up questions about the Catholic relegion. LJ I enjoyed it because it was a fast-paced, exciting, interesting adventure. Bobbie Hudson We are in search of a tangible connection to Christ and God. We are in search of the truth. I think because years have gone by, we need more assurance as to what the truth is. Carey Nixon The appeal comes from the mystery surrounding Jesus, the Templars, and that whole era of history.
Bookseller It touches on so many things that people think about: Jesus, art, crime, etc. All the publicity has also generated interest. Marion Miller I think people are fascinated when a religion is discredited for any reason. This is a premise in this book and the questioning and the existence of the organization make it believable.
You get the feeling that this could really be true. Beth Cummings It is fast moving and detail-driven. The characters are well drawn and believable within the context of the book.
Finally, it portrays a controversial approach to old ideas and traditions in a way that causes the reader to truly wonder, "Would this version be possible? Could this be true? Loretta Sanford It is not a passive experience. You are asked to figure things out, to think and to investigate other sources, to look up the art work and church interiors try to see what the characters are seeing. Many books have come out since, all questioning the Catholic Church and our long held religious beliefs.
When I read his words, "dust to dust," I felt like all I believed could be a lie. What an empty feeling! Connie Tritt The author is great and that should be reason enough, but I also believe some people were fascinated by the subject. And the trial, I also believe, sold far more copies of this book than would have otherwise been sold. Rita First, it is a well-written adventure suspense story. But, secondly, people love to latch onto new theories that question old beliefs, and nothing is so attractive as when those beliefs are religious ones.
I read it because I heard of so many other people reading it and I wanted to see why they were reading it. Kim Akens I think it is just good reading. It was hard to put down. The religious controversy is interesting, but did not play a part either way in my enjoyment of this novel.
Terry The book is about a myth supported by facts. It also had great promotion, is very easy to read, makes good company on the beach It also did provide some interesting historical references. Rita I cannot image the appeal of the book. I definitely am not attracted to the subject matter. The characters are fairly believable and the story follows a reasonable progression.
The combination of religion and art information was a delight to read. How could something that high-handed live up to that kind of hype? Protests occurred at theaters throughout the U. And all of that cacophonous noise was over… a pretty middle-of-the-road adventure movie. So, yes, I missed the appeal. But a funny thing happened when I sat down to watch it on Netflix the other day, about 15 years after its release: I realized what a big goofy delight the movie could be with the right mindset, and what I as a teenager—and so much of the contemporary film press during its time—missed out on.
Ad — content continues below. To be sure, The Da Vinci Code is still a ludicrous story that both benefited from and was weighed down by the sensationalism of its conceit. Essentially Indiana Jones if Harrison Ford never took off the tweed jacket, Langdon is an expert in the real world field of art history and the fictional one of symbology, and his monologues give the proceedings a nice bit of pseudo-intellectual window-dressing.
And what if Christ had children by that marriage? Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Richard Feloni and Graham Flanagan. Get a daily selection of our top stories based on your reading preferences. Loading Something is loading. The cover read: The Gnostic Gospels. Troublingly, they do not match up with the gospels in the Bible. It was Mary Magdalene.
I feel compelled to note several historical howlers in this set of quotations: The first Dead Sea Scrolls were found in , not the s. Most importantly, there is nothing remotely Christian about the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are pre-Christian, Jewish texts. By calling the Gnostic documents scrolls and by lumping them in with the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls, his database suddenly seems much older and larger than it really is.
Then in at Nag Hammadi on the Nile River, an Egyptian Bedouin named Mohammed Ali unearthed a jar with 12 leather-bound papyrus volumes that date to the second half of the fourth century. They were written in Coptic, probably from Greek originals composed in the second century.
Why were they buried? But it makes good sense to connect them to a circular letter sent in the year by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, in which he distinguishes the 27 books of the New Testament from books he thought were heretical.
My guess is that monks from a nearby monastery Saint Pachomius is three miles away cherished these texts and wanted to preserve them. What was the appeal of these texts for early Christians? Why does Gnosticism appeal to so many today? Let me suggest five reasons. For Gnostics, first of all, this world is evil. How else can you explain all the hunger and disease and death? Instead of the crass physicality of the material world is the serene world of the mind.
Reason can be trusted; the senses only deceive. As it turns out, lofty reason is represented by the male sex whereas physical sensation corresponds to the female. Gnostic Christianity was not pro-women.
The New Testament in your Bible is more feminist than the Gnostics were. In the New Testament Gospels, Jesus has women disciples, he speaks to women, teaches women, heals women, affirms women.
At the end of the Gospel of Thomas saying , for example, we learn that for women to be saved, they need to become men. Second, Gnostics thought the world was created by an inferior being. The God of the Old Testament, the creator and redeemer of Israel, is a lowly, contaminated emanation of the transcendent, good god of the Gnostics. In this respect, Christian Gnosticism was fundamentally anti-Jewish.
So unbeknownst to Dan Brown, the heroes of his novel are both misogynist and anti-Semitic. Who are we, according to the Gnostics? We are, thirdly, divine sparks trapped within the fallen, material world. The human dilemma is not sin, or bondage to evil impulses, or spiritual death or alienation from God. Our problem is ignorance. Fourth, salvation comes through knowledge — in Greek, gnosis. Knowledge lets us escape to the true God. Historic, orthodox Christianity, then, says God yearns to redeem and restore this world; Gnosticism offers help to escape it.
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