The main problem I have with labelling the book a "crock" is that...erm... it's fiction. The problem is if people take it too seriously.
Yes, they talk about that in the article. It's fiction, but Brown prefaces by saying the Priory of Sion is real. Yes, it was real -- created by an antisemetic French embezzler in the 1950s. (What the article has to say about Pierre Plantard, the actual founder of the Priory of Sion, is pretty interesting, and would make a more interesting novel than The DaVinci Code, IMHO.)
BTW, I always wonder when people talk about the information in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The majority of the scrolls are pre-Christian (approx. 80 years, B.C.E), and there are actualy no references to Jesus in the texts. (This information comes from the Orion Center web page. http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/ These are the people who have custody of the scrolls.) It's not actually clear that "The Teacher of Righteousness" is a reference to Jesus. They were written by a Messianic Jewish sect (thought by some to be the Essenes) in the pre-Christian era.
The bulk of the information in the scrolls refers to the Second Temple period of Judiasm, and is interesting from a historical perspective, but not particularly relevant to any study of Christianity.
no subject
Yes, they talk about that in the article. It's fiction, but Brown prefaces by saying the Priory of Sion is real. Yes, it was real -- created by an antisemetic French embezzler in the 1950s. (What the article has to say about Pierre Plantard, the actual founder of the Priory of Sion, is pretty interesting, and would make a more interesting novel than The DaVinci Code, IMHO.)
BTW, I always wonder when people talk about the information in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The majority of the scrolls are pre-Christian (approx. 80 years, B.C.E), and there are actualy no references to Jesus in the texts. (This information comes from the Orion Center web page. http://orion.mscc.huji.ac.il/ These are the people who have custody of the scrolls.) It's not actually clear that "The Teacher of Righteousness" is a reference to Jesus. They were written by a Messianic Jewish sect (thought by some to be the Essenes) in the pre-Christian era.
The bulk of the information in the scrolls refers to the Second Temple period of Judiasm, and is interesting from a historical perspective, but not particularly relevant to any study of Christianity.