Shortly before the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in Britain, the publishers, Transworld, kindly sent me an advance copy of the hardback edition. I glanced through it, recognised the recycled nonsense of the 1980s bestseller, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and sent it off unread to the Oxfam shop. It seemed to me unlikely that the public could fall for the same trick twice. How wrong I was: the novel was rapturously received in the United States, has sold more than 18 million copies in 42 languages and has spawned a dozen commentaries — among them The Rough Guide to the Da Vinci Code and Bart D. Ehrman’s Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code.

Bart Ehrman is a serious scholar: he chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but is at pains to point out that, while this is ‘the buckle of the bible belt’, he is not a blinkered, born-again Christian. He rigorously confines himself to his area of expertise — early Church history — and eschews comment on tangential aspects of The Da Vinci Code such as the role of Opus Dei or the Templar Knights.

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