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http://www.reason.com/links/links051106.shtml

Brief Quote:

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Ostensibly anti-Christian works from The Secret Life of Christ to Léo Taxil's Vie de Jesus to The Da Vinci Code participate in a conspiracy more vast than anything Dan Brown has in mind: the elaborate collusion by billions of people to agree that anybody named Jesus Christ existed in the first place. If he did live (and beyond a forged passage in Josephus, there's no non-faith-based evidence that he—or He, or She—did), Dan Brown's claims about a royal bloodline look modest indeed: As the writer Steve Wilson has demonstrated, most of the population of planet Earth is already related to the savior. Most also believe that there really was a Jesus of some kind, and once that hurdle is overcome, arguments over whether he was divine or merely a prophet, a Jewish apostate or a closet Buddhist, a celibate or a father, are as intramural as arguments over Batman's origin story (though even the most shameless DC comics geek understands there was no historical Batman). In an era of audience fragmentation, Dan Brown has produced something rare—a genuine popular phenomenon. But to get Christians, Muslims, and Jews agreeing that you're worth arguing about at all— even Ron Howard and Tom Hanks couldn't pull that one off.

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