OTTAWA — “The Da Vinci Code,” Dan Brown’s best-selling religious thriller, should be branded as “hate literature,” says one of Canada’s two editors of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Peter Flint, co-director of Canada’s Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, goes further. He says if “lies” and “blasphemies” like the ones in Brown’s novel were written about the sacred text of any other religion, there would be “pandemonium.”
Flint told ChristianWeek that Christians must stop “lying back and taking it.” He’d like to see charges brought against the publisher under Canada’s hate laws because “no other religious group would tolerate this kind of treatment.”
Meantime, biblical scholar Ward Gasque, founder of the Center for Innovation in Theological Education in Seattle, Wash., is on a Canadian tour to debunk the book, which has sold 6 million copies in hardcover.
Gasque says he created the seminars, called “Cracking the Da Vinci Code,” to give people tools to evaluate the work using critical thinking skills.
“You wouldn’t think that people would be believing this because it’s a work of fiction,” Gasque said. “But it’s being assumed to be a work of history and historical research.”
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