Considering that I did not read that article, I cannot speak to it.
Okay (treading lightly here) may I ask what is so bad about Jesus being married and having children? Does that negate all the good he did, that he loved a woman and had a family? Please help me understand.
I was talking about the publishers, not the authors. There are undoubtedly many books in print that require debunking for the credulous. However, very few of them ever see the bookstores for the simple reason that publishers don’t see a market for them. That’s reality.
There’s a thread over in GD(?) about this very subject.
Link, please?
Thanks.
Again, I’m sorry if I upset anyone.
Do you mean The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold?
Don’t say stuff like that in Memphis, dude. People’ll lynch you if the figure out what you mean.
You know, I’d kind of like to read a “debunking” book for Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Stephenson readily admits that he’s invented, altered, and discarded a great deal of history for his books, but there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s historically accurate, too. It would be interesting to know which bits are real and which bits are made up without having to read a dozen or so different history books covering different aspects of the era. Brown’s claims of autheticity aside, I can see some real value in reading one of these Da Vinci code debunking books
One of my book clubs read the Da Vinci Code (everything you’re thinking about this book club is absolutely true. In fact, you probably haven’t gone far enough - it’s worse.) And the discussion was astounding in a scary way. The number of people who had the “what if it’s true?” “I think it’s true that…,” “the … part really made me think.”
Sadly, I know that they’re not the only people who read the book who couldn’t separate the fact (there really is a museum that is called the Musee du Louvre) from the speculation from the flat out fiction. (Part of the problem is that Brown is an annoyingly sloppy writer. In one of the two books, there’s a conversation which is written in a way that it indirectly suggests (especially to a non-careful reader) that the idea of Communion was stolen from the Aztecs. Whatever the origin of Communion was, divine or human, it is most certainly not Meso-American.) Of course, those people aren’t likely to buy the “Debunking” book. Still, I can very well imagine someone getting tired of saying “No, that’s supposed to be John” and just wanting to hand over a book instead.
You’re implying that I’m horribly naive to think that some of these authors might be motivated by a desire to (ahem) fight ignorance, rather than being driven by the almighty dollar.
In case you haven’t noticed, I did NOT claim that people are never motivated by financial means. However, this does not mean that every single author who attempts to debunk Dan Brown’s claims fits that mold. If people are going to claim that “Whether people believe or don’t believe is really beside the point,” then I think it’s only fair to ask how they arrived at that conclusion.
Opus Dei approached me when I was in college and I did attend a couple of their meetings. They were basically prayer and conversation sessions. I felt some pressure to join and it could be intense, but no one mentioned self-flagellation.
Maybe the self-flagellation is a feature that’s only available to members.
Or perhaps much more recently than that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priory_of_sion
Replace “Christ” with “Jesus” and I’d agree with you.
Otherwise, no.
OTOH, Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh, authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Blood_Holy_Grail – presented their findings as historical facts.
Which makes their suit against Brown for plaigiarism doubly ludicrous. You cannot copyright a set of historical facts. If John Smith writes the definitive history of Scotland, and I rely on it as source material for my historical novel about William Wallace, I don’t owe Mr. Smith a dime.
I just this weekend finished this series. I was in the book store waiting to buy the third volume, and saw a biography of Robert Hooke by Lisa Jardine (sp?) on the discount table. I bought that too, and low and behold, in the afterward, Stephenson says that this book came out too late for his research, but is a good case of what is thought to really have happened during that time.
Okay, hijack over.
Stephenson set up a wiki for him and others to annotate the trilogy, but it never took off (he didn’t want to put any real work into it) and it seems to have vanished.
The Wikipedia page on the Baroque Cycle has a few tidbits, plus a list of historical characters.
Spotting the deliberate anachronisms on almost every page is the real fun, though.
Ivylass, it’s not just the whole “Jesus and Mary were married and had children” thing. That interests a lot of people, and some Christians are bothered by the idea for certain reasons, but not all are.
But there are a lot of other historical assertions Brown makes that are just plain false, and easily demonstrated to be so. He makes claims about what happened at the Nicene Council (we have the records for that), what Constantine did, how the Bible was compiled, what the Gnostics believed (he cherrypicks that and completely distorts it, and even mixes up the Dead Sea Scrolls with gnostic beliefs), what ‘da Vinci’ did with his paintings (ow, his last name was not da Vinci, he just didn’t have one, you’re supposed to say Leonardo), and on and on.
It just makes some people’s heads explode that he can make such silly assertions and that so many people are buying it. He’s taken advantage of the fact that many people use historical fiction as an easy way to learn about history (good authors try to get their background facts straight), that hardly anyone knows anything about early Christian history these days anyway, and that people like to know ‘secret oppressed truths.’ The way he put all the ‘information’ into a historian’s mouth reinforces the impression of true history, and the way he constantly says things like “all serious students know that…(insert bibblebabble).” You may have known enough to consider the whole thing to be fiction, but you can hardly be ignorant that many, many people have been convinced that he’s telling the truth about a lot of things.
He even gets the science wrong; phi is not connected with bees the way he claims, and Venus does not trace a ‘perfect’ pentagram in the sky. Those bits drove my husband nuts.
So I think it’s perfectly fair that some people are out there trying to fight ignorance with their debunking books. It’s just like debunking little grey alien/crystal healing/alien pyramid architects/crop circle claims, as far as I’m concerned.