The Books the Church Suppressed: Fiction and Truth in The Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code argues that the church has falsified the truth - that the story of Jesus, dying on the Cross for the sins of the world, is utterly untrue: a fiction perpetrated by a male, power-hungry hierarchy. He puts forward the case, previously argued in the eighties bestseller Holy Blood , Holy Grail , that the Church deliberately suppressed the so-called Gnostic Gospels and other sources in its anxiety to conceal what really happened. Dr Michael Gren goes back to the original sources to check these assertions. The Church certainly denounced many Gospels and other purported revelations. Why? What did it fear? Were these fears well-grounded? What are ten implications of the ideas put forward by Dan Brown and his fellow-travellers? Can the famous Gnostic Gospels be trusted?