Fr Richard Leonard has said that The Da Vinci Code's main achivement is to expose the level of ignorance among Christians about their own history and how the New Testament was compiled.
Delivering the Newman/St Mary’s Academic Centre Lecture Series at the University of Melbourne on Monday, Fr Leonard suggests that Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown could have have even taught Christians more about the Bible than their own religious education classes.
"It is much to our shame that Mr Brown has been the first person to tell a host of biblically illiterate Catholics, and other Christians besides, that the New Testament was not a first century version of the Book of Mormon, falling from the sky," he said.
"It’s not Dan Brown’s fault, that the religious education of most of us was so poor that we were never told that the revelation of our scared texts came through a prolonged and passionate stoush about what was in and out."
He said that Hebrews, James, Revelation and I and II Peter, and not the four canonical Gospels, were the highly disputed texts. It was not until, finally, in 633 that the Council of Toledo decreed that the fights were over and that the 27 books we now accept as the New Testament were it.
Fr Leonard said that it is not the fault of most Catholics that they don’t not know this, "because we were warned off reading the Bible, and the study of its history or compilation was a Protestant concern at best, or a sin against accepting it as holy writ".
Fr Leonard is director of the Australian Catholic Film Office. He made his points in the context of a much longer discussion of the film, in which he concludes that the film is poor on most levels, but improves on the book.
"It remains didactic, the dialogue clumsy in parts and the drama in the last act if as elusive as the Holy Grail. Pleasingly, the way the theories are discussed in the film is much more speculative and contested than in the novel. This film is trying to be more conciliatory."
Click here to download the full text of the lecture.