Content area
Full Text
Darrel L. Bock. Breaking the Da Vinci Code. Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2004. 208 pp. $19.99 (cloth), ISBN 0785260463.
When The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was released in 2003, few evangelical scholars paid much attention to it, since it was a work of fiction with little historical foundation. However, when The Da Vinci Code sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks, became the most popular book sold on Amazon.com, and had an hour-long special devoted to it by ABC, it was clear that it could no longer be ignored. This was especially true because, both in the book and then forcefully on the ABC special report, Brown claimed that the book was based on sound historical scholarship. The fact that Ron Howard is planning a 2005 movie based on the book just made it more imperative that evangelicals show its numerous historical errors.
Therefore, Darrell Bock's Breaking the Da Vinci Code is a welcome response to this runaway phenomenon. Bock, who is the Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, has written a very careful, user-friendly critique of Brown's book. In...