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Breaking the Da Vinci Code focuses on the issues closest to a New Testament scholar's heart: Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the formation of the canon. Of the four books, Bock's deals most systematically with those themes. Ben Witherington's The Gospel Code (to be released in July) covers much the same territory but with less focus and a more personal and playful tone.

Like Bock, Witherington is baffled by the contradictions. In the name of diversity, champions of Gnosticism promote an elitist movement. And in the name of feminism, they promote a Jesus who saves females by making them males (Gospel of Thomas 114). These texts are hardly an appropriate vehicle for the "sacred feminine."

Witherington also reviews the development of the idea of God as Father. He concludes that there was no "suppression of the divine feminine" in ancient Israel, because God was imagined as spirit and not as either male or female. Christian language for God as Father derives, not from patriarchy or pagan influence, but instead from the intimate relationship between the divine Son and the one who has begotten him.

For Witherington, the fundamental danger of the new Gnosticism is the focus on the self. "The problem with the advice 'be yourself' or 'be your own person,' " he writes, "is that none of us are ourselves, we all have sinned and fallen short of God's glory, and we need the redemption Christ offers us, not another self-help program."

Pastoral polemic Cracking Da Vinci's Code, by James L. Garlow and Peter Jones, is a pastoral polemic. Together they have written an entertaining attack on The Da Vinci Code that will be easily understood by average churchgoers.

Garlow and Jones focus much more on the sexual aspects of The Da Vinci Code than do the other books. Dan Brown, in making claims about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, the New Testament, and the church, promotes a sexual agenda. Modern sexual libertinism is blended with themes from ancient fertility cults to argue that everyone has access through sex to a direct, unmediated experience of the divine. The church, possessive about access to God, suppressed this so-called truth.

Ecstasy and transcendence have indeed been associated with sex for centuries. Several years ago, I visited the site in Turkey of an ancient temple to Cybele, the great mother goddess whose worship promised fecundity. It is one thing to read about such cults in scholarly texts, and quite another to visit a site like this. My aha moment came when the senior archaeologist excavating the site pointed to niches in the wall behind the altar, places where male worshipers who had emasculated themselves in an ecstatic frenzy would deposit their testicles as an offering. Of course, that is not what today's sexual and spiritual left want us to remember about goddess worship.

Garlow and Jones give their own account of how sex makes us god-like, and they offer a helpful, though quick, review of how Christianity has ennobled and enabled women who were bound by pagan cultures.

As pastors and polemicists, Garlow and Jones cast their message in culture-war terms, but like good evangelists, they cap their argument with an appeal for a decision.

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June 2004, Vol. 48, No. 6