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While visiting relatives in northern Sweden last September, we flew from Stockholm to Luleå. Then we drove to Piteå, a small town far from any tourist itinerary (and 100 miles from the Arctic Circle). I found Piteå's one bookstore in the town market, entered out of curiosity—and there it was, a full display, spilling over with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code in Swedish. Here among the reindeer and lingonberries, Swedes were preparing for their long winter with copies of Da Vinci Koden.

The book has been translated into 43 languages since being published three years ago. Now Hollywood is hoping for similar blockbuster status for its heavily hyped movie starring Tom Hanks, now in theaters.

Though the general public is fascinated with the book's conjectures, The Da Vinci Code has merely brought into the open a heated discussion among scholars that is at least 50 years old. Among Dan Brown's more controversial claims are these:

1. Jesus had an intimate relationship with Mary Magdalene.
2. Jesus and Mary Magdalene were husband and wife.
3. Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children.
4. Church leaders (some mysterious Catholic order) hid this secret.
5. Long-suppressed Gospels—such as the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Philip—now are finally telling us the truth.

These claims are not being made only by agnostics and "liberals." Recently, in a basic New Testament class at Wheaton College, a sophomore presented me with the February 27 edition of Time. An article described a "long-lost second-century Gospel," the Gospel of Judas, that promised to unveil new secrets about Jesus. Later that same hour, another student asked, "I've read that the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John are similar, so if John is trustworthy, why not Thomas?" Welcome to the new world of New Testament studies.

Since the earliest years of the church, Christian leaders have had to confront rival accounts of Jesus' life. These were Gospels that refashioned Jesus' life, often giving it a spin palatable to the Hellenistic trends of the day. From about A.D. 125 to about A.D. 600, people with active religious imaginations wrote numerous Gospels. As Origen of Alexandria wrote in his Homily on Luke, "The church has four Gospels, but the heretics have many."

In some cases, we know about these writings through the refutation of church leaders. Orthodox writers cite the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Nazareans, and the Gospel of the Ebionites, but we have no copies of these texts themselves. In addition, we have always had apocryphal (meaning "hidden") Gospels, which often expanded stories about Jesus' childhood centuries later. Infancy Gospels are attributed, for instance, to both Thomas and James. Fragments of lost Gospels have also been found (such as Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 840) that record supposed supplemental sayings of Jesus. But these are so short they can hardly be dated.

In 1945, however, an archive of 57 Christian writings was discovered in central Egypt at Nag Hammadi. Here were Gospels we had never seen. Although they were clearly early, they were out of the mainstream of New Testament thought. The Hypostasis of the Archons, the Exegesis of the Soul, the Apocalypse of Adam, and the Acts of Peter were among these.

Nag Hammadi's Gospel of Thomas has 114 sayings from Jesus, unconnected to any narrative. About half appear to be a direct echo of the New Testament. Others are utterly far-fetched.

But this archive raised forcefully a set of questions now confronting every New Testament scholar and church historian. Were rival "Christianities" competing in the ancient world? Did our Scriptures come to us thanks to the power politics of ecclesiastical leaders during the first centuries?

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June 2006, Vol. 50, No. 6