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Today, many books explore these themes. In 1979, Elaine Pagels wrote The Gnostic Gospels, received numerous awards and accolades for her creativity and courage, and promised to help us unpack the formative centuries of Christian belief. Perhaps some Christians did not believe in Jesus' resurrection or even in one God, she proposed. Perhaps they thought of God as both male and female. And who is to say they were wrong? In 2003, Pagels returned to her subject with Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. In it, we are told that the earliest form of Christianity was not certain what it believed and that the orthodoxy that emerged simply out-maneuvered its rivals and repressed alternative scriptures. Thomas supposedly represents one such repressed voice.

Of course, to evaluate these claims we must determine the value of these apocryphal Gospels. Do they represent legitimate voices suppressed in antiquity? In the last five years, this debate has intensified. Some scholars argue that the canonical boundary that separates our Scriptures from the apocrypha should come down. Others argue that Gospels such as Thomas should have equal weight with Matthew. Still others believe that notions such as "orthodoxy" and "canon" are simply arbitrary conventions of the winners.

But they fail to mention that while most of the recently discovered Gospels will claim to come from an apostle (such as Mary or Peter), virtually every scholar knows these claims are fictitious. Moreover, these Gospels are not easily dated. When someone claims that, say, the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas is "late first century," we are merely hearing conjecture.

Furthermore, the early church was well aware of these writings and understood that they offered a view of Christian faith utterly different than the genuine apostolic Gospels. Christians of the time did not see these Gospels as rivals. They simply saw them as wrong in every respect: They presented an understanding of creation, humanity, Jesus, and salvation that significantly departed from what Christians had believed from the very beginning.

Which brings us back to Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code. Brown's astonishing claims about Jesus and Mary are found in two apocryphal Gospels, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip. Brown, a skilled author but no scholar, simply picked them up and spun a fictional narrative around them.

Bart D. Ehrman, however, is chair of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ehrman has studied Christianity's first three centuries carefully since leaving the evangelical fold. In 1996, he wrote The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, in which he claims that not only did the winners "write the history," but they also shaped the Greek texts making up the New Testament. Last year, Ehrman wrote a popular study of the transmission of the Greek New Testament, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (HarperSanFrancisco).

In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman retraces the common knowledge that scribes transcribed the Bible for 1,500 years until Gutenberg came along. But Ehrman further suggests that not only did the scribes alter the theological message of the texts, but that they also were simply continuing in the tradition of biblical writers such as Matthew and Luke, who shaped Jesus' message to fit their theological agendas.

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June 2006, Vol. 50, No. 6