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Nicolosi says she is concerned that pastors and teachers are sending their fellow Christians to a spiritually harmful movie without ensuring first that they know enough history and theology to counter the story's erroneous claims about the divinity of Christ, the formation of the New Testament, and the church's treatment of women.

She also takes issue with the notion that the people attracted to this story are "seeking the truth," as the movie poster claims. "If people were seeking the truth, they would be buying the Catechism and enrolling in theology courses," she says.

Still, some scholars say they've found a whole new audience thanks to The Da Vinci Code and the fans who may, indeed, be seeking the truth after all.

Ward Gasque, a Washington-based church historian, says he's been "having an awful lot of fun" giving dozens of lectures about The Da Vinci Code over the last few years. "If the event is publicized widely, about a third of the audience will be from outside of the sponsoring church—some of them from other churches, but some of them totally unchurched. Now, when I give lectures on the Book of Acts, nobody shows up who is unchurched."

Gasque says Dan Brown's book has been so successful partly because people don't know their history—and that includes Christians. He points to a recent survey which found that approximately one out of six Canadians and one out of eight Americans believes that Jesus faked his death, got married, and had a family—a statistic that has been attributed to the influence of The Da Vinci Code, even though the novel does not deny the crucifixion.

"The reason 17 percent of all Canadians believe this, and it's true virtually worldwide, is that they don't know anything about history," says Gasque. "But that's true of most active Christians as well. They don't know anything about what happened between the end of the first century and the Protestant Reformation, and therefore it seems plausible."

Amy Welborn, author of De-Coding Da Vinci, says many Catholics who have come across the story are equally ignorant of church history. "I was involved in Catholic education for a long time," she says, "and we in the past 40 years have become very present-oriented in our catechesis. Most people don't do any religious education after they're confirmed.

"So I thoroughly blame Christian churches for leaving their people bereft of an anchoring in Christian roots, for whatever reasons, and I really don't think if The Da Vinci Code had come out 60 years ago that Catholics who had any sort of education would have been taken in by it. I think this Da Vinci Code business has been a real eye-opener for a lot of people involved in ministry in the Catholic church. They are now seeing the consequences of this eviscerating of religious education. This is the fruit."

Nonetheless, says Gasque, that "fruit" can serve to motivate Christians to educate themselves about the origins of the faith.

"Christians need to have an understanding of history," he says, "and the church is not serving the Christian community well by not teaching them the basic essence of Christianity. Therefore they don't have the resources to respond very intelligently to this." He recommends that churches devote entire study groups to this subject.

Bock agrees that Christians should know their church history first. "I think the opening up of these issues has been a very good thing," he says, "and if it produces the kind of dialogue about the real Jesus that it can generate, and if the church can get itself into a position to understand its own history and theology, that will be a good thing for the church."

Licona says it is important that Christians do their homework because skeptical scholars with actual academic credibility will take advantage of the media spotlight generated by The Da Vinci Code to promote their own versions of revisionist church history—an example of which was recently provided by the much-hyped, so-called Gospel of Judas.

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