The Archbishop of Canterbury is not a big fan of The Da Vinci Code:

In a strongly worded Easter sermon, Dr Rowan Williams said there was a tendency to treat biblical texts ‘as if they were unconvincing press releases from some official source, whose intention is to conceal the real story’. (Melbourne Age, 17 Apr. 2006)

In fact, Rowan, that’s a very sensible way in which to treat all biblical texts. As Bible scholar Bart Ehrman (2005) points out:

Not only do we not have the original [biblical texts], we don’t have the first copies of the originals … What we have are copies made later - much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places … [T]here are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. (Misquoting Jesus, 10)

Pace Archbishop Williams, the ‘real story’ has certainly been concealed from us to some extent, although whether intentionally or unintentionally is often impossible to tell. As Ehrman concludes:

If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don’t have the very words of scripture? … It’s a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don’t even know what the words are! (ibid., 11)

Filed in: Biblical criticism