*Looks down his nose at her inferior Vanderbilt heritage*

Well being of such high pedigree, I wouldn't know anything about the vulgar pleasures of the masses. Hawaiian Kona is the absolute lowest grade filth that I will refer to as coffee.

Don't tell the Vatican that you have found a true Templar descendant, as they will probably send Jesuit assassins to do away with me before my book is complete. And we can't have that can we? Sweet Jesus, I better use a pen name or else everyone really is going to label me the anti-Christ. I can see it now:

There are many interesting facts in Greek Mytholgy and the Bible - that doesn't mean these things are to be trusted as telling the truth without investigating them. The DaVinci code, unfortunately, is a book that falls far below the standards set by both Greek Mythology and The Bible in terms of historical accuracy.

Most of the art-history stuff is interesting (the borrowed symbolism from other religions), but even a lot of that needs to be taken with a grain of salt - or indeed a salt lick. For example, the assertion that Bahomet is a fertility god is occultic bullshit coming out of the work of HPB, who took the idea from French or Spanish monks writing propoganda about the muslims for the crusades. They said the Muslims worshiped the god "Bahomet" - - i.e. Mahomet (Muhammed). Dan Brown is one of those poor souls who is either rankly dishonest or as gullible as the fundies whose dogmas he tries to skewer. The "horned devil god" that Brown claims was Bahomet was actually the Greek god Pan.

As for the similarities with the mysery cults, again Brown is reckless in his accusations. Some - or many - of the similarities he points out are genuine, but many others are not OR are things that may have acculturated FROM Christianity TO the Mysteries.

Bullshit. The only true thing in that statement is that they voted on the date of Easter. Jesus was considered divine by Christians at LEAST by the end of the first century, and probably much earlier. Jesus was NEVER viewed by the church as "merely a man." Indeed, the thing they voted on was whether he was ever a man at all, or just appeared to be a man. Brown is an out-and-out-liar on this point, as ANYONE who has read primary sources can tell you.

Nope. Under Constantine the religion of his mother (you know, the one Constantine was raised with) was made the state religion for reasons that no one really knows (Eusebius claims that it was because of a vision in some places but not in others, there's a good case to be made for the need of a unifying religion in the empire for political reasons, etc). The Christians worshiped Christ as a diety from the beginning, and the church as it existed in Constantines time was placed into power by Constantine (and given the holdings of various other religions, including Vatican Hill which was the seat of Mithraism at the time).

Wrong wrong wrong. Jesus may never have existed at all. If he was, it's possible he could have been married, but is just as likely he wasn't, as the Stoics and other wandering philosophers of that ilk (which the character we know as Jesus certainly fits) generally took vows of chastity and traveled in the company of women with similar vows.
The Essenes (a.k.a. the Nazoreans) were a Jewish sect that had similar practices.

These books are the ones that Brown based his scenario on. They are fraudulent and hoaxes. The documentation that Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Templar Revelation are based on was forged by a French Nazi sect (The Priory of Sion) in the late 19th century - the forgery was admitted to in the 30s. These books are fanciful fiction woven together with enough fact to be convincing, but they're not history in any sense of the word.

Reminds me of an article by an author called Richard Smoley who says about the curiosities linking Jesus and Mary Magdalene,