Ross Douthat of the NYT says, “You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.”

Douthat writes: “Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, (Brown) serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah – sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message – which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators – can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The `secret’ history of Christendom that unspools in `The Da Vinci Code’ is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling – they’re far, far weirder than that – nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – jealous, demanding, apocalyptic – may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.”