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Dan Brown’s novel, The DaVinci Code, is now a movie starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard. According to Brown, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, a fallen woman, had a son who moved to Gaul and fathered Frenchmen. Voile! Mary Magdalene is the chalice which contained the blood(line) of Christ. Oi vey! Proof? DaVinci’s painting, The Last Supper, of course! (The John portrayed by Leonardo is not a John but a Mary! Holy switcheroo!) According to Brown, an international religious cabal known as Opus Dei works desperately to keep the facts about this chalice and child secret. (One can’t blame...

Friday, 21 October 2005, 16:59 GMT 17:59 UK Da Vinci publisher in court case Two authors are launching a High Court action against the publishers of The Da Vinci Code, which they say infringes upon their ideas. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are suing Random House, claiming the bestseller lifts from their 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. A High Court hearing will be held next week, followed by a trial next year. Random House was unavailable for comment on the claim that Brown stole the idea that Jesus had a child. A spokeswoman for Baigent and...

BERKELEY, CA – The Da Vinci Code, the best selling novel and soon-to-be-blockbuster film, may also be linked some day to the solving of a scientific mystery as old as Leonardo Da Vinci himself — friction. A collaboration of scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University have used Da Vinci's principles of friction and the geometric oddities known as quasicrystals to open a new pathway towards a better understanding of friction at the atomic level. Atoms are spaced periodically in one direction on a surface perpendicular to a quasicrystal's 10-fold rotational...

LINCOLN (Reuters) - Sister Mary Michael is no killjoy. Only the other day the 61-year-old Catholic nun was riding around on the back of a motorbike. But her sense of fun does not extend to "The Da Vinci Code," a film based on the Dan Brown best-seller and starring Tom Hanks that is being filmed this week at the towering Gothic cathedral in her home city of Lincoln, eastern England. The sister staged a 12-hour prayer vigil to protest at the decision by the building's custodians to let director Ron Howard use it in his movie of the novel, which...

When he walks on to a movie set, he usually gets star treatment. But as Tom Hanks arrived at Lincoln Cathedral yesterday, he found himself somewhat upstaged. A handful of protesters were making their feelings known about the decision to film scenes from The Da Vinci Code in the historic building. Led by a Catholic nun, Sister Mary Michael, they claimed the movie, based on the bestselling novel by Dan Brown, should be filmed elsewhere. She led a 12-hour prayer vigil to push the message home. The controversial thriller is the story of a Vatican conspiracy to suppress the supposed...

THE film version of The Da Vinci Code is attempting to reduce the offence that the best-selling book caused to Roman Catholics. Sony Pictures, the studio behind the film starring Tom Hanks and Sir Ian McKellen, is reported to have been so concerned that it has consulted Catholic and other Christian specialists on how it might alter the plot of the novel to avoid offending the devout. Film officials have held talks with Catholic groups and other organisations despite Dan Brown, the author, insisting that “it’s only a novel and therefore a work of fiction”, The New York Times reported...

But "Da Vinci," set for release in May, is shaping up as one of the movie world's more complicated exercises - so much so that Sony has dropped a scrim of secrecy over the affair, refusing to discuss anything but the barest details. The script has been closely controlled. Outsiders have been banned from the set. And those associated with the film have had to sign confidentiality agreements. ...their silence is a measure of concern about the potentially incendiary nature of the subject matter. The book, which is fiction, takes aim at central Christian dogma, claiming that Jesus had a...

by Marcellino D'Ambrosio, Ph.D. Other Articles by Marcellino D'Ambrosio, Ph.D. New Age and the Da Vinci Code: Revisiting Gnosticism 07/05/05 For nearly a generation, the New Age movement has been importing exotic religious ideas from the East into middle-class America. For the past couple of years, a best-selling novel, supposedly based on the authority of a secret tradition, has painted for many a picture of Jesus far different than what we read in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In This Article...A Diverse MovementChristian Gnostics?The New Age- DaVinci Connection A Diverse Movement Qoheleth said it well: “What has been is what will...

Vatican's dilemma The church may resist attacking the movie as strongly as it did the book Bertone It was enough to make a cardinal kick a hole in a stained glass window: There they were, stacks of copies of "The Da Vinci Code" displayed as bold as sin in the windows of Catholic bookstores along the avenue leading into St. Peter's Square. For months, Vatican bureaucrats fumed at the sight. Then, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone lashed out. "I think," he said, "that I have a responsibility to clear things up, to unmask the cheap lies contained in a book like...

In Hollywood, as the old adage goes, bad books often make great movies. In fact, the pulpier the fiction, the better the final result (think "The Bourne Identity" or "The Bridgesof Madison County"), because then the movie adapters feel no qualms about making significant improvements. So it'll be fascinating to see how closely the team behind the 1995 smash "Apollo 13" - star Tom Hanks, director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer - will hew to Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," which started production in Paris on Wednesday. The phenomenally popular novel has remained on the U.S. best-seller list for...

Almost two million Canadians who read the mega-selling book, The Da Vinci Code, ended the novel convinced that Jesus Christ fathered a line of descendants on Earth, a new survey suggests. The coast-to-coast survey for the National Geographic Channel conducted by Decima Research found that, among 1,005 adults surveyed June 9-12, 16 per cent had read the book in the past two years. Among those readers, 32 per cent believed the story that "a holy bloodline exists and that this secret has been protected through the ages by a dedicated society," the television channel announced yesterday. The survey was conducted...

    Columbia Pictures plans to turn the novel The Da Vinci Code into a major Hollywood movie.... and lots of people have sent me emails urging me to do something about it.     I agree. We do need to do something. That’s why I am launching a national e-protest to stop this book from becoming a movie. And you can participate by sending your protest e-message to Columbia Pictures. Click here.     This is what people will see if we fail to stop The Da Vinci Code:     • Jesus and Saint Mary Magdalene married.... with children…     • Saint Mary Magdalene as the first...

One of the few benefits of the literary train wreck titled The Da Vinci Code is that the book has motivated everyday Christians to investigate the early Church. Was Jesus really married? Was “;pre-Catholic Christianity” actually a variant of ancient goddess-worshipping cults? What they find is something quite different from Dan Brown’s buffet of idiocies. No dressed-up paganism anywhere in sight. Rather, ancient Christians concerned themselves with two major points: First, understanding God’s revelation in light of the world around them; and second, preserving that revelation from the corruptions that such efforts can bring. That’s why so much of their work reached...

It is one of the world's most baffling puzzles, the bane of professional cryptologists and amateur sleuths who have spent 15 years trying to solve it. But the race to find the secrets of Kryptos, a sculpture inside a courtyard at the CIA's heavily guarded headquarters in Langley, Virginia, may be reaching a climax. And interest has soared since Dan Brown hid references to Kryptos on the cover design for his bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, and suggested it might play a role in his next novel, The Solomon Key. The Kryptos sculpture incorporates a coded message made up...

AMMAN -- Jordanian authorities reportedly confiscated copies of the controversial bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, for slandering Christianity. Amman's daily Al Ghad said that copies of the book were seized from a publishing house in the Jordanian capital and its owner, Ahmed Abou Tawk, was summoned for interrogation. The paper quoted the president of the state's Publication Department, Ahmed Kodat, as saying that other titles were confiscated in addition to The Da Vinci Code for undermining religions. "This book is largely harmful for Christianity and was banned from many countries, including Lebanon," Kodat said, noting that Christian clerics in Jordan...

An ancient document likened to something which could have been featured in best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code was being analysed at a top auction house for its significance today. The manuscript, believed to date from the 17th century, contains biographical details of every person in the Bible. It was unearthed in the depths of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth where it had been kept in storage for Llandovery College, an independent school near the Brecon Beacons. It was among about half of the school’s archive of books which were taken to the library around 50 years ago....

Ian McKellen, famous for his role of Gandalf, and Alfred Molina will be joining Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou in The Da Vinci Code. Ian McKellen, famous for his role of Gandalf, the wizard from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Alfred Molina of Spider-Man 2 will be joining Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou in The Da Vinci Code, according to Variety. Alfred Molina is set to play zealous Bishop Arigarosa, who’s keenly interested in the sleuthing activities of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks) and cryptographer Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou). Sir McKellen will play Sir Teabing, a wealthy man...

Filed: 19/04/2005) Toby Clements grits his teeth and finds inspiration in a bestseller Every couple of months, I have lunch with a friend who writes historical thrillers. He shares a publisher with Dan Brown, the author of the extraordinarily successful The Da Vinci Code, and every time we meet, we spend the first 15 minutes complaining about his rival's sales, which this week reached nearly 2½ million in paperback in Britain alone. The Da Vinci Code remains a mystery to its rival's author Neither of us had read the book, but that didn't stop us forming strong opinions about it....

Listen While You Freep! All programs are replayed for 23 hours and again on weekends so tune in when it’s convenient for YOU! Call In Number - 866-884-TALK (8255) Heating the EDGE of a New Media! 1pm EST - Is the labor union movement losing steam with the leadership battles, membership decline and regulation crackdown? Or is it gaining steam -- even going after judicial nominees? National Right to Work Foundation will join us to discuss. Also, Attorney Jim Bopp will join us to talk about his latest legal victory -- are you confused about who to vote for in...

March 27, 2005 OP-ED COLUMNIST The Vatican Code By MAUREEN DOWD ome may mock the Vatican for waiting until everyone on earth has read "The Da Vinci Code" to denounce "The Da Vinci Code." I am not one of them. It's Easter, and I don't want to blot my catechism. It's a little late, now that the two-year-old thriller by Dan Brown is a publishing miracle - with 25 million copies sold in 44 languages, a cascade of other books inspired by the novel and a movie with Tom Hanks set to start filming this spring - for Cardinal Tarcisio...