Hey, people! It's just the entertainment biz. Big bucks, and just for fun. From a Bainbridge piece at TCS: Jesus Christ as Poache
d Egg. A quote:
...the International Herald Tribune reports, Brown has managed to convince many readers that DVC is "largely true." Indeed, as the IHT also reported, it is precisely the truth claims that attracted the attention of Sony executives: "The amazing thing about this book is it's provocative: Is it all true? Isn't it true?"
Perhaps no one has ever captured the basic problem with the truth claims made on behalf of DVC and its ilk better than C.S. Lewis, who observed in Mere Christianity that:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
All Dan Brown, Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, and that whole crew have accomplished is getting richer by saying that "really foolish thing."
Bainbridge's whole piece here.
