Liberal scholars often view them as "reliable facts suppressed by orthodox Christians," and "The Da Vinci Code" adopts that position, he said. "Just as we need to understand the provenance of scholarly texts, we need to understand the spin of the author."

The lecture series at BYU is just one of the latest attempts to explain that spin, and its larger historical and cultural implications, to readers.

Several Catholic and Evangelical theologians have challenged much of the extrabiblical interpretation put forth in the book, with at least two of them penning books of their own as a rebuttal.

Darrell Bock, a research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, was featured in an ABC-TV special last November exploring the debates surrounding Mary Magdalene that have been fanned as a result of "The Da Vinci Code."

"Dan Brown's book isn't an innocent novel," he said in a statement from his publicist. "There is something else going on here." He believes the book "at its very core is an attempt to reshape our culture and Christian beliefs." Bock, who with other evangelical colleagues has posted a detailed response to Brown's book on the seminary's Web site — www.dts.edu/dialogue — will release his own book, "Breaking the Da Vinci Code," in April.

He said the book will "expose the failings of Dan Brown's research and indicate where his claims are coming from. There is an important issue of cultural and religious identity that the novel carelessly plays with — and he is not alone in this effort." Bock's book is currently the subject of a legal challenge.

Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky., told the Deseret Morning News that Brown's best-selling novel is "bad history, bad analysis of early Christianity, and it misrepresents the Bible and the theology of God that's in the Bible. It's shoddy historiography and bad art history as well."

Brown brought a cascade of criticism on himself, Witherington said, when he claimed the rituals and documents he used to construct the book were true. "It's closer to pure fiction than historical fiction."

Despite its popularity with readers, Witherington said even the Gnostic gospels themselves don't claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. "The Gnostics are aesthetic, they avoid sexuality. Brown is so poorly informed he doesn't even understand he's jumbling gnosticism with paganism."