Popular media's modern depiction of religion tends to be negative, though some scholars see it as a double-edged sword that also gets consumers thinking about topics they may otherwise never consider.

At least two discussions on the topic are continuing through Friday at Brigham Young University during its annual Education Week, which draws thousands of Latter-day Saints from across the United States and several foreign countries for a week of immersion into presentations about how their faith plays out in daily life.

Richard Holzapfel and Thomas Wayment, both religion faculty members at BYU, focused on recent discussion in popular media surrounding the best-selling novel, "The Da Vinci Code," and the questions it has raised among readers who continue to wonder how much of the fictional work is fact. They dismissed some of the myths they say the book generated during a presentation Wednesday at the Marriott Center.

• The Dead Sea Scrolls have nothing to do with Christian history, yet the novel states that they are among "the earliest Christian records." In reality, the texts were written by Jews in the first century A.D., and give a context for the time of Jesus but do not mention or chronicle his life in any way.

• The Catholic Church did not suppress the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices, a set of ancient books found in Egypt that include some of the recently publicized "Gnostic gospels" including the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip. No religious group tried to suppress them.

• The Gnostic gospels are not the "true" account of history, put aside by early church leaders in favor of the current New Testament canon. "They have nothing to do with what Jesus did," Holzapfel said, but present "the Jesus of imagination, of fiction ... of intellectual arrogance."

• There is no evidence Mary Magdalene was ever married to Jesus. She was a financial supporter and disciple, and was the first to see the resurrected Christ, Wayment said.

Another class Tuesday examined how Hollywood portrays religion, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. BYU faculty member Brett Latimer said after positive portrayals during the World War II era, the ensuing three decades were filled with increasingly negative characterizations that portray clergy and believers alike as corrupt, abusive, sexually perverse, fanatical, crazy, greedy and simple-minded.

Latter-day Saints are most often represented as isolationists, fanatics, and nice but incompetent, he said, though there are a few more depictions of late that portray them as "well-ordered, stable and sane."

---

E-mail: carrie@desnews.com