the (real) da vinci code

So I finished the Da Vinci Code yesterday. It was a pretty entertaining book. Not great, but interesting. Assuming they get some decent actors and a good budget, the movie should do pretty well. A friend of mine already lent me a copy of Angels and Demons (the book to which The Da Vinci Code is actually a sequel which deals with the Illuminati and the Vatican).

Anyway, part of the The Da Vinci Code really focuses on a secret stash of documents which establish a radically different alternative understanding of Christian history. I'm not going to spoil the novel by giving away whether the characters find this hidden stash or not. But in the "real world", if you are curious, you might be interested in checking out some of the many resources out there associated with early alternative forms of Christianity.

The most significant alternative form of early Christianity is Gnosticism.

A good resource for looking at many of these alternative texts (Other gospels, the Nag Hammadi texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.) is the Gnostic Society Library

Another good place to look is the Wesley Center Online's page on Noncanonical Literature or the early Christian writings page

There is a large amount of overlap among these pages but you they each have their differences too.

From a Muslim perspective this literature is especially interesting because it can help fill a particular gap: If Jesus was a Muslim, then where did the original Christians go, and where did the Pauline Christians come from?

By looking at these alternative texts maybe we can come closer to the actual Gospel of Jesus; the Injeel described in the Quran. And by looking at the history of these other groups perhaps we can understand the process by which Christianity went from the original teachings of Christ, to spreading and "mutating" into a larger movement with ALOT of theological diversity, and then changing again into the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire.

For example, some Christian groups had different understandings of the crucifixion and saw Jesus as a human and not as the divine second person of the Trinity.