Tuesday, June 27, 2006

Old News

The Da Vinci Code dropped off the NY Times best seller list after its June 18th appearance at number 12 (166 weeks on the list). The paperback edition remains at the top of the paperback list, of course, ruining an early theory that "everyone" has now read it, or seen the movie, and so got over it.

3 comments:

Malnurtured Snay said...

I don't understand how such an awful book can be so popular.

Anonymous said...

Never heard of it.

Fringe Element Enthusiast said...

Disposable fiction for a disposable world we live in. Took a looong time for this book to settle down. Maybe the movie hindered it (with the panned reviews) more than kept it chugging. What I find interesting is that some people I talk to say stuff like, I don't see why people are getting so upset over it (the Church, etc), it's just "fiction".
Well, yes, it is, BUT the idea of this Jesus dude being married is NOT necessarily fiction. Neither is a lot of the new testament tales compared a lot of the earlier religions (Golden Bough is a good book to look at for this, as well as Jesus Mysteries, Jesus and the Lost Goddess and Pagan Christs, etc etc.)
I guess the point is that while Dan Brown giggles to the bank, and media and people explore this new "historic" possibility, there is a bigger controversy being overlooked here. Egyptian, Greek and other "pagan" religions came up with a lot of these stories first, the early Christians adopted them (perhaps sold by this Jesus fellow), and Paul sold the heck out of HIS spin of Christianity to the powers that be WAY back in days before weapons of mass destruction, Marketing Strategists, Starbucks and Tom Hanks.

That is all.