I agree!! The whole priory of sion stuff was crap. I did enjoy the historical overview about the cathars, Knights templar etc, but you need to filter out the Sion stuff.
And as far as Jesus as a figure goes, there is a book called "One Jesus Many Christs" that talks about how the figure of Jesus and his life was filtered through the Greek hero/God stories and took on aspects of those myths in order to appeal to the gentiles and Romans so that the religion did not die out. Very interesting stuff.
As far as the DaVinci Code--I enjoyed reading it, and it really led me to read a lot more of the Gnostic history and scripture. I can't be sorry about that.
I had high hopes when I bought the book last summer to take to the beach. I was rather let down. As light, fluffy, beach reading it's fine and dandy, at times even a page turner, I guess, but sheesh...the guy doesn't know squat about art history (again, even the title is wrong), and there was one section that annoyed me a great deal (taking more than a dozen pages to get to the point -- as though it were a huge revelation -- that "sophia" means "Wisdom". Well...duuuhh. The author apparently has not much respect for the educational background of the reading public as he seemed to think he was being *very* clever with the sophia bit).
The book suffered from plenty of "cheese" factor as well, and the ahem..."ceremony" was kind of..well, it's been done to death in other literary incarnations, hasn't it.
The ending was weak, too. Eh....I gave my copy away to a relative, who died a week later...I would say it might have been the book but I *did* also give her a copy of "Girl With a Pearl Earring", which is quite nice (though the only decent book by that author, imo).
