Angels And Demons

‘Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code. A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name’. That’s how Salman Rushdie described Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster in an interview with the Lawrence Journal-World in 2005.

Rushdie isn’t alone in his unflattering assessment of Dan Brown’s writing. More recently, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Geoffrey Pullum told the Daily Telegraph that ‘Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad’.

And Pullum isn’t just being a high-minded literary snob, either; the professor has a point. To illustrate his case, Pullum cites a passage from Angels and Demons in which the lead female character hears about the death of her scientist father. ‘Genius, she thought. My father . . . Dad. Dead’ writes Brown.

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You have to hand it to the Pope. He’s got ticker. This week he asserted science had provided proof of a key plank of the story of the Catholic Church - a test on bones from a Roman tomb “seems to confirm” they belonged to St Paul the Apostle.

Calling on scientific evidence to prove Church teaching is grounded in historical fact is a staggeringly high-stakes game for the Pope to play. As technology advances, archaeologists will only build an ever-clearer picture of the past. As in the case of St Paul - who along with St Peter was instrumental in founding the modern Church - there may be evidence along the way that suggests certain people lived and died precisely as the Church says.

But what happens when the science calls it into question? What happens if scientists produce convincing evidence that certain things didn’t happen, or someone didn’t exist?

What if that someone was, say, Jesus?

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