'Fiction, as if it were fact, as if it were history, and say 'Well, this really rocks my world? What I’ve always come to understand about Jesus and the Catholic church is suddenly everything’s up for grabs and that shakes a lot of people up,” says NBC News analyst Father Thomas Williams of Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University. But readers are told right from the start that 'all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.' That provocative statement gives an air of credibility to the book's elaborate conspiracy theories and it's caused millions of readers to wonder how much they really know about Jesus and a woman named Mary Magdalene.
That scene, from the opening pages of “The Da Vinci Code” is, of course, fiction.
