Unravelling the Da Vinci Code

Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood peel away the evidence to find an extraordinary hoax at the heart of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel.

The greatest publishing success of last year was Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, with its headline-grabbing suggestion that Jesus escaped death on the cross and travelled to the south of France, where he married Mary Magdalene and raised a family. Understandably, this has upset many Christians, but the novel's enthusiasts have flocked in such numbers to see the real sites associated with the story that visitor numbers to places such as Westminster Abbey and the Temple Church in London, the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland and the Louvre in Paris, have risen dramatically.

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