With just over a week remaining until the release of what is expected to be one of this year's box office smashes, it was inevitable that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was going to be one of the key issues on everyone's lips at the National Christian Resources Exhibition taking place at Sandown Park in Esher this week.

|PIC1|A debate hosted by The Times’ religious correspondent, Ruth Gledhill, brought together a mixed panel which included evangelical director of Focus Radio, David Couchman, Catholic film critic, Fr Peter Malone, and the Master of the Temple Church, the Rev Robin Griffith-Jones.

The panel also included author Lynn Picknett, a lecturer on heresy and the occult, who contends that Jesus was besotted with Mary Magdalene and was his chosen successor, not St Peter.

Panellists were challenged to debate the interchange between faith and the historical facts, with many in the audience defending their faith as based on something entirely separate from historical proof and rationale.

Fr Malone said, “Although the story has many irritating inaccuracies, it does provide an opportunity for discussion.”

Picknett, who sides with Dan Brown, said prior to the debate: “The rejection of the earlier Gnostic gospels from the New Testament - or at least the sentiments and beliefs of the Gnostics - does appear to be extreme censorship, if not actual cover-up. |QUOTE|

“In our view, the more people ask questions the better, although the usual Christian attitude towards its doctrines and theology is the fewer questions, the better.”

Clive Prince, who has co-authored a number of books with Picknett, was also on the panel and welcomed Brown’s book for “opening the debate” on the facts of the Christian faith and how it came into being.

“Nobody can argue with the personal experience, but we are strictly talking about debating the historical side and Dan Brown’s got us doing it which is very, very helpful,” said Prince.

|TOP|Couchman maintained in the debate, however, that Dan Brown’s claims on the Christian faith were both “distorted and dishonest”, while Fr Malone asserted that the claims of Picknett were based on gross “generalisations” of the Catholic faith and the history of the Church.

Speaking to Christian Today after the debate, Rev Griffith-Jones denied that The Da Vinci Code phenomenon was a mountain out of a molehill, saying that, “A great many people are asking perfectly sensible, honest, genuine questions and they are finding some of the claims made in the book, and the claims to which they gave rise, a stumbling block”.

He said that Christians had “a real duty to set the record straight”, adding that many had been to his church already where they were able to learn the truth about some of the fundamental errors of The Da Vinci Code.

|AD|“I’m not naïve,” said Rev Griffith-Jones. “Of all the people that will go to see the film in the world, about one in 20,000 would encounter what I say about the book, so of course one has a tiny effect, it pea-shoots against an elephant.

“But if enough of us respond thoughtfully and ably and generously and without being scratchy and angry then I think we do have a place.”

This sentiment was echoed by Couchman in a special seminar he held to follow-on from the debate.

In the seminar he said that Dan Brown was “pressing all the right buttons” with The Da Vinci Code, warning that it was “going to shape the way people think about the Church for years to come”.

He criticised the recent calls for Christians and churches to sue cinemas that show the film, saying that such action “makes us seem small-minded and miserable and doesn’t win people to Christ”.

“Churches should actually book out the cinema like with The Passion,” said.

Couchman urged Christians to engage with the issues and get people talking about the history of their faith.

“Christianity can stand up to that kind of examination,” he said. “If it can't then what is it worth?”