Peter may have been the "rock" on which the Church was founded, but Paul is the rock on which protestations of Biblical gender-equality and respect for women tend to founder. Which is not to say that, elsewhere in the Bible, women are not accorded great respect and value. The Bible is a whacking big book, written by many different authors, and you can find within it support for just about any theological argument you care to make.

My point in dragging out 1 Corinthians (which sort of Godwinizes any debate over Biblical gender-issues) was not to attack Christianity, but to point out an obvious flaw in the claim that people who view the Church or the Bible as supporting misogyny are simply "scriptually illiterate." T'ain't necessarily so. If you want to use the Bible as evidence of the "naturaleness" and "rightness" of female subjugation, the text is easy to find, and Paul is the first and most obvious go-to guy.

And on a tangential but related note, I find it curious that the Bishop regards wives and girlfriends as mere "appendages," such that they are inherently to be accorded less respect than students. Off the top of my head, I don't love this, but I haven't read any of his work, and am responding merely to the text laid out in the previous letter.

So what's your solution to this "problem," Longtime? People shouldn't be permitted to write or read fiction?

>Don't be silly, bookseller. Just don't be disingenuous.

Mmmm, I don't think I'm either (well, occasionally silly). As it happens, after I responded to you I backed off and thought about "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which was similarly a piece of fiction that was widely read as fact, and similarly made ugly and scandalous allegations about a particular group. If that were the piece of fiction under discussion, my reactions would be very different, and I don't think that double standard is fair.

At the same time, I have a very hard time buying into the notion that an inquiry into the true nature and history of any group or organization is a bad thing. Dangerous, perhaps, but ultimately healthy, rather than the reverse.

FYI, "The Da Vinci Code" is hardly the first thriller -- not even the first bestselling thriller (though we might need to coin a new phrase to describe TDVC's extreme bestseller-ness) -- to focus on the Church or even on Opus Dei, as the villain. Off the top of my head I can point to Thomas Gifford's "The Assassini" and Daniel Easterman's "Brotherhood of the Tomb." Both were fairly big honking bestsellers in their day, and the Easterman book, in particular, postulates both some extremely heretical notions about Christ's death and a centuries-long cover-up on the part of the Church.

But thrillers, you know, thrive on the existence of secretive organizations. There have been zillions written in which the CIA is the bad guy, or the Masons, or U.S. oil companies in league with shadowy gentlemen from the Middle East with long robes and briefcases stuffed with money. Often -- as is the case with TDVC -- the blame is cast on a "rogue" faction within the larger organization; thus it's not the Vatican or the Fraternal Order of Freemasons or even the Central Intelligence Agency or Standard Oil that gets the blame and the ultimate bullets, but a small nefarious band operating independently but under the larger organization's cloak of secrecy.

So really, I'm going back to my earlier question: Should conspiracy thrillers be banned because they cast some group or other in a bad light, or purport to call into question some aspects of a given group's passionately held beliefs? Or should they be permitted only if they're badly done, such that their persuasive powers are nonexistent?

And on a completely unrelated note, the "reason" Salman Rushdie called TDVC "typewriting" is that he swiped the line from Truman Capote's famous dismissal of Jack Kerouac.

>But why applaud someone who advances ridiculous claims that real church historians reject?

Um, because they make for a fairly entertaining story, and the purpose of fiction is entertainment? You keep pushing this argument, that fiction -- at least, fiction about something you care about (as opposed to things that others might care about) -- should either not be fiction and thus adhere to the strictest conventions of scholarship, or should be lousy fiction, such that no one could find it remotely convincing or compelling.

Historians are pretty clear that King Arthur never existed in the form that myth and Mallory have created, yet thousands of people make pilgramages to Glastonbury and Tintagel, just as thousands are now flocking to sites mentioned in "The Da Vinci Code." Are you similarly offended by "The Once and Future King"? Do you want to do away with Shakespeare? Historically speaking, his depiction of Richard III is pretty far off the mark.

It's too bad, perhaps very much too bad, when a given piece of fiction both paints a given group in a bad light and proves so compelling that some people take that depiction as the truth. (I imagine that surviving Plantagenets were not particularly thrilled to have their royal ancestor popularly regarded as a child-murdering monster.) But again, what do you propose as an alternative? And again again, to the extent that those compelling fictions promote inquiry into the real history of the Church, or of King Arthur, or of Richard III, I can only view them as a net positive.