NOT SINCE Erich von Däniken maintained that extraterrestrials built Stonehenge has there been a more preposterous bestseller than The Da Vinci Code. In pedestrian prose and wooden characterisation, the book depicts a conspiracy that has suppressed the true history and doctrines of the early Church. In reality, Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who bore him a child and whose descendants dwell among us. Though a novel, The Da Vinci Code is claimed by its author, Dan Brown, to be based on historical fact.

The book has caused predictable outrage, including an outright ban in Lebanon lest it “worsen sectarian prejudices or offend religions”. This week the Cardinal Archbishop of Genoa attributed the book’s success to “great anti-Catholic prejudice”, and urged that it not be bought or read.

Such responses are more absurd than anything written by Dan Brown. Anti-Catholic prejudice does exist in our secular culture, and Brown has written a work of outstanding theological ignorance. But ignorance is not bigotry. The Da Vinci Code is not a work of systematic historical falsification for sinister purposes, like Holocaust denial. It is an imaginative reconstruction written for no more nefarious reason than enormous personal enrichment.

The Da Vinci Code stands in an established genre of fictional accounts of Christian origins. D. H. Lawrence’s The Escaped Cock (1929) depicts the risen Jesus being seduced by a priestess of Isis. In George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916), Jesus is not dead but comatose when taken down from the Cross. He lives for 20 years among the Essenes, till he meets Paul, who denounces him as a madman.

In his short story The Miracle of the Stigmata (1913), Frank Harris portrays Jesus marrying and living under the name Joshua while rejecting the new doctrines of Paul. On Joshua’s death, the Crucifixion scars are uncovered and Paul declares a miracle: “the Stigmata . . . had been wrought on the body of the last unbeliever in Caesarea.”

These are far greater literary works than The Da Vinci Code, but the ideas they express are no less heterodox, even blasphemous. We do not casually ascribe prejudice to those who read Lawrence or Moore, or regard these authors’ offensiveness to religious sensibilities as of the slightest public interest. That is as it should be, and Dan Brown and his readers merit the same minimal courtesies.