Sports Calendar

So what are the gospels? “We must rediscover them as forms of mystagogic texts.” Mystagogic? “Initiating the reader into a mystery. Once you recognise that this is what the texts are, they come alive in a most humane way.”

Like Brown, then, Griffith-Jones is trying to rescue Mary Magdalene from centuries of error and fear. His next book will be about her and the role of women in the early Church. In a funny sort of way, I say, wasn’t D. H. Lawrence trying for a similar rehabilitation of the carnal in Lady Chatterley’s Lover? “That’s very interesting. Yes, he does talk of sex as a sort of sacrament.”

The 1960 trial, in which a jury cleared Penguin books of obscene publication, has been on people’s minds because of Andrew Davies’s BBC TV drama in which Pip Torrens played Mervyn Griffith-Jones, Robin’s father. Was, I ask, his home full of servants being told what to read by his dad? “We had a nanny. My father died when I was in my early twenties, but I have been told by his junior that he when he sat down at the trial after his opening speech he said, ‘ That’s it. It’s over’. He knew he had lost. His junior said it was quite surprising because Dad apparently would write out his speeches word for word, and he’d added this sentence about wives and servants at the last minute.”

His father wanted Robin to follow him into the law. “I had a rather unsettled schooling because I was not, as a young man, very good at recognising what I was rebelling against. In fact, I was trying to react against the path laid out for me.”

He quit Eton for Westminster and obtained a third in maths at Oxford. Later, he worked in the English drawings and watercolours department at Christie’s, though during his first week a friend angered him by predicting that he would end up ordained. In his late twenties he left Christie’s, worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta for six months and was eventually accepted by the Church. After spending three years as a curate in Liverpool, he became chaplain at Lincoln College, Oxford, and joined the Temple in 1999.

And yet, I note, for a man so spirited in his support of women, he has never married? “It is the regret of my life so far. I’d like to have a family. Here I am writing a book about Mary Magdalene! I’m not sure, in a way, if I’m the person best equipped to do so. I spent quite a lot of my life quite close to someone but it isn’t the same as being married and having a family.”

So he lives an untidy bachelor’s life in a house a few yards from the Temple. “God willing, one day it will fall into place and I’ll then have that completeness.”

I ask if, all in all, he is glad Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code. “Yes, in the larger setting of the responses that it’s made possible from churches. In itself, it just sort of hangs there and can mislead people, but it does give an astonishing opportunity for churches to respond and clarify things in an open and upbeat way, and for that I’m very glad.”

The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of The Temple, Canterbury Press (£4.99). Robin Griffith-Jones’s next Friday talk is on April 21