I enjoyed reading Raymond Khoury's novel, except for the ending, which always felt to me like it was added by an insistent editor.
The film version is a major disappointment, for all of the reasons I have read in user comments here and more, including ludicrous dialog, totally inane jumps in logic (digging in the middle of the desert and just immediately finding a buried city), finding the long lost sunken ship in the middle of a horrible storm, and on and on.
But the most offensive deviation from the novel was the part about the Templars having just "invented" the Gospel of Jesus, rather than discovering it in the rubble underneath the Temple in Jerusalem -- and then also turning the character of the older male archaeologist who had been seeking the truth of the Templars into a raving lunatic determined to bring down Christianity. This is the same kind of argument I have found over the years from people who insist that one cannot believe both in God and Evolution --- e.g. that it was not possible for God or a creative force to have created the evolutionary process. Here, the theology is somehow that the transforming message of Jesus is somehow totally irrelevant if one does not believe that Jesus was God, which I find offensive. This was and is the great debate that was central to the struggles in early Christianity between the followers of Peter and the Gnostics, the outcome of which was what determined what gospels made it into the New Testament and which gospels were banned (some of which were discovered in the desert in 1945 or so at Nag Hammadi).
The film version is a major disappointment, for all of the reasons I have read in user comments here and more, including ludicrous dialog, totally inane jumps in logic (digging in the middle of the desert and just immediately finding a buried city), finding the long lost sunken ship in the middle of a horrible storm, and on and on.
But the most offensive deviation from the novel was the part about the Templars having just "invented" the Gospel of Jesus, rather than discovering it in the rubble underneath the Temple in Jerusalem -- and then also turning the character of the older male archaeologist who had been seeking the truth of the Templars into a raving lunatic determined to bring down Christianity. This is the same kind of argument I have found over the years from people who insist that one cannot believe both in God and Evolution --- e.g. that it was not possible for God or a creative force to have created the evolutionary process. Here, the theology is somehow that the transforming message of Jesus is somehow totally irrelevant if one does not believe that Jesus was God, which I find offensive. This was and is the great debate that was central to the struggles in early Christianity between the followers of Peter and the Gnostics, the outcome of which was what determined what gospels made it into the New Testament and which gospels were banned (some of which were discovered in the desert in 1945 or so at Nag Hammadi).