CANTERBURY, England — The huge public appetite for revisionist stories like "The Da Vinci Code" shouldn't weaken the truth of the Gospel, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said Sunday.
Williams, leader of the world's Anglican Communion, used his Easter sermon to comment on the spread of conspiracy theories about religion.
He mentioned in particular Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," a fictional thriller based on theories that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had a child. It has sold more than 40 million copies since it was published in 2003.
"One of the ways in which we now celebrate the great Christian festivals in our society is by a little flurry of newspaper articles and television programs raking over the coals of controversies about the historical basis of faith," Williams told worshippers at Canterbury Cathedral.
Williams, who is the spiritual head of 70 million Anglicans around the globe, said "saturation coverage of the 'Da Vinci Code' literature" and the recent rediscovery of a 1,600-year-old "Gospel of Judas" were part of a widespread desire to expose conspiracies.
"We are instantly fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups. This has become so much the stuff of our imagination these days that it is only natural, it seems, to expect it when we turn to ancient texts, especially biblical texts," he said. "Anything that looks like the official version is automatically suspect."
But he said that while such theories may be appealing, they do not help in "understanding what the New Testament writers are actually saying and why." Williams said the Bible "is not the authorized code of a society managed by priests and preachers for their private purposes, but the set of human words through which the call of God is still uniquely immediate to human beings today."