Sour Grapes

“It’s true that I let a few little mistakes go in the first edition,” said Brown. “Factual errors about Biblical history, early Christianity and Judaism, Catholic theology, Egyptian mythology, Mithraism, the origins and language of the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels, the Nicene Council, Emperor Constantine, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi texts, the history and modern organizational structure of Opus Dei, the history of the Vatican, interpretations of Leonardo’s Last Supper and Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s sexuality, the history of the Knights Templar, the history and architecture of Rosslyn Chapel and the Church of Saint-Sulpice, the history and geography of Paris, the location of Versailles, the position of Curator of the Louvre, the design of the Louvre Pyramid, the French education system, the French language, Andorra’s rail system and propensity for seismic activity, the geography of London and the procedures of the Metropolitan Police, the astronomical position of Venus, the feasibility of a button-sized GPS tracking device, the number of female victims of the Inquisition, the existence of a professorship of religious symbology at Harvard University, the existence of a scholarly discipline of religious symbology, the origin of the word ‘minstrel’, the ratio of male and female bees in a hive, the secret agenda of Disney films, the number of words in Job 38:11, the existence and supposed history of a Priory of Sion, the physical characteristics of people with albinism, to name a few — and, umm, the divinity of Jesus, and the notion that there is any historical evidence, at all, that Jesus had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene. “These are all minor errors,” said Brown, “but a few people have complained about them since the novel was first published. We’ve corrected a few errors over the years in different editions, but Doubleday and I felt it was time we had another bite at the apple, and release a new edition with enough changes that people would want to buy it again.” (via 101 Reasons to Stop Writing : » Breaking News: Dan Brown, Doubleday to Publish Da Vinci Code 1.5)