In an interview published on May 8, 2006, Newsweek magazine asked Tom Hanks, "How do you soothe the people who consider the story [of The Da Vinci Code] offensive?"

Hanks replied, "We're all gonna keep using the word 'fiction.' Fiction, fiction, fiction."

But whatever you think of The Da Vinci Code, you'd have to say that it's a very unusual kind of fiction. In historical fiction, everyone expects that the novelist is going to play with what's called the "foreground." The writer will invent minor characters and make up their dialogue. But, according to historian Paul Maier, you don't change the basic historical events or mess with the identity of established people when writing fiction based on history. If you want to put Henry VIII in your novel, go ahead, but you can't make him an Irish chambermaid. He has to be the King of England and have six wives.

You say: "Who cares? Why can't Dan Brown have a little fun?"

Let me put it this way. This year, I toured the Civil Rights museum in Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1960s, they called the city "Bombing-ham" because so many black leaders and white sympathizers there were having their homes firebombed and their children killed. I saw photographs of the laundry trucks that would not mix the laundry from black people and the laundry from white people. I held the cold, iron bars of the jail cell in which Martin Luther King Jr. sat, beaten and alone, and wrote to his critics the Letter from a Birmingham Jail—one of the most profound and important letters in all of American history.

Now, suppose someone was writing a novel about a Harvard professor who is studying the Civil Rights movement. And in this novel, by decoding various symbols, the professor discovers that Martin Luther King was becoming desperately afraid of the threats on his life. So, on the day of the giant March on Washington, when 200,000 people gathered in the largest demonstration in the history of Washington till that time, King never went to the march. Instead, he stayed holed up in the corner of his hotel room, whimpering like a baby. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, had infiltrated the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in order to spy on King and, using an amazingly clever costume, it was Hoover who actually stood on the white, marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and gave the immortal speech, "I Have a Dream." To cover up this appalling fact, the NAACP began murdering anyone who discovered it, including Bobby Kennedy.

Now if someone published that novel, we all would be outraged because it would cast a slur on Martin Luther King, on the Civil Rights movement, on the African-American community, on American history, and on America itself. We would say: "That may be fiction, but it stepped over a big line. You can't just take real people in history and change major facts about their lives."

But in The Da Vinci Code, that's exactly what Dan Brown does to Jesus Christ—not to mention Roman emperor Constantine and Mary Magdalene.