Dan Brown, 2003
Doubleday
An enjoyable thriller, with short chapters and lots of both suspense and documentation.
Characters:
Chapter 28, p 125
The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum -- or The Witches' Hammer-- indoctrinated the world to "the danger of freethinking women" [...] During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.
Chapter 55, p 232
[Constantine] was a lifelong pagan who was baptised on his deathbed, too weak to protest. In Constantine's day, Rome's official religion was sun worship --the cult of Sol Invictus-- and Constantine was its head priest. Unfortunately for him, a growing religious turmoil was gripping Rome. [...] In 325 A.D., he decided to unify Rome under a single religion, Christianity. [...] he created a kind of hybrid religion that was acceptable to both parties.
[...]
December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus.
[...] Originally, Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan's veneration day of the sun.
p 234
Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ's human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.
[...] The word heretic derives from that moment in history. The Latin word haereticus means 'choice'.
Chapter 83, p 343
London's ancient Temple Church was constructed entirely of Caen stone. A dramatic, circular edifice with a daunting facade, a central turret, and a protruding nave off one side, the church looked more like a military stronghold than a place of worship. Consecrated on the tenth of February in 1185 by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, the Temple Church survived eight centuries of political turmoil, the Great Fire of London, and the First World War, only to be heavily damaged by Luftwaffe incendiary bombs in 1940.