Quickly! I want to get home to watch the History Channel. Tom and Audrey in The Da Vinci Code. Photograph: Simon Mein/AP
By way of answering those fretful clerics who think the large-scale absence of Jesus-based greetings cards and general air of satanic consumerism indicates a society speeding towards damnation, here, for anyone interested, are the seasonal Christian options (crudely put, but let's get them over with). Should you believe, you can turn up at church, rejoice in the Godly version of the winter solstice and pray a lot. If you just fancy a taste of all that, you can join the suddenly-swelled ranks at midnight mass and then forget about it all for another year. Or maybe you'd like to switch on your TV set and bolster a new kind of Christ-centric business: that wave of conspiracy theory, cod-history, pseudo-religiosity and potboiler dreck that was started by The Da Vinci Code and shows no sign of disappearing.
What with Jesus being around a lot at the moment, you won't have to look very hard. On Christmas night, the History Channel brings us something called Illuminating Angels and Demons, which apparently has a long hard look at "the validity of the claims made in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, asking whether the secret Illuminati society existed and searching for the links to the work of Galileo and Raphael." The following day, they're offering Decoding the Past, which is all about the infamous Knights Templar. And on December 29, there are two hours of Beyond The Da Vinci Code, "an exploration of the facts that inspired the alternative history in Dan Brown's controversial novel." (Hats off to UKTV History, while we're here, who are sticking to what they're good at: there, December 25 is the second world war and the Nazis all the way).
Lest anyone think this is just a matter of the usual satellite silliness, however, consider what Channel 4 are showing on Christmas night: a 120-minute production called The Secret Family of Jesus, in which "Theologian Robert Beckford travels to the Holy Land to find out whether Christ really did have a family that endured, 300 years after his crucifixion." The Channel 4 website hypes up the show with an inspired question: "Did he get married and did he have kids - and if so, where are they now?" I reckon they're probably long dead, but don't let that put you off.
Now, far be it from me to cast doubt on Beckford's academic clout, but a quick online trawl revealed that he is the author of a book called Jesus Dub, which makes the entirely sensible point that just as dub reggae producers occasionally put transformational echo on the vocals and rework the bassline, so the messiah's preaching found "hypocrisy and failure" changing into "compassion and forgiveness" (according to the synopsis, moreover, "dub style appears in the teachings of Jesus"). This perhaps doesn't exactly imply programming of a Simon Schama/David Starkey standard, but it's probably best to let that pass.
Far more important, I think, is the fact that all this tomfoolery has moved from the borderline lunatic fringe to an immovable place in our national conversation. Once there was Nostradamus and the iconic 70s series Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World now, millions of people have been encouraged to blur the difference between history and faith and tie themselves in completely unnecessary knots. I'm an agnostic, personally, so speaking on behalf of believers makes me feel a bit uneasy, but the point needs making: contrary to all this nonsense, Christianity has nothing to fear from archaeology, academic research, people who think St Paul made it all up, or the imaginary version of the Public Records Office visited by Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou in the rib-tickling Da Vinci movie. 1. It's actually much more magical and mystical than that, and 2. Actually, no one is ever going to find anything that settles the "debate" one way or the other.
So, a proposed New Year's resolution to finish. Can we begin 2007 by leaving Dan Brown to count all his money and exiling all this to its proper place? And if that eternal thirst for mystery and conspiracy will always have to be quenched, how about something a bit more interesting? Let the search begin, I say. "Chelsea Library" might be a good place to start.
