Pope’s book to dismiss Da Vinci fiction

POPE Benedict, in his first book since becoming Pontiff, shares his “personal search for the face of the Lord,” indirectly dismissing popular speculative versions of Christ’s life like The Da Vinci Code.

Jesus of Nazareth, released yesterday, is a highly complex theological treatise on Christ as both God and man in which the Pope dissects and analyses scripture passages like the old university professor he once was.

Benedict says the reader should not consider the 450-page work, a study he began about two years before his election and finished last September, as an infallible part of official Church teaching, writing: “Anyone is free to contradict me.”

The book is sprinkled with hundreds of Biblical references, citations, and quotes of people as disparate as Karl Marx and Mother Teresa, Socrates and Confucius, Dante and Nietzsche.

“I have tried to present the Jesus of the Gospels as the real Jesus, as the historical Jesus in the true sense,” writes Benedict, the Vatican’s top theologian for nearly 25 years.

Recently, Christian churches have fought against depictions of Christ which have worked their way into works of fiction such as The Da Vinci Code, which claimed that Jesus married, had children and never rose from the dead.

As if to confront these, Benedict writes: “Yes, it really happened. Jesus is not a myth. He is a man made of flesh and blood, a totally real presence in history ... he died and rose from the dead.”