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.”