A poor effort

I had just recently read "The holy blood and the holy grail", "the dead sea scrolls deception", the apocrypha, the gnostic gospels and a couple of highly enjoyable recent scholarly works on early Christianity. The prospect of diving into this book, hence, got me quite excited but I was quickly disappointed by the approach and the quality of this work. This was the first book in my recent reading about early Christianity where I essentially didn't learn anything new.
A lot is plainly banal, especially when the author reasons on why this or that has to be interpreted in this or that way, so often coming around with the jovial argument from authority (I am the historian here). Much of the reasoning is circular, like: Brown's characters claim that documents concerning an intimate relationship between Jesus and the Magdalene were withheld and destroyed by the early church, Ehrman: it is not true that the two had an intimate relationship because we have no early sources that would say so - seriously?? This is lazy thinking. The book is full of such examples, there was hardly a single minute in between that did not provoke a counter argument in my mind which the author did not take into account himself. That's not unbiased or good scholarship, and I really disliked the book.
Also, it hardly deals with or even mentions Brown's sources (clearly the two controversial titles mentioned in the first sentence of this review). Overall very disappointing. Not even the audio is well done, you regularly hear the author munching, swallowing, turning pages or whatever it was that created these unpleasant noises.

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