For King, the Da Vinci effect was farther-reaching than any book reviewer had foreseen. It helped turn a scholar whose intellectual passions had been confined to classrooms, academic tracts and the occasional church into a best-selling author with live audiences of hundreds and a television viewership of millions. Yet it put King in a curious bind: On the one hand, The Da Vinci Code was just the latest of more than fifteen hundred years of fictions about Mary Magdalene—and fictions about Magdalene were precisely what King had devoted her career to dispelling. On the other hand, this particular
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