MORE DA VINCI CODE REFUTATION from New Testament Scholar Bart Ehrman and author Sharan Newman. The latter has a new book out called The Real History Behind The Da Vinci Code.

One error in Ehrman's comments, at least as presented in the article:

Brown's plot involves Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene, so the novel says it was unthinkable for a Jewish man to remain unmarried. But Ehrman says historians agree the Dead Sea Scrolls disprove Brown's claim.

Not so. The Dead Sea Scrolls never refer explicitly to celibacy. Josephus, Philo, and Pliny tell us that the Essenes, or some of them at any rate, lived lives of celibacy. A connection with the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, however plausible, is inferential. If we had the Scrolls but not the authors who comment on the Essenes, I doubt that it would have occurred to us to think that the Qumran group was celibate.

Ehrman's point remains: there is first-century C.E. evidence for celibate Jewish men. But it doesn't come from the Dead Sea Scrolls. I've written on this in greater detail here.

UPDATE: Speaking of the Da Vinci Code, here's a Scottish angle:

Da Vinci Code crush threat to Scots chapel (The Times)
Karin Goodwin

DA VINCI CODE fever is threatening the fabric of Rosslyn Chapel, the Scottish church reputed to be the resting place of the holy grail and featured in the bestselling book.

Fears that the building and its unique stone carvings are being put at risk by an influx of visitors will lead to tourists being banned from making unsupervised visits to the medieval chapel.

Since The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, visitor numbers at the 15th-century chapel have risen by 56%. Last year almost 70,000 visited the building in Midlothian, making it one of the country�s most popular tourist attractions.

[...]

UPDATE (11 January): Ken Penner e-mails

BTW, about your comment on the Qumran celibacy issue, "If we had the Scrolls but not the authors who comment on the Essenes, I doubt that it would have occurred to us to think that the Qumran group was celibate," there are still the cemeteries, the demographics of which are unquestionably skewed toward adult males, extremely so if one examines the standard N-S oriented graves in the cemetery east of the site. It is the absence of children that most surprises me; other cemeteries show 50% children (Tal Ilan, "'Bone of my Bones' (Genesis 2:23): Skeletal Remains, Gender and Social History" [Pages 195-214 in _Integrating Women into Second Temple History_; Peabody, Mass.: Hendricksen, 2001]). My best guess is that the women and men at Qumran abstained from procreation. Do you know of a good explanation for the cemetery demographics?

No, I don't, and you may well be right. But I am not an archaeologist and I would feel more sure about this if, first, the whole cemetery had been excavated and, second, if the archaeologists agreed on what the evidence we have from the site of Qumran means. The first won't happen any time soon: it's politically impossible now and may not come about until we can do it non-intrusively with molecular technology. And it doesn't sound to me as if the second is going to happen any time soon either.

Anyhow, in this case I was responding to Ehrman, who referred only to the Scrolls. I stand by my statement that if we only had them, it probably wouldn't occur to us to think of the group that collected them as celibate.

UPDATE (16 January): As I hinted above, perhaps not strongly enough, the error seems to have been the reporter's, not Ehrman's.