London, England - Conspiracy theories and newly discovered ancient texts will not undermine the truth of the Gospel, the Archbishop of Canterbury said in his Easter Sunday sermon.
The best-selling thriller, The Da Vinci Code, and the recently unearthed "Gospel of Judas" might appeal to people's sense of mystery, but the real Bible transformed lives, Dr Rowan Williams said at Canterbury Cathedral.
The Archbishop dismissed suggestions that the early Church had manipulated the truth about Jesus, and decried the modern tendency to believe that it had been involved in a Watergate-style cover-up.
"One of the ways in which we now celebrate the great Christian festivals in our society is by a little flurry of newspaper articles and television programmes raking over the coals of controversies about the historical basis of faith," he said.
"So it was no huge surprise to see a fair bit of coverage a couple of weeks ago to the discovery of a 'Gospel of Judas', which was, naturally, going to shake the foundations of traditional belief by giving an alternative version of the story of the Passion and Resurrection."
In fact, he said, the crumbling papyrus was a translation of a late text that echoed a large number of other works from the "more eccentric fringes" of early Christianity.
Dr Williams said some of the media coverage had been similar to that surrounding The Da Vinci Code, the novel by Dan Brown which suggests that the Church was involved in a plot to keep women from positions of influence. "We are instantly fascinated by the suggestion of conspiracies and cover-ups; this has become so much the stuff of our imagination these days that it is only natural, it seems, to expect it when we turn to ancient texts - especially biblical texts," said Dr Williams.
The first assumption people made was that they were faced with spin of some kind, with an agenda being forced on them. "So that the modern response to the proclamation, 'Christ is risen!' is likely to be, 'Ah, but you would say that, wouldn't you?
"Now, what's the real agenda?' We don't trust power; and because the Church has historically been part of one or another sort of establishment and has often stood very close to political power, perhaps we can hardly expect to be exempt from this general suspicion.
"What it doesn't help us with is understanding what the New Testament writers are actually saying and why."
The Bible was not "the authorised code of a society managed by priests and preachers for their private purposes, but the set of human words through which the call of God is still uniquely immediate to human beings today".
He said that it had been written by people who, by writing what they did and believing what they did, "were making themselves, in the world's terms, less powerful, not more.
"They were walking out into an unmapped territory, away from the safe places of political and religious influence".
If people wanted to know what the message was about today, they should turn to people who were taking the same risks, he said.
There were still places where conversion to Christianity was a matter of putting one's life on the line, he said, referring to the case of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man granted asylum in Italy last month after facing possible execution in his country for becoming a Christian.
"We know that his story is not unique," said Dr Williams.
"We can say there with absolute certainty that whatever the Gospel means in circumstances like that, it isn't a cover-up for the sake of the powerful."