The gnostic gospels cited in "The Da Vinci Code" are no secret.

"The whole story of 'The Da Vinci Code' is built on these supposedly secret documents that will destroy the Christian faith and the Vatican will collapse. Well, I've had them sitting on my desk in English for 40 years," said Kenneth Bailey, a renowned New Testament scholar and canon theologian of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.

They appeared at least 100 years after Jesus' crucifixion. Most scholars believe they were the work of pagan mystics who liked stories about Jesus, but rejected key Christian doctrines. Their existence was always known because early bishops denounced them. But real study began after 1945, when many were unearthed in Nag Hammadi, Egypt.

Some scholars view gnosticism as an authentic form of Christianity that was unfairly suppressed, partly because church leaders believed it empowered women. Others, including Dr. Bailey, say gnosticism was a distortion of Christianity, whose record on women was mixed at best.

The scholarly consensus is that all books of the New Testament were completed by 90 AD, at least a generation before the first gnostic gospels. Contrary to the novel's assertion that the Emperor Constantine imposed the four gospels on the church in the fourth century, "95 percent of the canon was selected 150 years before Constantine was born," Dr. Bailey said.

By 100, he said, the four gospels were widely used and considered authoritative.

"They didn't ask whether these books were inspired. The question was, have they been passed down by the apostles? The issue wasn't even authorship," Dr Bailey said.

At no point were any of the gnostic gospels considered for inclusion, he said. Not only were they late, their Jesus was more Greek philosopher than Jewish rabbi. "These gnostic gospels are basically novels built on the person of Jesus," Dr. Bailey said.

While some gnostic gospels say Mary Magdalene understood Jesus better than the male disciples did, they also contain disturbing statements about women. The Gospel of Thomas ends with Jesus promising to make Mary Magdalene male: "For every woman who makes herself male will enter into the kingdom of heaven."

The novel argues that history is written by winners, and that the New Testament triumphed only because powerful orthodox bishops squelched the gnostics.

But "there wasn't any power in the early church," Dr. Bailey said.

Before the printing press, it was impossible to control publication, he said. "Books were produced by going to a copyist with a manuscript and agreeing on a price for copying it," he said.

The gnostic gospels "died because they didn't mean anything to anybody. They just faded out because they weren't worth copying or spending money on."