I've said before that I would like my money back from my two-year Christianity Today subscription begun late last year and I repeat my general dissatisfaction with the magazine.

Maybe it's a blessing that I don't always have time every month to read from it but this month I made an effort because of all the current topics, Da Vinci in particular.

And the gratuitous Catholic slur at the end of Gary Burge's article on page 29 put me over the line. It reads like this, see for yourself:

"This came home to me when I was discussing The Da Vinci Code in a book group recently. Everyone there had a graduate degree, was a professing Christian, and had a professional career. But I was asked, 'What are the apocryphal Gospels, such as the Gospel of Mary, anyway? Don't Catholics have them in their Bible?'"

Even taken with a grain of salt the size of Lot's wife, I find it hard to believe that an "educated, professional evangelical" ever uttered such an absurdity. The comment could very well be a fiction of Burge's journalism. I might even be relieved to discover that no real life evangelical is ignorant enough to put forth such a question. Fair enough, the authenticity of the statement notwithstanding, the dubious sentiment still appears in the article, so what would make Burge and his editors think its inclusion a good idea?

Can't bear to pass up the irony that, of course, Catholics would include the Gospel of Mary among Matthew, Mark, Luke & John because we love all things Marian? Forget the fact that this is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, not of the BVM. Close enough for us?

Or, forget the fact that the Catholic Church set the New Testament canon and that we have always argued for four, and only four, gospels. Think, yeah, as soon as the fragmentary manuscripts were discovered and published, beginning in 1938, we Catholics greedily added it to our New Testament? Frankly, in case you haven't noticed, our church just doesn't move that quickly on anything, much less incorporating newly discovered "Scripture" into our Bibles.

From the preface to the NAB, revised edition:

The Greek text followed in this translation is that of the third edition of The Greek New Testament, edited by Kurt Aland, Matthew Black, Carlo Martini, Bruce Metzger, and Allen Wikgren, and published by the United Bible Societies in 1975. The same text, with a different critical apparatus and variations in punctuation and typography, was published as the twenty-sixth edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece in 1979 by the Deutsche Bibelstiftung, Stuttgart. This edition has also been consulted.

That said, it's actually the popular NIV which has its own eclectic Greek text for the New Testament.