One of the bizarrest things about the whole DaVinci phenomenon is peoples' double-mindedness about the whole thing. In response to various criticisms of the book's fact-mangling, devotees will assert: "Ach, it's just a novel." (The "Ach" is, of course, optional.) Yet, every time you turn around, another soft-headed journalist is prattling on as though the whole thing were fact.

Today's case-in-point, from Slate:

Why We're All Jesus' Children
Go back a few millenniums, and we've all got the same ancestors...

If anyone living today is descended from Jesus, so are most of us on the planet....

The author starts out with the whole "if" thing nicely intact. But by the end of the piece, the assumption seems to have become an accomplished fact...

In addition to Jesus and the warlord, we're also all descended from Julius Caesar, from Nefertiti, from Confucius...

I have no idea who this guy is -- it seems people seem to think he's an expert on this sort of thing. But his contention seems to be wrong, as far as I can see. If we're ALL absolutely certainly descended from each Jew who procreated around the time of Jesus, then how on earth could they show that some Africans were Jews by pointing out they carried the Cohanim gene?

If "everyone" is descended from each and every reproducing Jew living at the time of Jesus, then you'd expect the gene should be scattered throughout the African continent, not just concentrated in one particular tribe which still followed Jewish rituals.

And I don't know how I -- or most Danish people -- are supposed to be descended from Confucious. Was there some early Danish ancestor who was supposed to have mated with some Chinese person back around 0AD? Or 1000AD? Logistically, how was this supposed to have worked?

Sorry, perhaps I'm wrong here, but this just still seems as wrong as the word "milleniums", which is used in the title of the article.