LONDON – 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, 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 programs 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 other works from the “more eccentric fringes” of early Christianity.

Archbishop Williams said some of the press coverage had been similar to that surrounding “The Da Vinci Code,” the Dan Brown novel that suggests that the Church was involved in a plot to keep women from positions of influence.

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.