Minnesota Women's Press is featuring a short interview with Elaine Pagels, author and Dan Brown-inspirer regarding the 'secret history' of Mary Magdalene (via her books such as The Gnostic Gospels). In the interview, Pagels confides that she doesn't have too much of a problem with Dan Brown riffing on her themes (unlike Baigent and Leigh):

I think that’s one of the ways that scholarly work begins to be known. He’s raising important questions about history, like if we didn’t know Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute, what else don’t we know?

She does point out though, that Brown's portrayal is the flipside to the Catholic view - neither portray her as a leader, instead "they give her exclusively sexual roles".