PART II
The Gospels of the New Testament
The Da Vinci Deception
(p. 231-234)
“More than eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament, and yet only a relative few were chosen for inclusion - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among them. ‘Who chose which gospels to include?’ Sophie asked...The Bible, as we know it today was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great...Because Constantine upgraded Jesus’ status almost four centuries after Jesus’ death, thousands of documents already existed chronicling his life as a mortal man...Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible which omitted those gospels which spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made him god-like. The early gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.”
The specific focus of The Da Vinci Code’s assault upon the authenticity and reliability of the Biblical Canon is the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Mr. Brown would have us believe that the four Gospels of the New Testament were relative late-comers selected over scores of other earlier and more accurate accounts of the life of Christ by Constantine and his minions at the Council of Nicea in order to suppress the real truth about the humanity and sexuality of Jesus Christ. Once again, an examination of the historical facts will demonstrate that Brown’s imaginative scenario is flagrantly inaccurate.
The reality of the situation is
that the four canonical
Gospels -Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John - had already
been composed and were
being widely circulated
throughout the Church by the
end of the 1st Century (A.D.
100). This is necessarily the
case for the most basic
standard of canonicity was
apostolic authorship.
Tertullian, writing in North
Africa around A.D. 210,
defined this principle as basic
to the recognition and
acceptance of the Gospels:
“We lay it down as our first
position that the Evangelical
Testament has apostles for its
authors, to who was assigned
by the Lord Himself this
office of publishing the
gospel.” (ANF, 3, p,. 347)
Since John, the last of the
apostles died in the 90's, no
genuine Gospel could
possibly have been written
after that time. The earliest
extent physical evidence of
the antiquity of the Gospels is
the famous and fascinating Magdalen College Papyrus fragments of Matthew’s
Gospel. These three scraps of ancient paper were accidentally (if one believe’s in
accidents) rediscovered on Christmas Eve in 1994 by Dr. Carsten Peter Thiede, a
German papyrus expert, while on vacation in England. Based on the style of writing,
the ink, and type of papyrus itself, Dr. Thiede contends that these words from the
Gospel of Matthew date back to the mid 1st Century, perhaps as early as A.D. 60 and
could very well be a portion of the original autograph of Matthew’s Gospel. But
even without this most remarkable find, the antiquity of all four Gospels is firmly
established by a proliferation of extant papyrus manuscripts which date to the first
half of the 2nd Century (A.D. 100-150) well within the appropriate time-frame.
From the very beginning of Christianity, the uniqueness of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as eyewitness accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus was acknowledged throughout the Church. Justin Martyr, in a defense of Christianity written around A.D. 150, refers to the crucial role which the Gospels played in the worship of the earliest Christian congregations. The Gospels had already been recognized as the authoritative source which established and defined the role of the sacraments in the life of the Church. As the “memoirs” of the apostles, the Gospels served as the link which conveyed to the Church the very words of Jesus Himself. Justin declared:
“For the apostles in the memoirs composed by them, which are called
Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was enjoined upon them; that
Jesus took bread, and when He had given thanks, said, ‘This do ye in
remembrance of Me. This is My Body.’” (ANF,1, p. 185)
Writing a few years later (c. A.D. 180) in the Roman province of Gaul, Irenaeus affirms that “It is not possible for the Gospels to be either more or fewer that they are.” (ANF, 1, p. 428) He takes no small amount of satisfaction from the fact that the heretics who would prefer one of the Gospels while rejecting others can be refuted by the very book which they themselves acknowledge and in so doing provides a specific list of all four canonical Gospels:
“So firm is the ground upon which these gospels rest, that the very
heretics themselves bear witness to them, and starting from these
documents, each one of them endeavors to establish his own peculiar
doctrine. For the Ebionites, who use Matthew’s Gospel only, are
confuted out of the very same...But Marcion, mutilating that according
to Luke, is proved to be a blasphemer of the only existing God from
those passages which he still retains. Those again who separate Jesus
from Christ...preferring the Gospel of Mark, if they read it with a love
of truth may have their errors rectified. Those, moreover, who follow
Valentinius, making copious use of that of John to illustrate their
conjunctions, shall be proved to be totally in error by means of this very
Gospel. Since then, our opponents do bear testimony to us and make
use of these very documents, our proof derived from them is firm and
sure.” (ANF, 1, p. 428)
To use the well-chosen words of Origen of Alexandria, who lived a generation after
Justin Martyr at the end of the 2nd Century, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John were viewed as “the only
indisputable ones in the Church of
God under heaven.” (Metzger, p.
136) Origen was a remarkable
theologian and Bible scholar at the
turn of the 2nd Century. He was one
of the first to apply the designation
“The New Testament” to the
writings of the evangelists and the
apostles, thus deliberately equating
them with the prophetic writings of
the Old Testament as “divine
Scriptures” written by inspiration
of God. In a Commentary on the
Gospel of Matthew, Origen offered
this detailed description of the
apostolic sources of the four
Gospels:
“Concerning the four Gospels which alone are uncontroverted in the Church of God under heaven, I have learned by tradition that the Gospel according to Matthew, who was at one time a publican and afterwards and Apostle of Jesus Christ, was written first; and that he composed it in the Hebrew tongue and published it for converts from Judaism. The second written was according to Mark, who wrote it according to the instruction of Peter, who in his General Epistle, acknowledged him as a son, saying, ‘The church that is in Babylon, elect together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Mark, my son.’ (1 Peter 5:13). And the third was according to Luke, he Gospel commended by Paul, which he composed for the converts from the Gentiles. Last of all, that according to John.” (ANF, 9, p. 412)
Pennsylvania State University historian Dr. Phillip Jenkins persuasively argues that the four Gospels formed the solid core of a broad consensus on canon of the New Testament which had already been established by the end of the 2nd Century. Jenkins summarizes the evidence in this way:
“The list of approved Gospels was first to be determined. Already by 150, Justin Martyr’s Roman school was using a fourfold gospel collection, namely Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. About 170, the Syrian Tatian composed his ‘Diatesseron’ (literally - ‘through four’) a harmony or synthesis of the texts of the four gospels, again showing that four was the full and complete complement of gospel texts. A few years later in Gaul, Irenaeus argued that the only correct number of gospels was four, on the mystical analogy of the four winds, four directions, and so on; ‘it is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are.’ Accordingly, the four strongest and most celebrated candidates drove out their competitors, and in terms of gospels at least, if not of other Scriptures, this policy very soon became the norm across the empire. By the third century, there was a lively debate about what texts were included in the canon, but not, generally, about the approved list of gospels. In the churches of which we have any knowledge, this list had been fixed by about 200, long before the supposed machinations of Athanasius and Constantine.” (Jenkins, p. 85)
This view is strongly reinforced by Dr. Donald Guthrie in his classic “New Testament Introduction.” (1961) Dr. Guthrie summarized the status of the four New Testament Gospels in this most unambiguous way: “By the end of the second century it is clear from all the evidence available that our four Gospels were accepted not only as authentic, but also as Scripture on a level with the Old Testament.” (Guthrie, p. 17) Guthrie further noted that the remarkable unanimity on the authenticity of the four Gospels which prevailed throughout Christendom by A.D. 200 was all the more impressive because it was achieved within only a few generations of the apostles themselves. Perhaps, he suggested, this historical proximity ought to lead us to defer to the firm conclusions of the 2nd Century Church Fathers over the dubious scepticism of some modern Bible critics.
“None of these writers seems to
have questioned the origin of
these Gospels in the apostolic
age, although their approach has
been challenged by modern
criticism. It may well be that
these men were nearer the truth
than is often allowed.” (Guthrie,
p. 18)
These historical realities are in clear contradiction to the titillating fantasies of “The DaVinci Code.” Dan Brown has evidently decided that actual facts should not be allowed to obstruct the course of entertaining fiction. Accordingly, He would have us believe that the four canonical gospels were, in fact, late-comers - written long after numerous other, more accurate accounts of the life of Jesus. As has been previously noted this is not the case. The four Gospels of the New Testament were written in the second half of the 1st Century and had all been completed and were being widely circulated among the churches by A. D. 100. This is in clear contrast to the alternative gospels which did not originate until well into the 2nd Century and thereafter. Paul Maier summarizes:
“The gnostic gospels which the church rejected were not written earlier
but actually much later than the Biblical Gospels. The earliest gnostic
gospel, the so-called ‘Gospel of Thomas,’ was written at least 100 years
after Christ’s ascension - and certainly not by the apostle Thomas.”
(Maier, p. 6)
The plot thickens as Brown informs us that Constantine and his wicked co-conspirators found it necessary for their own sinister purposes to suppress the real
truth about Jesus and so “the early gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and
burned.” (DVC, p. 234) Again, as has been previously demonstrated, consensus on
the canon had been established long before Constantine and there is no historical
evidence that the emperor played any role or had any interest in reshaping the
boundaries of the New Testament. But while the “The Da Vinci Code”’s conspiracy
theories may not be accurate, they are certainly intriguing and entertaining. So
history notwithstanding, the plot must go on.
These allegedly earlier, more authentic accounts of the life of Christ with which
Brown and his ilk are so enamored were produced in the context of a
theology/philosophy called “gnosticism.” The term “gnosticism” is based on the
Greek word “gnosis” which means “knowledge.” This philosophy flourished in the
Greco-Roman world during the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Christian era and
thereafter. It was not specifically Christian, and significantly impacted a number of
world religions. Dr. Marvin Meyer sympthetically notes:
“Some gnostics were Jewish, others Greco-Roman and many were Christians. There were Mandaean gnostics from Iraq and Iran; Manichaeans from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and all the way to China; Islamic gnostics in the Muslim world, and Cathars in Western Europe.” (Meyer, p. 2)
In the Christian context, those who followed this philosophy were scornfully called “gnostics,”, a label first applied to these “heretics” by the 4th Century church father Epiphanius (A.D. 310-403), because they believed that they had achieved a secret, mystical knowledge - available only to the enlightened elite. This superior insight enabled them to see beyond the outward appearances of the physical/historical world to the genuine reality of the inner spiritual world. Gnostics held to a strict dualism which distinguished between the pure realm of ideas and the hopelessly corrupt physical world. To this extent, gnosticism was similar to the world view of the classic Greek philosophy of Socrates and Plato who despised the physical while exalting the spiritual, scorning the body, for example, as the “prison house of the soul.” The gnostics hated the earthy realism of the Old Testament and derided “Yaweh,” the God of the Old Testament, as an impotent fool who sought to suppress humanity by restricting its knowledge. They rejected God’s law as the instrument of that repression because it limited human experience and therefore human knowledge. In the gnostic view it was man who created God, not God who created man. According to gnostic theology, God is not a separate being, independent and sovereign. He is a mere projection of humanity and its needs. The gnostic Gospel of Philip ironically notes: “”God created humanity, but now human beings create God. That is the way it is in the world - human beings make gods and worship their creation. It would be appropriate for the gods to worship human beings!” (Pagels 1, p. 122) This being the case, the gnostics also insisted upon a careful male/female balance in our understanding of the god/goddess. To use the language of Princeton professor Dr. Elaine Pagels, the foremost contemporary authority on and advocate of gnosticism, the gnostic texts tend to “speak of God as a dyad who embraces both masculine and feminine elements.” (Pagels 1, p. 49) She goes one to quote one text in which the god/goddess declares: “I am androgynous. I am both Mother and Father, since I copulate with Myself...and with those who love Me...I am the Womb that gives shape to all...the glory of the Mother.” (Pagels 1, p. 55) The same classic gnostic themes are often heard in the writings of modern feminists. For example, in her best-selling study “The Goddess in the Gospels - Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine” feminist scholar Margaret Starbird urgently demands the restoration of what she calls “the partnership paradigm - the imaging of the Divine as both bride and bridegroom.” (Starbird 1, p. 145) She argues that as long as “the other face of God is scorned and neglected” humanity can never be whole.
“We must look at the many facets of the sacred feminine in order to
understand what we truly need to reclaim. The celibate male image of
God worshiped for nearly 2,00 years of Western civilization is a
distorted image that desperately needs to be corrected.” (Starbird 1, p.
146)
Dan Brown conveys all of this to adoring contemporary feminists through the impassioned words of his hero Robert Langdon who declares:
“Powerful men in the early church ‘conned’ the world by propagating
lies that devalued the female, obliterating the goddess from modern
religion forever...Mother earth had become a man’s world and the gods
of destruction and war were taking their toll. The male ego had spent
two millennia running unchecked by its female counterpart.” (Brown,
pp. 124-125)
The attraction of gnosticism was (and is) that the individual and his endless quest for personal enlightenment alone are sovereign and absolute. Modern observer Duncan Greenlees, who describes himself as a gnostic of the 20th Century, asserts that this burning desire for the liberation of the human spirit without restriction of any kind is the central feature of every genuine religion in history:
“Gnosticism is a system of direct experiential knowledge of God...the
soul, and the universe...In the early centuries of this era, amid a
growing Christianity, it took the form of the Christian faith, while
rejecting most of its specific beliefs. Its wording is therefore largely
Christian, while its spirit is that of the latest paganism of the West.”
(Garlow, p. 167)
This absolute personal freedom, without constraint of truth or morality, is a message most congenial to contemporary liberal elites and helps to explain the phenomenal success of “The Da Vinci Code.” This book is no mere novel. It is a work of religious propaganda with a message precisely tailored to fit the times in which we live. Its popularization of ancient gnostic writings seems to validate everything that hedonistic moderns have been seeking. As James Garlow and Peter Jones have observed, “The Da Vinci Code” has a message whose time has come:
“Here we begin to decipher The Da Vinci Code and to suggest the real
reason for its enormous popularity. The book appeals to many people
because it expresses in such an engrossing way the new liberating
religious option that has taken the West by storm...The Gnostic writings
have re-appeared at a time when patriarchy, doctrinal precision,
canons, confessions, clearly defined sexual morality, church institutions,
and authority are out. What’s in? The personal spiritual quest,
diversity, individualism, egalitarianism, and sexual liberation. And the
prospect of finding ancient ‘Christian’ scrolls that support this new
era’s spiritual viewpoint is, for many post-moderns, a dream come
true.” (Garlow/Jones, p. 168)
Historically, most of our knowledge of
gnosticism was derived from the writings of
early church fathers like Irenaeus (A.D. 130-
200), Hippolytus (A.D. 170-236) and Tertullian (A.D. 160-220) who described
ideas of the gnostics in detail as they
attacked and condemned them as deviations
from apostolic doctrine in their day. So, for
example, Irenaeus of Lyons in the Preface to
his “Against Heresies,” offers this incisive
assessment of the dangers of gnosticism:
“These men falsify the oracles of God, and
prove themselves evil interpreters of the
good word of revelation. They also
overthrow the faith of many by drawing
them away under a pretense of superior
knowledge from Him who founded and
adorned the universe; as if they had
something more excellent and sublime to
reveal, than the God who created the heaven and the earth and all things that are
therein. By means of specious and plausible words, they cunningly allure the simple-minded to inquire into their system; but they initiate them into their blasphemous and
impious opinions respecting the Demiurge and these simple ones are unable, even in
such a matter, to distinguish falsehood from truth.” (ANF, 1, p. 315)
The modern world’s first substantive direct contact with gnostic sources came with the
discovery of the now famous “Nag Hammadi Manuscripts” discovered in Upper Egypt
in 1945. An Egyptian peasant named Muhammed Ali and his brothers were digging
around in a massive boulder in the desert near the village of Naj Hammadi. They were
looking for fertilizer. Instead, they stumbled across a large red clay pottery jar. The
brothers hesitated to break the jar open, fearing that it might contain an evil “jinn.” But
Mohammed Ali also realized that the vessel might hold golden treasure so the jar was
smashed open. The jar held neither gold nor an evil ‘jinn’ but it was filled with
treasure, treasure of a different and unexpected kind. Within they discovered 13 large
leather bound papyrus books written in Coptic, a language of Egypt early in the
Christian era. These volumes contained a library of 52 gnostic writings which had been
collected and translated from the
original Greek late in the 4th
Century. Muhammed’s family
had no idea of the significance of
what they had uncovered but after
some of the pages had been
burned for kindling, one of the
books finally found its way onto
the black market in Cairo and
eventually the Egyptian
government located and
confiscated the remainder. Since
then, the collection has been
widely translated and published to
scholarly acclaim as “The Gnostic
Bible.”
The Nag Hammadi manuscripts contain a handful of documents that have been described as “gospels.” They include “The Gospel of Thomas,” “The Gospel of Philip,” “The Gospel of Truth,” “The Gospel of the Egyptians,” “The Apocalypse of Peter,” “The Apocalypse of Paul,” “The Letter of Peter to Phillip,” and “The Thunder.” None of these are narrative accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus like the four gospels of the New
Testament.
Instead, reflecting the gnostic
distaste for factual history, these
gospels are largely collections of
random teaching and sayings,
laden with hidden meanings and
secret significance. A sampling of
pithy sayings attributed to Jesus (Yeshua) in the Gospel of Thomas, the best known of
these writings, provides an enlightening insight in the nature of the gnostic gospels:
“Jesus said, ‘Blessings on the lion if a human eats it, making the lion human. Foul is the human if a lion eats it, making the lion human’...Jesus said unto them, ‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make the male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter the kingdom’.... Jesus said, ‘Whoever has come to know the world has discovered a carcass, and whoever has discovered a carcass, the world is not worthy.’” (Lutzer, pp. 28-29)
The earliest of these works, the gospels of Thomas and Phillip, may date back as early as A.D. 150 while the remainder were written in the centuries that followed.
Dan Brown’s extravagant claims that “eighty gospels were considered for the New Testament” (DVC, p. 231) and that “thousands of documents already existed chronicling his life as a mortal man” (DVC, p. 234) are flagrantly inaccurate. The numbers are wildly inflated and the suggestion that any of these gnostic writings predated or were ever considered on a par with the canonical gospels is simply wrong. As previously noted (cf. p. 21), all four of the Bible’s Gospels were written between A.D. 60 - 90, within the lifetimes of the apostles. The very earliest date assigned to one of the gnostic gospels is A.D. 150 for the Gospel of Thomas and that date is challenged by a great many scholars. Most of these documents were not composed for another one hundred years. Furthermore, not even their most ardent advocates today would argue that any of the gnostic documents were actually written by the apostles or the other Biblical figures to whom they are ascribed. These are clearly pseudonyms, designed to give stature to the writings of a later, unknown authors. By A.D. 200, long before most if not all of the gnostic alternatives had even been written, the four Gospels had already been recognized throughout the church as the “foundation documents in what later came to be called the New Testament.” (Maier, p. 33)
Sir Leigh Teabing, Dan Brown’s fictional authority figure, indulges in a bit of fiction himself as he describes the survival of the gnostic gospels:
“‘Fortunately for historians,’ Teabing said, ‘some of the gospels which Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950's hidden in a cave near Qumram in the Judean desert. And, of course, the Coptic scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. In addition to telling the true Grail story, these documents speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms. Of course, the Vatican, in keeping with their tradition of misinformation tired very hard to suppress the release of these scrolls.” (DVC, p. 234)
The reference to the Dead Sea
Scrolls is somewhat mystifying since
they have nothing whatsoever to do
with Jesus, the Gospels, or the New
Testament. They contain only the
library of the Essenes, a dissident
group within Old Testament
Judaism. The Dead Sea Scrolls were
hidden by Essene community at
Qumram around A.D. 70, just before
it was destroyed by the Roman
legions of Titus. All of this predates
the evil Constantine and his alleged
machinations by three hundred years.
The manuscripts found at Nag
Hammadi were not scrolls at all, as
Teabing incorrectly states (“the
Coptic scrolls”), but papyrus books
that had been written and concealed
late in the 4th Century. There is
nothing in them about “the true
Grail story” as our fictional
authority figure alleges. Any delays in the publication of the Nag Hammadi documents
between 1945 and the present were the result of the illegal circumstances of their
discovery, scholarly rivalries, and disputes with the government of Egypt which
presently controls the great majority of the manuscripts. There is no evidence of any
sinister Vatican plot to delay the publication of either the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag
Hammadi documents, nor has any real life scholar ever alleged such a conspiracy.
It is absolutely essential for “The Da Vinci Code” to completely discredit the authenticity of the Biblical Gospels and their confession of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and the Savior of the world. The imposition of this so-called “lie” is the core component in Brown’s conspiracy theory and he describes the plot with exuberant gusto. Neither undisputed facts of history nor the long-standing orthodoxy of millennia can be allowed to stand in the way of the erection of this grand edifice of malicious subterfuge.
“The Da Vinci Code”’s treatment of the Gospels of the New Testament illustrates the pernicious symbiosis at the heart of this remarkable novel. On the one hand is the fictional story itself, titillatingly told, with the flourish of an undeniably great novelist. Woven into the tale, as its factual foundation, are the non-fictional theories and assessments of revisionist scholars and modern mystics. The novel’s use of their theories lends authenticity to its story, making the narrative more compelling. At the same time, the presentation of the theories in the novel as fact grants them new credibility and accessibility to a wider audience than could otherwise ever have been possible. Books which until now have been obscurely hidden in the occult sections of local bookstores are now flying off the shelves in unprecedented numbers. Both the novel and the theories have benefitted immeasurably from their co-existence with one another. Critic James Garlow coins the new term “fact-tion” - that is a deliberate and artful blending of fact and fiction - to describe “The Da Vinci Code.” He warns that it is this combination of fact and fiction which makes “The Da Vinci Code” “a stunning and effective propaganda piece that moves its readers to a skewed perception of reality.” (Garlow/Jones, p. 58) Garlow sums up his concern in these words:
“If ever a book should be written off as mere fiction, “The Da Vinci Code” is the one. On the other hand, this book can’t be ignored so easily. Due to its author’s effective sprinkling of occasional ‘facts,’ along with the assertions by the characters that they are speaking the truth. It is ‘fact-tion’ - that is, a wily narrative that blends limited facts with some grossly exaggerated claims; these claims are placed in the unfolding plot in real locations and times to provide sufficient plausibility. The result is a stunning and effective propaganda piece that moves its readers to a skewed perception or reality.” (Garlow/Jones, p. 58)
