Decoding The Da Vinci Code – part 3
“Did Constantine Have a Conspiracy”
Picture of book
The owner of a Christian bookstore sounded fairly desperate in an emailed message regarding the impact of the book The Da Vinci Code recently. "We are getting bombarded daily by people who are buying into the garbage in this book…We even had an elderly aunt talking about Opus Dei tonight and yelling at us that the book is true or it couldn’t be printed." Anyone who thinks it is overkill to see so many books written to respond to and refute Dan Brown’s claims or for a preacher to spend a few weeks in the same pursuit only needs to see the tip of the iceberg of how the masses are responding and buying into the theories presented by Dan Brown. Remember 1 Peter 3:15. Please don’t write this off just because you were wise enough not to buy into it. Instead be aware of what is going on in the world around you, and be ready to defend your hope in Christ to those who would challenge it.
This morning I want to focus on one section of The Da Vinci Code, where Brown’s character Teabing repeats a number of false statements about the influence of the emperor Constantine that have been circulating for a long time on the conspiracy fringe, and that have long since been refuted by credible scholarship. Let’s have a look at a them.
On pages 231-32 of The Da Vinci Code we read:
… Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. “The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
“I thought Constantine was a Christian,” Sophie said.
Hardly,” Teabing scoffed. “He was a lifelong pagan who was baptized on his deathbed, too weak to protest. In Constantine’s day Rome’s official religion was sun worship—the cult of Sol Invictus, or the Invincible Sun—and Constantine was its head priest….”
Then a bit later on pages 232-33 we continue to read:
“Originally,” Langdon said, “Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.” He paused, grinning, “To this day, most churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning with no idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun god’s weekly tribute—Sun-day.”
For the moment we leave aside the claim that it was Constantine that “collated” the Bible. I will address that. For now I want to deal with these three other false assertions: (1) that Constantine was a lifelong worshipper of Sol Invictus, (2) that he was baptized on his death bed against his will, and (3) that he is responsible for the fact that Christians worship on Sunday.
As with much of the other misinformation appearing in his book, Brown probably got these claims about Constantine from the 1982 conspiracy book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, where we find them on pp. 367-68.
What’s wrong with these claims?
1. Credible scholars have at times questioned the sincerity of Constantine’s faith. The reason usually given for doing so is that he continued to feature Sol Invictus on his coinage for a time after 312, the traditional date of his conversion to Christ. But within a decade of his conversion, Constantine phased it out. As Ramsay MacMullen puts it: “Sol (Invictus) declining from 320, finally sank in 322.” It is always hard to tell whether a politician who claims to be a Christian actually is one. We can only judge by the support they give to Christian causes and their own personal behavior. Constantine both claimed to be a Christian, honored God with many of His policies and supported Christian causes.
2. Constantine was baptized on his deathbed, but at his own request. He had hoped to be baptized in the Jordan River, but as his final illness overtook him, he called the bishops together at Nicomedia and requested baptism. The story is told in the fourth book of Eusebius’ Life of Constantine, written soon after Constantine’s death. It was at his request, and because he took the sacrament of baptism very seriously.
Why then did Constantine wait so long to be baptized? He was adhering to a then common, though hardly biblical, practice based on the idea that since baptism washed away sins, one ought to hold off getting it as long as possible. At this time in the church, the false belief was prevalent that you had better not sin after your baptism. They misunderstood the difference between justification and sanctification.
3. In March of 321, Constantine did make Sunday an official day of rest. Christians are not mentioned in the edicts related to this, nor is anything said about when they or anyone else should worship. So then Brown is wrong in his claim that Constantine made Sunday the day of worship for the church. But there is more. Constantine did not have to tell Christians to worship on Sunday rather than Saturday, because they had done so from the beginning of the church. They worshipped on Sunday rather than on the Sabbath because that is the day that the Lord Jesus rose from the dead. The mid-second century Christian writer Justin Martyr, for example, writes more than 175 years before Constantine: “Sunday is the day on which we hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having worked a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things.” (1 Apology 67)
The New Testament sets the precedent for us that Sunday, the Lord’s day, or the first day of the week, was already being observed by Christians in the first century. That Jesus rose on the first day of the week is indicated in all four Gospels (Matt 28:1, Mark 16:2 and 9, Luke 24:1, and John 20:1). Acts 20:7 refers to a gathering at Troas where the believers came together on the first day of the week (Sunday) to break bread (the Lord’s Supper) and listen to Paul preach. In 1 Corinthians 16:2. Paul is giving instruction for an offering he intends to collect when he visits them. To prepare for this he tells the Christians in Corinth “On the first day of every week let each one of you put aside and save, as he may prosper, so that no collections be made when I come.” In other words, when they gathered for worship, they were to take a weekly collection to, so that they would have a contribution for the offering Paul would take to Jerusalem to help the poor. In the book of Revelation John already uses the name Christians commonly used to describe Sunday, their day of worship: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day….” (Rev. 1:10). The anonymous letter called “The Teaching,” or Didache, written most likely before 150 A.D., says: “On the Lord’s Day come together, break bread and hold Communion, after confessing your transgressions” (Didache 14). Ignatius of Antioch, who died a martyr’s death in Rome before 117 A.D., writes that Christians are “no longer living for the Sabbath, but for the Lord’s Day, on which also our life sprang up” (Magnesians 9.1). Anyone who suggests to you that the Catholic Church or Constantine changed the day of worship is simply uninformed of the history of the early church and of the New Testament itself.
What about Constantine and the New Testament Canon?
We now turn to refute another major falsehood in the passage we quoted at the beginning, namely, that “The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
Page 234 of The Da Vinci Code:
Teabing paused, eyeing Sophie. “Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier Gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.”
The term “commissioned” clues us in to the fact that Brown is alluding to a conspiracy tale according to which Constantine corrupted the Bible in collusion with Eusebius of Caesarea in 331 A.D. The book Holy Blood, Holy Grail (p. 368) is Brown’s probable source. There we read: “Then, in A.D. 331, he [Constantine] commissioned and financed new copies of the Bible. This constituted one of the single most decisive factors in the entire history of Christianity and provided Christian orthodoxy…with an unparalleled opportunity.”
Holy Blood, Holy Grail then goes on to speak of the destruction of early Christian texts during the persecutions of the emperor Diocletion of 303 A.D., after which it continues: “As a result Christian documents—especially in Rome—all but vanished. When Constantine commissioned new versions of these documents, it enabled the custodians of orthodoxy to revise, edit, and rewrite their materials as they saw fit, in accordance with their tenets. It was at this point that most of the crucial alterations in the New Testament were probably made and Jesus assumed the unique status he has enjoyed ever since. The importance of Constantine’s commission must not be underestimated. Of the five thousand extant early manuscript versions of the New Testament, not one predates the fourth century. The New Testament as it exists today is essentially a product of fourth-century editors and writers—custodians of orthodoxy … with vested interests to protect.”
There are a number of inaccuracies in this passage. In the first place, no credible historian would accept Holy Blood Holy Grail’s assertion that all extant copies of the New Testament perished during the persecution begun under Diocletion in 303, nor its claim that “Of the five thousand extant early manuscript versions of the New Testament, not one predates the fourth century.” The most obvious reason being in both cases that numerous New Testament manuscript portions exist today that predate 303 – the time of the Diocletian persecution and even predate the year 100 A.D. And these can often be viewed by the public in various universities and museums. (by the way, there are well over 25,000 ancient N.T. manuscript examples, not 5,000). Furthermore, the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail appear to show their ignorance of basic facts when they say that: “Christian documents—especially in Rome—all but vanished.” The assumption behind the statement seems to be that since Diocletian was the Roman emperor, Rome must have been hit hardest, since it would have been the center of his activities. As a matter of fact, however, Diocletian reigned from his capital in the East, at Nicomedia.
The reality is that Constantine could have never gotten away with changing the Bible. Christians like Athanasius of Alexandria, for example, who suffered exile under “Christian” emperors no less than five times during his life for his unflinching defense of true Christianity, would have immediately protested. But the real baseless character of the story becomes exceedingly clear when one looks at the sum-total of the actual evidence that serves as its alleged basis. Here it is:
In 324 AD Constantine captured a relatively insignificant city on the west bank of the Bosporous towards its southern end called Byzantium. Here he decided to establish a new capital himself that would rival the glory of Rome. More than that even, it was to be the new Rome. A Christian capital for a Christian Empire. It was to be a city in which no pagan sacrifices were to be made, nor any idolatrous festivals celebrated. A City named for himself: Constantinople. Constantine dedicated it on 11 May 330.
Another thing we must understand about Constantine is that he was an enthusiastic builder of church buildings. He had at least seven built in Rome and one in Jerusalem. But as great as these contributions were, he had a particular zeal for building churches in his capital. Eusebius, the emperor’s trusted friend and biographer, reports how Constantine, “being fully resolved to distinguish the city which bore his name with especial honor… embellished it with numerous sacred edifices, both memorials of martyrs on the largest scale, and other buildings of the most splendid kind, not only within the city itself, but in its vicinity.” All of these “sacred edifices” were Christian in character, that is to say, they were primarily Churches. His massive church building program included at least nine buildings in Constantinople.
Now if you intend to build Churches you are going to need Bibles and other “Christian supplies” to stock them. And so we find Constantine, in the year following the dedication of his new capital, putting in an order with Eusebius of Caesarea for 50 Bibles. Eusebius’s biography of Constantine, along with Eusebius’ commentary on it says this:
Victor Constantius, Maximus Augustus, to Eusebius:
It happens, through the favoring providence of God our Saviour, that great numbers have united themselves to the most holy church in the city which is called by my name. It seems, therefore, highly requisite, since that city is rapidly advancing in prosperity in all other respects, that the number of churches should also be increased. Do you, therefore, receive with all readiness my determination on this behalf? I have thought it expedient to instruct your Prudence to order fifty copies of the sacred Scriptures, the provision and use of which you know to be most needful for the instruction of the Church, to be written on prepared parchment in a legible manner, and in a convenient, portable form, by professional transcribers thoroughly practiced in their art. The catholicus of the diocese has also received instructions by letter from our Clemency to be careful to furnish all things necessary for the preparation of such copies; and it will be for you to take special care that they be completed with as little delay as possible. You have authority also, in virtue of this letter, to use two of the public carriages for their conveyance, by which arrangement the copies when fairly written will most easily be forwarded for my personal inspection; and one of the deacons of your church may be entrusted with this service, who, on his arrival here, shall experience my liberality. God preserve you, beloved brother!
After copying the text of this letter, Eusebius remarks: “Such were the emperor’s commands, which were followed by the immediate execution of the work itself, which we sent him in magnificent and elaborately bound volumes of a threefold and fourfold form. This fact is attested by another letter, which the emperor wrote in acknowledgment.
And that’s it. That is all the evidence there is. No one knows which New Testament books were included in the 50 Bibles, (although by this time there was virtually complete consensus on at least 25 of the 27 books of the N.T.) nor anything about their contents. The only thing that may be safely assumed is that they pretty much followed the form of the New Testament as it was then received in the rest of the Christian world, otherwise, as I have already said, we would have heard about it from Christians crying foul. The silence in this regard suggests very strongly that there was nothing new or surprising in the form or content of these 50 Bibles.
The fact that so little is actually said about these 50 Bibles in the ancient evidence has given conspiracy theorists, a free hand for speculation, so that we even find them appealing to this evidence to prove opposite things. Brown says that the intention of Constantine’s Bible order was to make Jesus into a God: “Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike” (p. 234). But others have claimed just the opposite, i.e., that his intention was to undermine Jesus’ deity and make him into a mere man. An example of this is from a booklet called “The Attack,” by Jack T. Chick.
Dan Brown embellishes the facts even more: On page 233 of The Da Vinci Code,
(Teabing) “Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous ecumenical gathering known as the Council of Nicaea . . . At this gathering . . . many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops, the administration of the sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus . . . until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet . . . a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless. A mortal . . . Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the council of Nicea.”
(Sophie) – “Hold on. You’re saying that Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?”
(Teabing) – “A relatively close vote at that . . . Constantine turned Jesus into a deity.”
Brown is right about one thing (and not much more). In the course of Christian history, few events loom larger than the Council of Nicea in 325. When the newly converted Roman Emperor Constantine called bishops from around the world to present-day Turkey, the church had reached a theological crossroads.
An Alexandrian theologian named Arius had argued for a small minority that Jesus had undoubtedly been a remarkable leader, but he was not God in flesh. Arius was enough of a problem and persuasive enough as a false teacher to justify dealing with the issue in this formal fashion. Actually, more specifically, Arius claimed that Jesus was a created being. This effectively denied His divinity. This was a departure from what the church had understood and accepted from the beginning. It was what the martyrs had been willing for three centuries to die for. It is absurd to say that Constantine decided to make Jesus a God.
In The Da Vinci Code, Brown apparently adopts Arius as his representative for all pre-Nicene Christianity. Referring to the Council of Nicea, Brown claims that "until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet … a great and powerful man, but a man nonetheless."
In reality, early Christians overwhelmingly worshipped Jesus Christ as The Son of God, God in the flesh, their risen Savior and Lord.
And as for the vote: it was 318-2 – a real close vote as Dan Brown claims.
So what was the status of the N.T. canon before the time of Constantine? It is really not that hard to find.
As For The Gospels
1. Irenaues (had been a student of Polycarp, who was martyred in 130 A.D. and was a student of John the apostle) - by 180 A.D. – 145 years before the Council of Nicea – acknowledged the standard list of Mathew Mark, Luke and John as the verified four Gospel accounts upon which all agreed – even the heretics! He referred to it as “the fourfold gospel.”
“So firm is the ground upon which these Gospels rest, that the very heretics themselves bear witness to them, and starting from these, each one of them endeavor’s to establish his own particular doctrine.” (Against Heresies III).
So How Did the Canon of Scripture Come About?
The early church recognized that there were false gospels early on. Various church leaders from all over began to set the criteria that would be used to help recognize true Scripture.
What criteria did early church leaders use to develop the canon? (canon = reed – came to mean standard list)
- Is it authoritative? Does it come with a divine “thus saith the Lord?”
- Authorship – Was it written by an apostle, an eyewitness of the life of Jesus or one who personally interviewed an apostle?
- Is it authentic? The policy was, “if in doubt, throw it out.” They wanted to be sure it could be traced to the time and the writer from whom it professed to have come.
- Was it historically received, collected and used? Should have been recognized from the beginning as an authentic and authoritative text by the churches.
Early church leaders understood their job as “recognizing and receiving” what was Scripture – the inspired Words of God – not determining or making scripture. The church never commissioned anyone to write Scripture. In fact Peter wrote
2 Peter 1:19-21 – “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy in Scripture ever came from the prophets themselves or because they wanted to prophesy. It was the Holy Spirit who moved the prophets to speak from God.”
In other words, it was initiated by the Holy Spirit. The early church leaders depended on guidance from the Holy Spirit and the collective wisdom of other church leaders to recognize what the Holy Spirit had first inspired to be written and preserved for the churches. Their confidence in this fact led to a relatively fast and uncontentious process. Until the year 367 (more than forty years after the Council of Nicea), there was not a single church council that dealt with the issue of the canon of the N.T. Instead, there was just a growing consensus through the first three centuries of what was and was not legitimately part of the N.T. So Dan Brown ignores the fact that the process of canonization had progressed for centuries before Nicea, resulting in a nearly complete canon of Scripture before Nicea or even before Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in 313.
Early on, the formation of an authoritative list of N.T. books was motivated by a few factors. First there was the death of the apostles, leaving the church without those in this special office of the church to speak directly from the Holy Spirit. Second, there were increasing persecutions of the church that often included the banning of the Bible and destruction of those Bibles that were found. Early Christians had to decide what books were worth dying for – giving their lives in order to preserve.
Third, ironically, the process of collecting and consolidating Scripture was also became an urgent necessity when a rival sect produced its own false-biblical canon. Around 140 A.D. a Gnostic leader named Marcion began spreading a theory that the New and Old Testaments didn’t share the same God. Marcion argued that the Old Testament’s God represented law and wrath, while the New Testament’s God, represented by Christ, exemplified love. As a result Marcion rejected the Old Testament and the most overtly Jewish New Testament writings, including Matthew, Mark, Acts, and Hebrews. He manipulated other books to downplay their Jewish tendencies. Though in 144 many church leaders declared his views heretical, Marcion’s teaching sparked a new cult. Challenged by Marcion’s threat, church leaders began to consider earnestly their own views on a definitive list of Scriptural books including both the Old and New Testaments.
Another rival theology nudged the church toward recognizing the authoritative New Testament. During the mid to late-second century, a man from Asia Minor named Montanus claimed to receive a revelation from God about an impending apocalypse. The four Gospels and Paul’s epistles achieved wide circulation and largely unquestioned authority within the early church but hadn’t yet been collected in a single authoritative book. Montanus saw this as an opportunity to spread his message, by claiming authoritative status for his new revelation. Church leaders met the challenge around 190 and circulated a definitive list of apostolic writings that is today called the Muratorian Canon. The Muratorian Canon bears striking resemblance to today’s New Testament but includes two extra books, Revelation of Peter and Wisdom of Solomon, which were later excluded from the canon. By the time of Nicea, church leaders were still debating the legitimacy of only a few books that we accept today, mostly Hebrews and Revelation, because their authorship remained in doubt. In fact, authorship was the most important consideration for those who worked to solidify the canon. Early church leaders considered letters and eyewitness accounts authoritative and binding only if they were written by an apostle or close disciple of an apostle. This way they could be assured of the documents’ reliability.
It is actually unoriginal in its allegations, but The Da Vinci Code proves that some misguided theories never entirely fade away. They just reappear periodically in a different disguise. Brown’s claims resemble those of Arius and his numerous heirs throughout history, who have contradicted the united testimony of the apostles and the early church. Those witnesses have always attested that Jesus Christ was and remains God himself. It didn’t take an ancient council to make this true. And the pseudo historical claims of a modern novel, as popular as it may be, can’t make it false.
Yet, many still cringe at the very concept of orthodox truth. To them, it seems like a rigid and cold intellectual straight jacket that stifles diversity of opinion, dissent, and the right to think for one’s self.
Orthodoxy simply means “right teaching.” In the Christian faith, right teaching is rooted in a story—the story of God’s salvation as revealed through Israel, Christ and the Scripture. Right teaching about God’s salvation doesn’t take away the impulse to think for one’s self, but it challenges us to discern together the truth about God and the world, and human sin and salvation.
John 14:6 – “Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.’”
This is so hard for prideful people to accept.
Elaine Pagels (author of The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ) says she had an epiphany while reading the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas during graduate school, particularly this passage: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” According to Pagels, “The strength of this saying is that it does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves….” This Gnostic perspective essentially says that salvation is within ourselves, and that it is in a process of self-discovery that we find redemption.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a different perspective: “The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I shall die, and the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, shall be raised on the Last Day. Our salvation is “external to us.” I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ. Only he who allows himself to be found in Jesus Christ, in his incarnation, his cross, and his resurrection, is with God and God with him” (Life Together). Here he articulates the orthodox Christian perspective: we cannot save ourselves; salvation lies outside ourselves, in events that have happened in history, particularly the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Ephesians 2:8-9 – “God saved you by his special favor when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.”
John 14:6 and Ephesians 2:8-9 teach something hard for prideful people to accept, but not for broken people. To broken people the message is incredibly good and hopeful news.
Why is it that people have a hard time accepting the fact that they cannot save themselves? What is it about human nature that makes us want to be self-sufficient, to not only not want to rely on other people to help us in need, but also to accept the salvation God offers us through Jesus Christ?
