Cracking the Da Vinci Code:
Man-made or God Breathed?
2 Timothy 3:14-17
Sir Leigh Teabing is one of Dan Brown’s main characters in The Da Vinci Code. Teabing is a British knight who has spent his entire adult life in search of the Holy Grail. It is Teabing who reveals the secrets of the Da Vinci Code to the uninitiated Sophie, and one of the secrets he reveals deals with the authenticity and reliability of the Bible, particularly the New Testament. That is the issue we explore this morning as we continue to crack The Da Vinci Code.
Listen to what Dan Brown has to say about the reliability and authenticity of the New Testament:
“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven.”(250)
“The Bible is a product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.” (250-251)
“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.” (251)
“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.” (254)
Brown’s novel raises the question: Is the Bible God’s inspired Word that reveals the creator, or a cruel hoax that has deceived followers for thousands of years?
So, just how did we get the Bible? What made up the canon of Scripture that has come down to the church today, and who made the decisions about what books would be included and which would not? Let’s look this morning and see what we can discover.
First, we all must admit that the Bible did not fall magically from the clouds, and that it was written within a historical context, which at times were very tumultuous. But if we are going to be intellectually honest, we must admit that those very reasons alone make the Bible so much more than just another man-made book. Consider with me for a moment that the Bible is a book compiled over a period of approximately 1,500 years, over 40 different generations. Over 40 authors wrote it from all walks of life on three different continents, in different moods, and in three different languages. Think of a servant, a king, a military general, a doctor, a fisherman, a tentmaker, a poet, a farmer, and a tax collector all writing from places such as a prison, a dungeon, a pastoral hillside, a palace, and a ship during times of war and times of peace. Yet they all tell the same story--the story of God’s activity in redeeming humanity. Factor in the evidence that there are over 5,300 pieces of preserved text from the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and over 10,000 from the Latin Vulgate, and at least 9,300 other early versions of the Bible, and we have more external evidence for the trustworthiness of the Bible than any ancient writings. More than Homer, more than Aristotle or Plato, more than William Shakespeare himself. Yet we do not question the validity of their writings. Certainly God was at work through those generations to breathe life into the Bible as we know it.
The Da Vinci Code focuses on the New Testament’s development, and so we will focus our discussion there. Dan Brown would have us believe that the decision as to what books were included or excluded was made by a church council that met behind closed doors, accepting some books and rejecting others, and all motivated by power and politics. As we saw with the issue of the divinity of Jesus Christ, this is simply not true, either.
The canon (canon means “rule”) of Scripture was being developed even as Jesus was carrying on his earthly ministry. Jesus quoted from the Old Testament (from the prophets, and the Law, and the writings) thus validating its authenticity as conveying the message and the character of God. Jesus, in essence, commissioned his disciples to pass on the truth he taught them:
John 14:25-26
I am telling you these things now while I am still with you. [26] But when the Father sends the Counselor as my representative—and by the Counselor I mean the Holy Spirit—he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I myself have told you.
Christianity, as it grew, became an international religion; there was no place that served as a central location. It spread from Asia to Europe in the first century alone, and persecution of the church hastened it spread. As the early disciples wrote, they wrote to gatherings of believers spread out geographically. They also wrote to individuals in various regions. They all did, however, write in the latter half of the first century. The latest any book included in the canon of the New Testament is dated is 95-96 A. D. With such geographical and social diversity, it is understandable that not every church immediately had copies of these various documents. There were no fax machines or e-mail in the late first century. It did take time before the number of books regarded as authoritative was finally settled. But that time was not the fourth century as Brown leads us to believe.
Obviously, there must have been an early process of selection and verification. As long as the apostles were alive it was very easy to verify writings and attach authority to them. Peter validated Paul’s authority: 2 Peter 3:15-16
And remember, the Lord is waiting so that people have time to be saved. This is just as our beloved brother Paul wrote to you with the wisdom God gave him— [16] speaking of these things in all of his letters. Some of his comments are hard to understand, and those who are ignorant and unstable have twisted his letters around to mean something quite different from what he meant, just as they do the other parts of Scripture—and the result is disaster for them.
Peter penned those words around 65 A.D. The Apostle Paul’s letters were almost immediately regarded as scripture. Additionally, Paul quotes Luke’s gospel in 1 Timothy 5:18: For the Scripture says, "Do not keep an ox from eating as it treads out the grain." And in another place, "Those who work deserve their pay!" And Jude quoted the apostle Peter (see Jude 1:17-18 and 2 Peter 3:3). By the end of the first century more than two thirds of our present New Testament was deemed inspired, and accepted by the churches abroad. The remaining books were known and quoted as authoritative. They simply had not yet achieved wide circulation. That was due to the times, not the material.
Then, in the second century, along came a guy named Marcion. Marcion came out with his own version of the Scriptures in 135 A. D. Marcion was thoroughly anti-Jewish and anti-Jewish law. He believed the god of the Old Testament was different from the God of the New Testament, so he eliminated the Old Testament from his Bible. Any scripture in the New Testament that disagreed with his interpretation he simply omitted from his Bible. This turn of events forced the early church to define what was scripture and what was not, and it happened well before the fourth century. As a matter of fact, there is a document called the Muratorian fragment that dates to 175 A. D., and on that fragment, 23 of our current 27 New Testament books are identified as canon by the church. That’s at least 250 years before the Council of Nicaea. We might well agree with the person who said, “The church did not create the Canon: the Canon created the church.”
I must give a moment to those “eighty” gospels that were, as Brown claims, excluded from the canon. Suffice it to say that time does not permit me to expound all the problems associated with these so-called “gospels,” so I will concentrate very briefly on The Gnostic Gospels that Brown depends on so heavily in the book. In December, 1945, a peasant came across some scrolls in the Egyptian desert near a village called Nag Hammadi. These include The Gospel of Philip, which has Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene on the lips, and the Gospel of Mary, which claims a leading role for Mary Magdalene. The earliest date for any of these writings is 150 A. D.
So what determined what made it into the Bible? There were three standards the early church used to determine a writings inclusion in the canon. The first criterion was apostolicity. Was the text written or sanctioned by an apostle. Thus, Matthew and John were both apostles of Christ. Luke was an associate of the Apostle Paul, and Mark was an associate of the Apostle Peter.
The second standard was conformity to the rule of faith. That is, the texts teachings were consistent with the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles. If there was a common thread of redemption running through the text, and it confirmed what other accepted texts taught, it was included.
The third standard was that the document had to have wide-spread and continuance acceptance to be included. The churches, whether eastern or western, accepted and read the texts in its congregations, and that gave credence to the documents.
The 27 books of the New Testament were not accepted or rejected by any council or committee. There was never a power grab. Two councils in the late fourth century simply ratified what was already accepted throughout Christianity, and neither one of those councils was the Council of Nicaea as The Da Vinci Code would have the reader to believe. They were the Council of Hippo in 393 A. D., and the Council of Carthage in 397 A. D. These councils took their direction from an Easter letter by Athanasius in 367 A. D., which is the oldest document in existence that contains the list of all 27 books of our current New Testament. The Council of Nicaea didn’t even discuss the canon of Scripture.
Ultimately, though, we will not trust in the Bible through documentary evidence preserved through history, and debated by historians, theologians, and philosophers. We will not even trust the Bible because we see it as God’s story. But we will trust the Bible because we accept it as God’s story, and how do we accept it? By faith. Ultimately, it comes down to a question of faith, and God gives us the faith to trust His word for the salvation of our souls. Our faith is confirmed by the experiences of our lives, and the experiences of our lives confirm the truthfulness and validity of the Scriptures. The impact the Word has had on countless saints through the ages stands as a testimony to its truthfulness and dependability in leading and directing each person on our journey of faith.
Anatoli Shcharansky, a dissident Soviet Jew, kissed his wife goodbye as she left Russia for freedom in Israel. His parting words to her were, "I’ll see you soon in Jerusalem." But Anatoli was detained and finally imprisoned. Their reunion in Jerusalem would not only be postponed, it might never occur. During long years in Russian prisons and work camps Anatoli was stripped of his personal belongings. His only possession was a miniature copy of the Psalms. Once during his imprisonment, his refusal to release the book to the authorities cost him 130 days in solitary confinement. Finally, twelve years after parting with his wife, he was offered freedom. In February 1986, as the world watched, Shcharansky was allowed to walk away from Russian guards toward those who would take him to Jerusalem. But in the final moments of captivity, the guards tried again to confiscate the Psalms book. Anatoli threw himself face down in the snow and refused to walk on to freedom without it. Those words had kept him alive during imprisonment. He would not go on to freedom without them.
Our lives testify that the Bible is so much more than a historical creation of man, for it has survived every challenge, and every persecution, and every tumultuous time. There is something eternal and endearing about the Bible, and the orthodox Christian faith believes it is eternal and endearing not because it is man-made, but because it is God-breathed.
