Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.
“As he had anticipated, a thundering iron gate fell near by, barricading the entrance to the suite. The parquet floor shook. Far off, an alarm began to ring.
“The curator lay a moment, gasping for breath, taking stock. I am still alive.”
You might recognize those opening lines from author Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code.
“Minutes later, elderly curator Jacques Saunière is dead, murdered by a massive albino monk in the Grand Gallery of one of the world’s most renowned art museums, the Louvre.”
Without giving away the plot, The Da Vinci Code revolves around three main characters:
Robert Langdon, middle-aged American professor, a Harvard expert in ancient religious symbols and their meanings.
Sophie Neveu (noo-VOH), young French codebreaker who works for the French equivalent the FBI.
Langdon and Neveu are mysteriously brought together to solve the murder of the late curator. As the plot thickens, they seek the help of Sir Leigh Teabing, wealthy Royal Historian of England, who for his whole life has sought to unearth a priceless ancient relic.
The murder inquiry quickly becomes a quest to expose a shocking ancient conspiracy—the greatest cover-up in human history—that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene… fathered a child… left a line of descendants still alive in Europe… and that our traditional, biblical picture of Jesus is wildly amiss from the real truth.
Some wonder: what’s the big deal? It’s a fiction story. Yes – but the problem is that on the first page of the book it says this:
All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate. (page 1)
When a fictional story purports to tell the truth – and that truth directly contradicts the teaching of the Christian church over the past 2000 years – confusion is going to be the result. The power of books and especially movies to shape our thinking as a culture is hard to underestimate. And unfortunately, as a whole, those who call themselves Christians have very little idea why they believe what they believe. The issues raised by the DaVinci Code give us a great reason to discuss the reasons for our faith. Have no fear – truth is on the side of Christianity.
So, we’re going to spend this week and next getting a deeper understanding of the historical reasons for rejecting the conspiracy theories of the DaVinci Code and embracing the Bible’s teaching about Jesus Christ.
ISSUE #1: The Authority of the Bible
At the heart of the disputes raised by the DaVinci Code is the matter of authority. What sources from ancient times tell us the truth about Jesus Christ, and which ones do not. If there is doubt over the validity of the New Testament’s record of history, then the door is open to look at other sources of historical fact. So what does the DaVinci Code say? And what does history tell us? First – from the “DaVinci Code”:
“The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven… 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.” (p. 231 The DaVinci Code)
These are some pretty weighty allegations made by the supposed “expert” Sir Leigh Teabing.
It’s a quote that makes a lot of people nod their head in agreement – but it is completely in error. Throughout the story, the authority of the Bible is consistently maligned, and other documents that the church rejected are lifted up as telling the “truth” that has been suppressed for 2000 years. “So dark the con of man” or something like that!
The DaVinci Code
“The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great….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. (p 231.)
“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…
“Some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950’s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. And of course, the Coptic Scrolls in 1945 at Nag Hammadi.
“The scrolls highlight glaring discrepancies and fabrications, clearly confirming that the modern Bible was complied and edited by men who possessed a political agenda – to promote the divinity of the man Jesus Christ and use His influence to solidify their own power base.” (p. 234)
What about the other “gospels” out there? (Did the church suppress those gospels that contradicted the view of Jesus and the church they were trying to spread?) In order to answer these questions, let’s take a few minutes to compare the books of the New Testament with the “other gospels” that are out there.
A. The New Testament.
As with all other ancient literature, the original documents of the various books of the Bible have perished through time. But unlike most other ancient literature, there are so many manuscript copies (over 4000) of New Testament books that Biblical scholars have been able to:
• Date when the original was probably written
• Eliminate almost all copying errors to verify almost exactly what the original documents said.
When it comes to dating the NT books, there are differences between conservative and liberal scholars – but only in terms of decades, not centuries, as the DaVinci Code suggests. And the very latest of these dates is still within the lifetimes of those who knew Jesus of Nazareth.
Of even more interest is the fact that certain creeds found within the letters of Paul, can be dated to within 15 years of Jesus’ death and resurrection!
Also important when considering the authority of the New Testament is the question of authorship. Who wrote the books? Did they have access to truthful information? Did they have an agenda to promote?
With the exception of the Book of Hebrews, the books of the New Testament were written – without doubt – by men who either were Jesus’ disciples or were closely related to the original 12 disciples of Jesus.
So…on the one side of the “authority” scale you have 27 books of the New Testament that were written during the lifetimes of those who knew Jesus, by people who had access to first-hand information about his life and teaching. Now, let’s take a look at the other documents that the DaVinci Code asserts were “suppressed” by the church in order to further a political agenda.
B. The “other gospels”.
• First off, there are not 80 other gospels. There are actually only about 60 other writings that were ever even compared to scripture, and only a few of those are actually the type of literature we call “gospels”.
• These other gospels are commonly known as the “Gnostic Gospels”.
o Gnosticism was a heresy that developed late in the first century. The most important teaching of this belief system (at least as it relates to our discussion today) was that all material/physical matter was tainted with sin and therefore evil. As a result, Jesus could not have been (as the church has always believed) fully human and fully divine. Thus in the so called “Gnostic gospels” (such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and the recently translated and published “Gospel of Judas”) the teachingss of Jesus are presented quite differently than in the writings of the New Testament.
It should be noted before we go any further that when one actually reads these so called “gospels”, the picture they paint of Jesus is not one less divine, but MORE DIVINE and LESS HUMAN.
• The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for example, starts with a story about Jesus as a five year old creating 12 sparrows out of mud and then clapping his hands to bring them to life.
• In other places these writings are simply hard to understand. “Jesus said: ‘The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it come alive. When you are in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?’” (Gospel of Thomas, 11)
o When were they written? The “Gnostic Gospels” are given much later dates of composition than the books of the New Testament. Unlike the books of the New Testament, manuscript evidence of the Gnostic Gospels points to dates of authorship of late first century to late 2nd century. This is anywhere from 50-150 years after the writings of the New Testament.
o Though they were supposedly written by eyewitnesses of Jesus, in reality they were written many years later, through miraculous “secret” knowledge given to people.
Thus in the Gospel of Judas we suddenly are given “new” information about a discussion that Jesus and Judas had, which portrays Judas’ role quite differently than the books of the NT. We discover “new” conversations between Jesus and his disciples, including Mary Magdalene. But these “new” revelations are in quite a bit different category of literature than the writings which became part of the New Testament.
Let’s take another look at our authority test. On the one side you have the books of the New Testament.
• Thousands of manuscripts to compare to determine the exact wording of the original documents.
• Written within the lifetimes of those who knew Jesus.
• Written by those with access to first-hand knowledge of Jesus.
On the other hand you have the Gnostic writings:
• Very few manuscripts to compare.
• Written 50-150 years later than the New Testament writings.
• Written by anonymous authors.
Which books are more likely to be accurate? Obviously the books of the New Testament.
But this whole discussion leads to an important question that I believe all Christians should be able to answer. Just how were the books of the New Testament collated? Were they, in fact, chosen in the year 325 at the urging of the pagan Roman emperor Constantine?
So just how did the books of the New Testament come to us?
Canon: greek word for measuring rod, and came to mean “standard”. When applied to scripture, it means “an officially accepted list of books”.
For years I wondered just who it was that sat down to say “this should be in the Bible” and “this one shouldn’t”. But that’s not how it happened at all.
There never was an official church meeting in which the books were voted upon. As McDowell states in his study notes, “It is important to note that the church did not create the canon; it did not determine or select which books would be called Scripture, the inspired Word of God. Instead, the church recognized, or discovered, which books had been inspired from their inception.” (p. 34)
• As time passed certain writings were recognized as especially valuable and were passed on, copied, and translated.
As time passed certain writings were recognized as especially valuable and were passed on, copied, and translated. Others were not considered as valuable and so were either lost or simply never were shared among the wider church.
Add to that the rapid expansion of the Christian church in the first 2 centuries, and you’ll begin to see that as new cultures were introduced to Jesus Christ, they needed to have the Christian writings translated into their languages. In a world before copy machines and word processors, the decision of which documents to work on would have been made very carefully.
Over time, the list of books that were used by Christians to learn about the Christian faith and to teach new disciples began to get whittled down to a relatively small group of writings. By the middle of the 2nd century, a majority of the books now in the NT (most notably the 4 gospels) had already achieved “canonicity” – even though no official church council had made a decree.
• The problem of false teaching (heresy) created a need for an official “canon”.
In the year 135 a man named Marcion developed a following with his ideas that the God of the Old Testament was not the same God as the God of the New Testament. In order to teach others these ideas he created his own “canon” which excluded the entire Old Testament, and only included the letters of Paul and a highly revised version of the Gospel of Luke.
In order to counter what has now been termed the “Marcionite Heresy”, the church at large began creating lists of approved scriptures.
“This was not done in a formal manner, through a council or special meeting. What actually happened was that a consensus developed gradually. While very soon there was general agreement as to the basic books to be included in the canon of the New Testament, it took a long time to come to an absolute consensus on every minor detail.”
-Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1, page 62.
• The problem of persecution created a need for an official “canon”.
The book of Acts records the first persecutions against Christians that caused them to scatter from their homes. Throughout the first 3 centuries after Christ, many times Christians were forced to meet in “underground” locations.
In 303 AD, the Roman Emperor Diocletian called for the destruction of the sacred books of the Christians.
These very persecutions helped to establish the “canon” as Christians had to make decisions which writings were worth dying for – and which writings they would take with them when uprooted from their homes. Again – those that weren’t considered as valuable were left behind and destroyed.
It was not until late in the 4th century that an official list of the 27 books of the New Testament as it presently stands was created – but it is important to understand what that means. NT scholar F.F. Bruce puts it this way:
“When at last a church council – The Synod of Hippo in A.D. 393 – listed the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, it did not confer upon them any authority which they did not already possess, but simply recorded their previously established canonicity.” (Bible scholar F.F. Bruce)
When finally chosen, what were the criteria?
How were these chosen:
1. Was the book written by a prophet or apostle of God? Was the writer confirmed by acts of God?
2. Did the message tell the truth about God (did it contradict itself or other scriptures?)
3. Did it come with the power of God to change lives?
4. Was it accepted by Christians everywhere?
The books that were ultimately canonized passed those tests. The ones that were excluded were not canonized for usually one of 4 reasons:
1. It was not written by a prophet or apostle of God.
2. The message was contradictory with other scriptures.
3. It had not shown the power to change lives that other scriptures had.
4. It had only been accepted in a local area.
CONCLUSION:
If you want to know who Jesus was and what He taught, there is no better place to go than the writings of the New Testament.
Although it may make for interesting conspiracy theories to raise other ancient documents about Jesus above scripture, a reasoned search for the truth will always lead you to the same 27 books of the New Testament.
Next week we’ll continue our discussion of the DaVinci Code by looking at it’s claims that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and discovering exactly what the council of Nicea in 325 AD had to do with “voting” on the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Until then – let me leave you with a question. Who do you say Jesus is? Do you actually know what He taught or have you been content to let someone else tell you?
One of the most awesome privileges we as Americans have is to be able to read for ourselves the writings that have been preserved over nearly 2000 years which tell us who Jesus is, what he did, and why he is the most important person of history.
Don’t be fooled by the fiction. The facts are clear. Jesus Christ changed the world 2000 years ago – and he continues to change lives today of every person willing to become his disciple.
Let us pray.
