4. “During this fusion of religions, Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, and held a famous ecumenical gathering know as the Council of Nicaea…. At this gathering,” Teabing said, “many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus.”
5. “I don’t follow. His divinity?”
6. “My dear,” Teabing declared, “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.”
7. “Not the Son of God?”
8. “Right,” Teabing said. “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.”
9. “Hold on. You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?”
10. “A relatively close vote at that,” Teabing added…. “By officially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, and entity whose power was unchallengeable.” (DVC, p. 233, pb 252; T&F p.14)
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11. “Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen…. His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land…. 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.” (DVC, p. 231, pb 251, T&F p. 47)
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12. “As I mentioned,” Teabing clarified, “the early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible. (DVC p. 244, pb 264, T&F 48)
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13. “Fortunately for historians,” Teabing said, “some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. And, of course, the Coptic Scrolls 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, tried very hard to suppress the release of these scrolls.” (DVC p. 234, pb 254, T&F 26)
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The Da Vinci Code |
Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code |
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14.“Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen…. His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land…. |
15.
Jesus’ life was decidedly not
“recorded by thousands of followers across the land.” He didn’t even have
thousands of followers, let alone literate ones. (p. xiv) 16. There is no evidence that anyone recorded the facts of his life while he was still living (p. 48) 17. The problem is that ancient historians have come to realize that the vast bulk of the population in Jesus’ day was illiterate, able neither to read nor to write….At the best of times 85-90 percent of a population was illiterate. (p. 107) 18. And so what about Jesus’ followers? The only explicit reference to their literacy comes in the book of Acts, which indicates that two of the chief disciples, Peter and John, were, in fact illiterate (Acts 4:13). (p. 107) |
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19.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.” (DVC, p. 231, pb 251, T&F p. 47)
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20. The reality is that we don’t even know how many other Gospels were written; we certainly do not have eighty available to us today, although there are at least a couple of dozen that we know about. (p. 49) |
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21.“Aha!” 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.” (DVC, p. 231, pb 251, T&F p. 74) |
22. The historical reality is that the emperor Constantine had nothing to do with the formation of the canon of scripture: he did not choose which books to include or exclude, and he did not order the destruction of the Gospels that were left out of the canon (there were no imperial book burnings). The formation of the New Testament canon was instead a long and drawn-out process that began centuries before Constantine and did not conclude until long after he was dead. (p. 74) 23. What is interesting [about Paul’s quoting of scripture in 1 Timothy 5:18] is that he quotes two passages: one from the Law of Moses and the other from the words of Jesus….[Peter] refers to the false teachers who misinterpret the “letters of Paul,” he says, “just as they do with the rest of Scriptures” (2 Peter 3:16). My point is that near the end of the first century and the beginning of the second – hundreds of years before Constantine – Christians were already accepting some books as canonical authority, and choosing which books should be so accepted. (p. 79) 24. Once Jesus died and was no longer available to give his apostles instructions, there needed to be collections of his teachings for posterity, and once the apostles themselves had begun to die off, their own writings needed to be collected as a repository of true teachings to be followed. This was especially the case because of the enormous diversity of Christianity…. There were Christians who believed in one God, but others said there were two Gods (the God of the Old Testament and the God of Jesus); There were Christians who said the world had been created by the one true God, but others indicated that it had been created by a secondary deity; yet others said it was created by an evil being. There were Christians who maintained that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine; another group said he was so human he could not be divine; yet others said he was so fully divine he could not be human; others said he was two beings – the human Jesus and the divine Christ…. Each of these groups had sacred books that they claimed came from Jesus’ own apostles … and insisted that these books should be accepted as scriptural authority for Christians wanting to know what to believe and how to behave. The battle for scripture really was a battle – a conflict among competing groups of Christians…. Contrary to what Leigh Teabing said, this was not a decision rendered by the emperor Constantine. It was rendered by early Christian leaders…. (p. 80-81) 25. Criteria for Inclusion (p. 87-88) □ Ancient – near the time of Jesus □ Apostolic – written by apostle or companion □ Catholic – widespread acceptance (“universal”) □ Orthodox – correct content 26. The Muratorian Canon [late second century] includes the four Gospels that eventually made it into the New Testament, and no others…the Acts of the Apostles…all thirteen Pauline epistles. It explicitly rejects [others books]. (Note that these books were not to be burned; they simply were not to be read or presumably, copied). (p. 85) 27. In fact, the first time that anyone we know of listed our books as the books of the New Testament (those twenty-seven and no others) came nearer to the end of the fourth century, some fifty years after Constantine’s death… In 367CE, Athanasius included among his advice a list of books that he felt were appropriate to be read in church as the canonical scriptures. He listed our twenty-seven books of the New Testament, neither more nor less. (p. 93-94) |
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28.“During this fusion of religions, |
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29.Constantine needed to strengthen the new Christian tradition, |
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30.and held a famous ecumenical gathering know as the Council of Nicaea…. |
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31.At this gathering,” Teabing said, “many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon – the date of Easter, the role of the bishops the administration of sacraments, and, of course, the divinity of Jesus.” 32.“I don’t follow. His divinity?” |
33. Once again there are elements of both fact and fiction in Teabing’s view. Constantine did call the Council of Nicea, and one of the issues involved Jesus’ divinity. But this was not a council that met to decide whether or not Jesus was divine, as Teabing indicates. Quite the contrary: everyone at the council – and in fact, just about every Christian everywhere – already agreed that Jesus was divine, the Son of God. The question being debated was how to understand Jesus’ divinity in light of the circumstance that he was also human. Moreover, how could both Jesus and God be God if there is only one God? Those were the issues that were addressed at Nicea, not whether or not Jesus was divine. (p.14-15) |
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34.“My dear,” Teabing declared, “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.” 35.“Not the Son of God?” |
36. Teabing in fact presents a rather confused picture to Sophie in his discussion of Jesus’ identity as divine. On the one hand, he indicates that Jesus’ divinity was not accepted until Nicea in the year 325. On the other hand, he indicates that Constantine accepted into his canon of scripture only those Gospels that portrayed Jesus as divine, eliminating all the other Gospels that portrayed Jesus as human. But if Jesus’ divinity was not acknowledged by Christians until the Council of Nicea (Teabing’s view), how could the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John portray him as divine already in the first century (which is also his view). 37. Even beyond this inconsistency, the view that Teabing lays out is wrong on all key points: Christians before Nicea already did accept Jesus as divine; the Gospels of the New Testament portray him as human as much as they portray him as divine; the Gospels that did not get included in the New Testament portray him as divine as much, or more so, than they portray him as human. (p.15) 38. [see John 1:1-17, John 10:30, John 20:28, discussed on p. 17] 39. This view of Jesus as divine is not restricted to Paul and the Gospels, however. It is the common view held among Christian writers of the early centuries. As one of our earliest writers outside the New Testament, the Christian martyr Ignatius of Antioch (d. 110CE), put it in his own poetic way: 40. There is one physician, both fleshly and spiritual, born and unborn, God come in the flesh, true life in death, from both Mary and God, first subject to suffering and then beyond suffering, Jesus Christ our Lord. (Ignatius, To the Ephesians, 7.2) 41. From the very beginning – as far back as we have Christian writings (long before Constantine) – it became commonplace to understand that Jesus was in some sense divine. (p. 17)
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42.“Right,” Teabing said. “Jesus’ establishment as ‘the Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea.” 43.“Hold on. You’re saying Jesus’ divinity was the result of a vote?” |
44. And there certainly was no vote to determine Jesus’ divinity: this was already a matter of common knowledge among Christians, and had been from the early years of the religion. (p. 15) |
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45.“A relatively close vote at that,” Teabing added…. “By officially endorsing Jesus as he Son of God, Constantine turned Jesus into a deity who existed beyond the scope of the human world, and entity whose power was unchallengeable.” (DVC, p. 233, pb 252; T&F p.14) |
46. Contrary to what Leigh Teabing asserts, it was not a particularly close “vote.” The vast majority of the 200 or 250 bishops present sided with the view of Athanasius against Arius, which was eventually to become the view of Christianity at large (although the debates continued for decades even after the council.) And more important, contrary to Teabing, it was not a vote on Jesus’ divinity. Christians for 250 years had agreed that Jesus was divine. The only question was how he was divine, and that was what the Council of Nicea was called to resolve. (p. 23) 47. [According to The Da Vinci Hoax (Olson & Miesel, p. 171), only two of the Nicene bishops voted in favor of Arius’ position, similar to today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses’ view of Jesus as a created being. If nothing else, this representation of approximately 200 to 2 as a ‘close vote’ demonstrates the disingenuous nature of Brown’s handling of “facts” and by itself is sufficient reason to question anything else he says. mw] |
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48.“Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits.” (DVC, p. 234, pb 254, T&F p. 90) |
49. In his Life of Constantine Eusebius tells us that in the year 331 the emperor made a request of Eusebius personally for fifty manuscripts of the Christian Bible to be produced for churches that he was having built…. The order for Bibles did not involve any decision on Constantine’s part concerning which Gospels were to be excluded (those that stressed Jesus’ humanity) or which included (those stressing only his divinity)… Constantine needed some Bibles for his churches and he ordered them from Eusebius, whose home church was well equipped to provide them. Their contents were not a matter of concern, as both Constantine and Eusebius evidently knew which books would be appropriately included in these Bibles. (p. 91-92) |
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50.“Fortunately for historians,” Teabing said, “some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. |
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51.The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert. |
52. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not contain any Gospels, or in fact any documents that speak of Christ or Christianity at all; they are Jewish. Their initial discovery was in 1947, not in the 1950s. (p. 26) |
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53.And, of course, the Coptic Scrolls at Nag Hammadi. |
54. The Coptic documents at Nag Hammadi were in book form, they were not scrolls (an important distinction for the history of early Christian books). (p. 26) 55. The leather-bound books themselves were manufactured in the second half of the fourth century…. They were originally composed … by the second Christian century at the latest. (p. 39-40) |
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56.In addition to telling the true Grail story, |
57. Neither [the Nag Hammadi documents] nor the Dead Sea Scrolls ever speak of the Grail story. (p.26) |
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58.these documents speak of Christ’s ministry in very human terms. |
59. If anything, Jesus is portrayed as more divine in the Nag Hammadi sources than he is in the Gospels of the New Testament. (p. 26) 60. It is the Gospels of the New Testament that portray Jesus as human, and the other Gospels go much further in portraying him as a superhuman being. (p.45) 61. [Ehrman gives several pages of examples, such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas describing five-year-old Jesus making clay birds come to life and fly (p. 50) and striking playmates dead and raising them back to life (p. 51), and the Gospel of Peter describing a giant resurrected Jesus followed by a “walking, talking cross” p. 55] |
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62.Of course, the Vatican, in keeping with their tradition of misinformation, tried very hard to suppress the release of these scrolls.” (DVC p. 234, pb 254, T&F 26) |
63. The Vatican had nothing to do with covering up either of these discoveries (p. 26). |
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64.“As I mentioned,” Teabing clarified, “the early Church needed to convince the world that the mortal prophet Jesus was a divine being. Therefore, any gospels that described earthly aspects of Jesus’ life had to be omitted from the Bible. Unfortunately for the early editors, one particularly troubling earthly theme kept recurring in the gospels. Mary Magdalene.” He paused. “More specifically, her marriage to Jesus Christ.” (DVC p. 244, pb 264, T&F 48)
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65. Most of these other Gospels portray Jesus in even more divine terms that do the four in the canon, and in none of the extra-canonical Gospels is there any reference to Jesus having been married, let alone married to his follower Mary Magdalene. (p. 49) |
Imagine a news story about new pages from the U.S. Constitution, recovered after all these years of being lost. How would we decide if they were legitimate and should be a part of the Constitution?
Ø Age? Can we demonstrate that the document either dates from the late 18th century, or at least was copied from a document from that time? Anything much later (say, the Civil War era) would make it unlikely that the “new” pages represented the original ideas of the Founding Fathers.
Ø Source? Where did the pages come from, both the contemporary discovery and the original writers? If the original author was a loyal British subject opposed to the Revolution, maybe his ideas should be taken with some skepticism. Or if the documents were discovered and popularized by a member of al Qaeda, we might question the motives. But if they were clearly written in Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting, we would want to take them more seriously.
Ø Usage? Were these pages that all or at least most of the thirteen colonies thought were important, or did this just express some bizarre ideas from those folks in Massachusetts? If the new document can be shown to have been in common use by most of the colonies, it may have some legitimate value.
Ø Consistent? Does the content fit with the rest of the Constitution, in terms of the rights of people and the roles and restrictions on government? Or does it set out the principle that after 42 presidents, then the 43rd will be declared Emperor-for-Life? That kind of glaring inconsistency would raise serious questions about its authenticity.
This is the basic process of the canon of the New Testament in evaluating many competing documents on the basis of their antiquity, Apostolic authorship, catholicity (universality), and orthodoxy.
Documents matter – we are people of the Book, God’s primary vehicle for His self-revelation to us. What we believe about God and how we live before Him are based on this self-revelation in the Book, not on our cafeteria-style choices of what we think is the best way to be spiritual and which other interesting (and self-serving) ideas or teachings or documents we select.
So knowing where the Book came from is important. The Da Vinci Code seeks to seriously undermine our confidence in the Book by raising doubts about its authority, reliability, and integrity. The allegations of votes and hidden agendas, and political conspiracies between the government and the church – these all play on popular contemporary attitudes of the distrust of big government and big religion and conspiracy theories.
The “other Gospels” were considered and rejected by early (very early) church leaders. The canon was not a political move but the result of a couple of centuries of church experience and sorting through the varieties of claims about who (and what) Jesus was.
The doubts about the New Testament canon are a necessary plot device in The Da Vinci Code, in order to raise the status of the “other Gospels.” The elevation of the spurious sources then makes possible Brown’s ultimate plot twist, Mary Magdalene and her relationship with Jesus and role in the Church, and the “divine feminine” and “goddess worship” suppressed by the team of Constantine and the Catholic Church.
But with no documentary evidence, the Mary Magdalene angle just provides a sensational and salacious plot device, contrary to Brown’s claims about the factual basis of the novel. But ultimately the Mary Magdalene story is a side issue that should not distract us from the main focus of the authenticity, credibility, and reliability of the New Testament canon. That unique position held by the twenty-seven books of the New Testament is the necessary foundation for all our beliefs about the true nature and work of Jesus and the real story of His followers and His Church.
Copyright 2006 by Michael Wiebe