The Da Vinci Code Pt 3

Acts 3:12-19

May 7, 2006

( 8:30 , “The Book” video)

The Bible.  The Good Book, the Word of God—our insight into who Jesus is and how we can be reconciled with God through him, and how we can have eternal life with him in heaven—in other words, redemption.

So in our series about The Da Vinci Code, what does Dan Brown’s book say about the Bible that has caused such a stir? 

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….”

Continuing on 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.”

Can this be true?  Is the Bible that we’ve known our whole lives merely a well-conceived ruse to further political gain which has gone undetected for almost 2,000 years spreading lies about the nature of Jesus Christ?

And what about Constantine and the New Testament Canon?
Is it true that “The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great”?

Well, let’s begin with Constantine .  The truth is that Constantine was the first Christian Emperor of the Roman Empire . He stopped the persecution of Christians and made Christianity a state sanctioned religion in the year 315.

And no, he didn’t choose which books would go into the New Testament.
But let’s explore the claim in The Da Vinci Code that Constantine created the New Testament canon and suppressed 80 "gospels" in favor of the now-established four.

The premise of the Code is that there are more reliable gospels than the ones we know. In particular Brown’s characters refer to The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary. These, along with many other writings, were written by a Christian group called the Gnostics. Dan Brown, author of DVC, asserts that these “true” gospels were excluded by Constantine at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD in favor of the four we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

However, most scholars agree that the four Gospels which we hold to were in all probability written between 50 and 100 AD, and remain unchanged from their original form, and not “embellished” two hundred years later.  

Those same scholars tell us that the earliest of the Gnostic Gospels was written at least a generation later and some of them as much as two to three hundred years after and even after the early church had established the Canon of the scripture, which is our Bible.

And so as the early church recognized that there were false gospels being written and passed off as authentic, church leaders from all over began to set the criteria that would be used to help recognize true Scripture, and the early Church recognized our four Gospels.
Basically, the church consistently held that these books you have were apostolic – that is, reflected the true faith as it was passed on from the beginning.

And this was at least 150 years prior to Constantine and the Council of Nicaea who Brown asserts masterminded the entire conspiracy of the New Testament. This must have been quite a feat seeing it happened at least 100 years before any of them were born.

A man named Irenaues, who had been a student of Polycarp, who was a student of the apostle John 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. He referred to it as “the fourfold gospel.”
In writing his “Against Heresies,” Irenaues wrote, “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.”

So contrary to The Da Vinci Code’s assertion, the vast majority of Christians had been already been reading precisely our four Gospels as official Scripture since the second century at least, as writings from Irenaeus make clear.

But why did the Church even need an authoritative collection of gospels? 

Well, in a nutshell, 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 about Jesus and his mission.

Second, there were increasing persecutions of the church that often included the banning of the Bible and the 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 the truth about Christ.

Third, the process of collecting and consolidating Scripture also became an urgent necessity when the Gnostics, whom we mentioned earlier, produced its own false-biblical canon.

And so because of the Gnostic influence as well as inconsistencies in the teachings about the deity of Christ, Emperor Constantine summoned a council of Bishops in Nicea (across the straits from modern Istanbul), and there in 325 the Bishops of the Church, by a “close” vote of approximately 300 to 2, approved the canon of scripture and also the deity of Christ, and produced the first draft of what is now called the Nicene Creed.  This document put into precise language the philosophy and theology of Christianity for the first time.

In his book, 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.

Instead, he gets all of his historical facts wrong and claims that our scriptures are man-made propaganda.  And it’s amazing how many people buy into it.

In II Timothy 3:15-17 we read how the early Christians understood scripture as being authoritative:
“… you have known the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.”

I hope that this little installment of church history has been educational for you, and that it will help you to understand how we got our Bible, and help you to answer questions that your friends may have concerning Holy Scripture.