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Seek the Truth -- The Da Vinci Code (II)

The most anticipated movie of the year, The Da Vinci Code, hits the theaters this week. Rarely have we seen so much hype for a movie, which is interesting considering that the book upon which it is based (Dan Brown’s novel of same name) is a direct attack on Christianity. Its very theme is that Christianity as we know it is a big lie. It claims that we have the wrong Bible and that Jesus was a mere man married to Mary Magdalene with whom he had a child whose descendents live to this day. Supposedly a covert society known as the Priory of Sion has guarded the secret until the time is right to reveal it to the world. Once revealed, this secret would supposedly “devastate the very foundations of mankind”.

Do these claims have any credibility? The movie trailer ends with the counsel to “Seek the Truth”. So let’s do that, beginning with the claim that “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….The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great [p. 231]….[who] 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 [p. 234].”

The truth is that there are about 45 Gnostic writings, only about 20 of which (not 80) could remotely be considered “Gospels”. All of these are much later than the New Testament Gospels. The earliest Gnostic Gospel was the famous Gospel of Thomas, dated by most scholars to the early to mid-Second Century, more than a hundred years after Christ’s death. In contrast, nearly all scholars date the four Biblical Gospels to the mid-First Century, well within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of Christ’s life. Further, the writings of the “Church Fathers” of the first three centuries, including Justin (ca. 150 A.D.), Irenaeus, (ca. 185 A.D.), Origin (ca. 210 A.D.) and even some Gnostics describe the “Gospels” as “four-fold”, those four being Mathew, Mark, Luke and John just as we have them today. The early “canons” or lists of accepted New Testaments books (long before Constantine’s time) consisted of 22 or 27 books, never more and all of which are contained in our Bible today. The so-called “lost books of the Bible” were never accepted in any canons nor quoted by the early Christian writers. On the contrary, they were rejected long before the time of Constantine and the Nicene Council. The truth is, the Biblical Gospels are the true and accurate eyewitness accounts of Christ’s ministry and his death and resurrection. For further reading on this subject, go to justchristians.com and click on the recent issue of Abundant Life.