David Hilborn replies to the claims made by Dan Brown's character, Sir Leigh Teabing
In Chapter 55 of The Da Vinci Code Sir Leigh Teabing instructs Sophie Neveu in the ‘truth’ about Christianity, advancing various arguments which are familiar to scholars, but which have aroused great popular interest and controversy thanks to the success of Dan Brown’s novel.
The Biblical Canon
‘The Bible is a product of man….it has evolved through countless translations, additions and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book’ (p312/313)
The Bible does not present itself as falling ready-made from heaven without human mediation. It is manifestly the product of diverse authors with varying styles and personalities, writing in a range of contexts across a wide span of time. Those authors were not dictating machines, but real human beings. The claim of the apostles, however, it that the work of biblical writers is unified by having been produced consistently under the inspiration of God’s Holy Spirit, and by having been commonly concerned with a message of salvation which is fulfilled in Jesus Christ (“ Timothy 3:15-16; 2 Peter 1:20-21; )
Jesus debated with Jewish religious leaders over many issues, but the content of the Old Testament canon was not one of them. Indeed, by then there was little serious dispute in Palestinian Judaism about the essential shape of this canon, although its precise form and sequencing might sometimes vary. In common understanding, it consisted of three sections: the Torah or Law, the Nebi’im or Prophets, and the Kethubim or Writings. Jesus himself refers to this three-part structure in Luke 24:44. Furthermore, in Matthew 23:35, he appears to allude to the widely recognised parameters of the canon when he refers to all the righteous blood shed on earth, ‘from the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berakiah’, thus delineating the Hebrew Scriptures as they were then usually arranged, from Genesis at their beginning to 2 Chronicles at their end. No doubt Greek versions of the Old Testament did include certain books regarded as apocryphal elsewhere, but these were consistently seen as subordinate by mainline Judaism.
As for the New Testament, The Da Vinci Code severely questions the authenticity of the four canonical gospels in comparison with other extant texts on Jesus from the first three centuries of church history. But Matthew, Mark, Luke and John offer by far the fullest accounts of Jesus’ life, work and teaching, and are almost certainly earlier than any of these other texts. When it comes to the place of the Epistles in the New Testament canon, it is clear that where they were commonly understood to have been written by apostles of Jesus himself, they were accepted as canonical by the early church. Even within the New Testament period itself, Peter saw fit to refer to the letters of Paul as Scripture (2 Peter 3:16). By the early second century, 20 of the New Testament’s 27 books were settled in the canon. By the 140s, Marcion was decisively condemned and excluded from the Roman church for attempting to excise Matthew, Mark, John, Acts and three of Paul’s letters from the canon. A so-called Muratorian Canon may date from as early as AD 170. Disputes about the propriety and apostolicity of Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude and Revelation continued for some time after this, but they were included in the now-familiar list of 27 by the Council of Carthage in AD 397.
‘The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great’ (p313)
Constantine did fund the printing and circulation of a canonical Bible around AD 330, but the canon used there reiterated lists of books that had been circulating well beforehand.
The Deity of Christ and the Council of Nicea (AD 325)
‘At this gathering, many aspects of Christianity were debated and voted upon……[including] the divinity of Jesus…until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by his followers as a mortal prophet…a man…a mortal’.....‘Jesus’ establishment as the ‘Son of God’ was officially proposed and voted on by the Council of Nicaea’
‘Hold on. You’re saying that Jesus’ Divinity was the result of a vote?’
'A relatively close vote at that….’ (p315)
Brown holds that Jesus was made into a divine figure by the Council of Nicea in 325, to serve the political agenda of the Emperor Constantine. But Jesus had been presented as God by the New Testament writers (e.g. John 1:1, 20:28; Philippians 2:6; Colossians 1:15-16). He had also been affirmed as divine by numerous theologians well before the fourth century – not only by Irenaeus and Tertullian, but also by Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis and Origen.
The Apocryphal Gospels and the Dead Sea Scrolls
‘The Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea scrolls….the earliest Christian records’ (331) ‘according to these unaltered gospels….’ (p334)
Brown makes much of the 'Apocryphal Gospels' - a series of writings about Jesus discovered at the Egyptian sites of Oxyrhynchus and Nag Hammadi in 1896 and 1945. Indeed, The Da Vinci Code states that the Nag Hammadi texts are the earliest records about Jesus, and were excluded from the canon precisely because their portrait of him undermined Constantine's effort to make Christianity uniquely powerful in his empire. Yet while these sources contain certain sayings which derive from the first century and are close to those found in the canonical gospels, their own likely dating is mid-second century at best, with many going back no further than the third century. By contrast, even quite sceptical scholars accept that the four New Testament gospels were in circulation by around 100 AD. Thus, while The Apocryphon of James echoes some of Jesus' parables, in doing so it draws on material from each of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This indicates that the canonical gospels had already been collected together in some form before it was produced. The Gospel of Philip and The Gospel of Truth likewise contain some early sayings of Jesus, but are infused with a Gnostic philosophy which is sharply at odds with the canonical worldview, and which was rejected by mainline theologians like Irenaeus and Tertullian in the second century—well before Constantine came onto the scene.
Gnosticism describes a broad range of philosophies and spiritualities, but in essence it espoused a dualism which held that matter is evil and spirit good, and that God is therefore divorced from the world. As such, it rejected the incarnation, often preferring a Jesus who pointed to God but was not himself divine. In some cases, as with the Apocalypse of Peter, Gnosticism separated the divine and the human through the flip-side heresy of Docetism—the view that the cosmic Christ only appeared to be human. So here the true Saviour laughs at bystanders who think he has undergone the indignity of crucifixion, when the man nailed to the cross is a substitute.
The most prominent of all the 'Gnostic Gospels' is the Gospel of Thomas, and The Da Vinci Code makes great play of it. Thomas comprises 114 sayings, many of which parallel those found in New Testament. The idea that the earliest written records of Jesus’ ministry comprised sayings-collections rather than connected narratives has been influential since the mid-nineteenth century, when German scholars hypothesised a source of quotations, Q, on which Matthew and Luke were thought to have drawn. However, Brown misrepresents the highly theoretical nature of Q when he suggests that it might have been written in Jesus’ own hand. A similar distortion attends his account of The Gospel of Thomas. Brown implies that this may be as early as Q, but it in fact excludes the more distinctively Jewish elements of Jesus’ ministry reported by Matthew, and misses the future aspects of his teaching about the kingdom of God common to the first three canonical gospels. Indeed, the Jesus of Thomas comes over as an enigmatic Greek sage, rather than as a Hebrew Rabbi. This again suggests a later Gnostic reconstruction of his life, rather than an authentic account. No doubt a fair number of the sayings resemble those found in the New Testament, and this has led some scholars, including those of the so-called Jesus Seminar, to date the overall text from the mid-first century. But the majority of historians hold it to have been compiled and edited in the Syrian district of Edessa around 140AD. Moreover, the fact that the distinctive sayings of Thomas advocate harsh asceticism and celibacy reinforce the impression that it is a Gnostic recasting of the more earthy Jesus we find in the canonical gospels.
Brown misleads readers still further when he links the Nag Hammadi documents with the Dead Sea Scrolls. These manuscripts were found in 1947 and date from between the second century BC and the first century AD. They contain a mixture of Old Testament texts and apocrypha, and rules relating to a monastic Jewish community which most now locate at the nearby site of Qumran. The scrolls shed important light on the religious context of the time, but they never once mention Jesus or his disciples. Certain resemblances between the Scrolls and the New Testament have led some to speculate that Jesus might have been connected to the Qumran group. Both criticised institutional Judaism, both emphasised baptism, and both foretold an imminent apocalypse in which the Temple would fall. Yet the Scrolls are exclusive, sectarian, legalistic and puritanical whereas Jesus embraces Gentiles and ‘sinners’, challenges ritual purity codes and presents himself as the fulfilment of the Law.
Jesus and Mary Magdalene‘The marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is part of the historical record’ (p330)
‘the historical evidence supporting this is substantial’ (p340)
’[Mary] Magdelene was recast as a whore in order to erase evidence of her powerful family ties’ (p335)
Brown’s suggestion of a sexual relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is not in fact confirmed by any of the Apocryphal Gospels. The Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene records that Jesus ‘loved Mary more than the others’, and The Gospel of Philip reports that ‘he used to kiss her’, but neither confirm an erotic liaison or marriage between the two, and certainly do not mention that they had a child together. Besides, the philosophical provenance and relatively late dating of these two texts (between late second and late third centuries) casts severe doubt on their historical accuracy compared with that of the four canonical gospels. It is true that the medieval church dubiously conflated the Mary Magdalene who first appears in Luke 8:2 with the ‘sinful woman’ who anointed Jesus immediately beforehand (Luke 7:36-50), but this was down to the general ecclesiastical patriarchy and misogyny of the period, and a desire to construct an stark immoral contrast to the Virgin Mary, rather than to any ‘plot’ to cover up a physical union between Mary Magdalene and Jesus.
The Sabbath & Sunday
‘Nothing in Christianity is original… Originally Christianity honoured the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun’ (p314)
The earliest Christians were Jews, and certainly observed the Sabbath, although Jesus himself had been criticized for healing on the Sabbath and radically reinterpreting its purpose (Matthew 12:10-14). In addition, the resurrection of Jesus took place on ‘the first day of the week’ (Sunday), and this provided a basis for the first generation of Christians in Troas to ‘break bread’ on Sundays (Acts 20:7). In Revelation 1:10, Sunday is referred to as ‘the Lord’s day’, so Christian Sunday observance can be seen tasking shape even within the scope of the New Testament canon. Constantine undoubtedly formalized this move by forbidding townspeople to work on Sundays from AD 321, but the shift had begun well before then.
