The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (18 page)

Dan Brown seems unaware of the fact that there is no unquestioned unanimity of Christian opinion about Jesus’s divinity and what it might mean. Controversy has never really died down, at least since the blossoming of Unitarianism and Socinianism at the time of the Protestant Reformation. And more recently than that, various waves of Liberal Protestant and Modernist Catholic thinkers have suggested thorough revisions of Christological doctrine. The most radical of these, perhaps, was the 1977 publication in Great Britain and America of the symposium
The Myth of God Incarnate
, in which a number of reputable theologians argued that it was time to jettison the whole idea of Jesus as the God-man. There was a bit of a flap about it for a while, but the biggest result was to provoke a few more books, opposing collections of essays carrying on the debate. Each side tried to reinforce the views of its clientele or maybe even to steal off a few sheep from the other flock. But the earth didn’t shake. Nor would it if one could prove, as no one has ever done, that Jesus was married.

NOTES

1
Dan Brown,
The Da Vinci Code
(New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 232-33.

2
T. G. Elliott,
The Christianity of Constantine the Great
(Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 1996), pp. 17-27, 29-38.

3
James Brashler and Roger A. Bullard, trans., “Apocalypse of Peter,” in
Nag Hammadi Library in English
, ed. James M. Robinson, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 377.

4
P. L. Couchoud,
The Creation of Christ: An Outline of the Beginnings of Christianity
, trans. C. Bradlaugh Bonner (London: Watts, 1939); G. A. Wells,
The Jesus of the Early Christians: A Study in Christian Origins
(London: Pemberton, 1971); Earl Doherty,
The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?
(Ottawa: Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999).

5
Paul Veyne,
Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 88: “the Greeks held their gods to be true, although these gods existed for them in a space-time that was secretly different from the one in which their believers lived.”

6
Bart Ehrman,
The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 14.

7
Maurice Wiles,
Archetypal Heresy: Arianism through the Centuries
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

Chapter 6

LOOSE CANON

Who Picked the Books in the Bible?

T
ry to ignore the insufferable, patronizing tone; here is ry to ignore the insufferable, patronizing tone; here is Professor Teabing’s mini-catechism on the canon of scripture: “The Bible is the 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.”
¹
Well, the translations point is a bit of a red herring. We can pretty well just go back, as Martin Luther and all subsequent translators have, to the original Hebrew, Aramaic (a little bit), and Greek. But Teabing, Dan Brown, is right about the rest of it. Dewey M. Beegle used to make the same point to those who claimed that, whatever problems we might be able to find in our editions of scripture, the “original autographs” were “inerrant and infallible.” Beegle would counter, “
What
original autographs?” Because virtually every book of the Bible is a patchwork quilt.
²
Some, like the Pentateuch, the Psalms, and Proverbs, began as compilations of earlier sources. Others began as collections of sayings, ledgers, prophetic oracles, speeches, and so forth, to which many more of the same sort, by nameless successors of the original prophets, were added over the generations. Some books (Matthew, Chronicles, 2 Peter) are supplemented versions of others (Mark, Samuel and Kings, Jude, respectively). And the major inference Teabing intends us to draw seems inescapable: There is no reason whatever to believe that either the origin or the growth of the Bible was supernatural in character. “The modern Bible was compiled 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.”
³
This, too, seems fair. The notion of an inspired scripture containing these books and no others is indeed a piece of mystification put forth by the self-appointed guardians of traditional faith, who have always sought to control what sacred texts we read and how we interpret them. That is the whole point of a canon (a “standard”) of scripture.
⁴

But we must part company with the pseudoerudite Dr. Teabag, ah, Teabing, when he keeps rambling on: “The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.”
⁵
“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 gathered up and burned.”
⁶
Brown is a bit mixed up here. To be clear ourselves: Constantine was an intrusive amateur theologian who wanted things his way, and the notion of Christ as the Lord of the universe proved handy for him, as he positioned himself as Christ’s almighty vicar on earth. But, as we have seen, the notion of a divine Christ was already quite old and no political creation. And Alexandrian bishop Athanasius, whose patron Constantine was, did indeed have major influence toward establishing the twenty-seven-book New Testament we use today. But, as far as we know, Constantine had no input in his list (see below). What Brown may be thinking of is the fact, reported by Eusebius, another favorite of Constantine (and the author of the “official” history of the church as written by the winners), that Constantine had fifty copies of scripture prepared (hand calligraphy!) on fine vellum for distribution through the major churches. Some scholars believe that the two fourth-century Bible manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, were among these. If so, it is interesting, as these do not match the canon list of Athanasius, indicating that the matter was still up for discussion. We knew that from Eusebius anyway, since he tells us where various groups lined up on this and that document and whether it belonged to scripture or not (again, see below). And the bishops of Constantine’s faction (today’s Catholic orthodoxy) did see to the destruction of many, many Gnostic and other writings, a terrible reproach for which we can never forgive them.

Another oddity in the Teabing tirade just quoted is the supposition that the Nag Hammadi and other pre-Constantinian gospels uniformly portrayed a merely human Jesus. If anything, the opposite is true. The Jesus of virtually all these writings is a fantastic and phantasmagorical being who functions mostly as a literary mouthpiece for outlandish doctrines no one alive today could espouse! (See chapter 4 on Gnosticism.) What, then, can Brown be talking about? One thing, and just one, in particular. He must be referring to that passage in the Gospel of Philip, which says Jesus used to smooch Mary Magdalene. Taking it out of context, Brown seems to think the Gnostic gospels portray Jesus simply as a cool guy. (See chapter 7, “Eighty Gospels?”)

Many of these issues have remained unsuspected by most Christians, though they are no news to critical scholars. And thus we must thank Dan Brown for bringing them to the attention of such a wide audience. But, as ever, the problem is his admixture of gross misinformation. To collapse the history of the New Testament canon (which admittedly is anything but a textbook fallen from heaven) into the cynical scheme of an egomaniacal politician is on the same level with the ignorant claim of some that King James of England personally
wrote
the King James Bible! And as long as Professor Teabing has raised the issue, it is incumbent on us to try to sort out what really happened. In fact, the real story is much more fascinating and colorful than Brown’s bogus version, and no less subversive of orthodox security.

MARCION INVASION

The history of a distinctively Christian scripture canon begins with Marcion of Pontus in Asia Minor. Traditionally dated as beginning his public ministry about 140 CE, Marcion may actually have gotten started earlier, just after the turn of the century. One ancient tradition/legend makes Marcion the secretary of the evangelist John, writing at the end of the first century. That story is probably not historically true, but no one would have told it if they did not assume Marcion had lived that early. It was a general tactic of early Catholic apologists to late-date the so-called heretics so as to distance them as far as possible from the apostolic period (in the same way as apologists today prefer the earliest possible date for the epistles and gospels, to include them within the apostolic period).

Marcion was the first real Paulinist we know of. It would later be a matter of some embarrassment to the church fathers that the earliest readers and devotees of the Pauline epistles were the Marcionites and the Valentinian Gnostics. We know of no Paulinists before these second-century Christians. The mid-first century existence of Pauline Christianity is simply an inference (admittedly a natural one) from taking the authorship and implied dates of the Pauline epistles at face value, as works representing a wing of first-century Christianity. But it is quite possible that the Pauline literature is the product of Marcionite and Gnostic movements in the late first and early second centuries. But even if most of the Pauline epistles are genuinely Pauline and from the first century, the most likely candidate for the first collector of the Pauline corpus remains Marcion. No one else in the time period would have had either the interest or the opportunity. No one was as interested in Paul as was Marcion. Why?

Marcion shared with his theological cousins the Gnostics the belief that the true God and Father of Jesus Christ was not the same deity as the creator and lawgiver God of Israel and of the Jewish scriptures. In this belief he was perhaps influenced by Zoroastrian Zurvanism, a dualistic doctrine, as Jan Koester suggests. At any rate he allowed that the creator God was righteous and just, but he was also harsh and retributive. His seeming grace was but a function of his arbitrariness: Nero might render a verdict of thumbs-up or thumbs-down as the whim moved him, and so with the God of Israel. Marcion deemed the Jewish scriptures historically true. He expected messianic prophecies to be fulfilled by a Davidic king who would restore Jewish sovereignty. But Marcion deemed all of this strictly irrelevant to the new religion of Christianity. In his view, which he claimed to have derived from reading Paul’s epistles, Jesus Christ was the Son and revealer of an alien God who had not created the world, had not given the Torah to Moses, and would not judge mankind. The Father of Jesus Christ was a God of perfect love and righteousness who would punish no one. Through Jesus (and Paul) he offered the human race the opportunity to be adopted as his children. If they were Gentiles, this meant a break with paganism. If they were Jews, it entailed a break from Judaism and the Torah. Marcion preached a strict morality. For him all sex was sinful. Begetting children only produced more souls to live in bondage to the creator. Marcion believed Jesus had no physical birth but appeared out of heaven one day at the seeming age of thirty, already in a human body (like Adam—created as an adult but with a misleading belly button!), albeit a body of celestial substance. He taught and was later crucified. He had hoped his twelve disciples would spread his gospel of the alien God and his loving adoption of all who would come to him. But things went awry: The disciples, as thick-headed and prone to misunderstanding as they appear in Mark, underestimated the discontinuity of Jesus’s new revelation with their hereditary Judaism and combined the two. This was the origin of the Judaizing heresy with which Paul deals in Galatians and elsewhere.

Marcion had noticed an oddity most Christians never notice as they read the New Testament: If Jesus had named the Twelve to succeed him and seemed satisfied with them, whence the need for Paul at all? And why should he come to eclipse the others in importance? The Twelve are for the most part merely a list of names. Not so Paul, whose letters have formed the basis for Protestant Christianity. Marcion saw a simple answer: The Risen Jesus saw how far off the track his disciples had quickly gone and decided to recruit another who would get the message straight. And this was Paul. To invoke a recurrent pattern in Christian history, think of Martin Luther, Alexander Campbell, John Nelson Darby, Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Victor Paul Wierwille, and others. All these believed that original, apostolic Christianity had been corrupted by an admixture of human tradition, and they believed they had a new vision of the outlines of true Christianity and set about to restore it. This is what Marcion thought already in the early second century. It shouldn’t sound that strange to us. Like these men, Marcion succeeded very well in launching a new church, one that spread like wildfire all over and even beyond the Roman Empire. And the New Testament was his idea.