The good news beyond The Code

The Davinci Code bursts on to screens today, bringing with it a wild chase from clue to clue uncovering along the way an ancient secret which could rip apart the faith of billions of Christians. As I mentioned in last week’s column, the movie and book are fiction. But The DaVinci Code is not alone in propagating a myth about Christian origins.

The myth states that the Church suppressed hundreds of documents about Jesus. In this view, Christianity as we know it was not the result of the life and ministry a first century Palestinian Rabbi named Jesus. Instead, Christianity is said to be the brainchild of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who in the 320s made Christianity the religion of the empire for political reasons.

It is true that there are other texts which tell us of Jesus life and ministry. I have a book on my desk as I write this which contains full texts or fragments of 20 versions of Jesus’ life and ministry. These are not newly discovered, but have been known and written about since they were written. The fact that you are newly hearing of these other accounts of Jesus may depend on what you have been reading, more than on suppression by the Church. The other accounts of Jesus life came much later than the four gospels you know with one exception I will note below.

You have probably heard of The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in Israel in the 1940s and 50s. These texts were buried about the time of Jesus and contain many copies of Old Testament texts along with others from the Jewish community at Qumran. Despite The DaVinci Code’s claims, the scrolls contain nothing about Jesus.

The real mother lode for texts on Jesus was found in Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945. These 13 books in leather cases contained many texts we knew of, but the manuscripts of which had been lost for centuries. They include a collection of sayings named The Gospel of Thomas. Most of those quotations of Jesus are identical or close to the quotations of Jesus found in the four gospels in the Bible.

Some scholars date the Gospel of Thomas earlier than the gospels found in the Bible. This is important as earlier sources are generally viewed as more reliable. The reason behind assigning an earlier date is the assertion that sayings come before stories. But there is no archeological or linguistic reason to date Thomas earlier and the sayings not in line with the New Testament do bear the mark of the Gnostics who created the Nag Hammadi library, suggesting a later origin for Thomas.

Gnostic Christianity prospered briefly in Rome and around the empire. Gnostics taught that the most important part of Christianity was never taught publicly but spread by word of mouth from disciple to student in a line from Jesus to them.

Gnosticism taught that the physical world is inherently bad and only the spirit is good. This was counter not only to Jesus, but countered also Jewish tradition back to the creation account in which everything God made was called good. Gnostics nevertheless used Jesus as an exemplar of their ideal spirit and taught an alternate form of Christianity which existed for a time in competition with what we call today orthodox (meaning right belief).

Gnostic Christianity was declared a heresy, or wrong teaching, by Christians well before the Roman Emperor Constantine. Our best source of knowledge of Gnostic writings, before the Nag Hammadi discovery, was Irenaeus of Lyon whose work Against Heresies was written in roughly 180 A.D.

Irenaeus proudly stated that in his youth he was taught by Polycarp who himself knew and was taught by John and others who knew Jesus personally. Irenaeus said he could trace the oral tradition he had received about Jesus through a direct line to the apostles and that tradition was the same as found in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. No Gnostic teacher could claim a similar line of succession for their teachings.

The most important source for Christianity is found in the New Testament. Despite steady attack, the scholarly consensus remains that the New Testament was largely written within 50 years of Jesus’ death (some within 20 years) and is well attested historically two centuries before Constantine called the Council of Nicea. That council created what we know today as The Nicene Creed, which The DaVinci Code makes sound like a whole-cloth creation of Constantine who deified the previously human teacher Jesus.

Another readily accessible source for pre-Constantine theology is found in The Apostle’s Creed which dates from no later than 150 A.D. That creed, still said in many churches, teaches of a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with Jesus clearly being called both divine and born of a woman. Christian teaching on Jesus being both human and divine well predates Constantine.

The new myth of Christian origins says that the real Jesus was lost to time and the faith as we know it was a self-serving invention of a clever emperor and a self-serving hierarchy of priests. This view ignores the solid historical data we have on the early Christian movement which was persecuted by Rome up until Constantine. Furthermore, if Christians had believed for centuries that Jesus was merely a great human teacher, then no vote by the emperor’s council would suddenly convince them that Jesus was God.

More importantly, the New Testament is far from the sort of text any emperor would choose to shore up support of the kingdom. At its heart, the good news is that Jesus is Lord and therefore Caesar and any other person is not. Jesus was no friend of the emperor. Rather he was put to death as a revolutionary. Jesus’ teaching found in the Bible turns the world on its head making the first, last. This story of Jesus is not exactly congenial to any emperor.

The myth of Christian origins espoused in The DaVinci Code and elsewhere holds up to neither scholarship nor common sense. Rather than an sophisticated secret protected through the ages, the heart of the Christian gospel is the deceptively simple assertion that God so loved the world that he would choose to become a part of the creation in order to redeem it. That has seldom been good news to those in power and it has never been a secret.

(The Rev. Frank Logue is pastor of King of Peace Episcopal Church in Kingsland.)

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