But It's Just Fiction... (Part 7)

Miller adds that it is a mistake to misuse Rabbinical literature (as Teabing is likely doing by Brown’s account) to assume that a rabbinic opinion was somehow a law. As the historian E.P. Sanders notes, according to Miller:

“There is also a more general point with regard to calling an opinion a law: once one starts quoting rabbinic statements as laws governing Palestine, one may draw absolutely any portrait of first-century Palestine that one wants. There are thousands and thousands of pages, filled with opinions."

These “laws” may not be laws, but anything from “a simple description of common practice, which someone finally decided to write down” to a prohibition offered precisely because so many people were doing the opposite.

It may be something intended only for the Pharisees, or may be an expression of an ideal that was never followed. As Miller notes, quoting Jewish scholar Ze'ev Safrai: "The public at large did not obey the rabbis. Among the Jews, only a minority followed the rabbis, obeyed their decisions and was influenced by their sermons and moral teachings….The scholar or reader who wishes to do real history must take into account all sorts of possibilities when he or she faces a rabbinic passage; the response, 'everybody did it because the rabbis laid it down' is seldom the correct one."

Therefore, it is false to say that Jesus as a married man “makes infinitely more sense;” it is simply false to claim that the “social decorum” (or anything else) “virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried;” it is false that “celibacy was condemned,” and the silence on the subject in the Gospels is not room for a positive proof whatsoever. (Let it finally be added, as many have noted, that Jesus does have a "bride" -- the church!

This is how the body of believers is identified in Revelation, which clearly points to Jesus being single on earth.)

In a section following, Brown’s “historian” repeats his error about Gospels being found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He also appeals to a collection of texts found at a location called Nag Hammadi in 1945. Surprisingly, Teabing makes no mention of the most famous alternative gospel found in this collection, the Gospel of Thomas. Why this is so is quite clear: The Gospel of Thomas ends with an admonition by Jesus that women must “become male” in order to find salvation!

Needless to say, this would not fit in with Brown’s tale of seekers after a feminine divine! Instead, Brown cherry-picks two other documents:

The Gospel of Philip. Recommended as a “good place to start” by Teabing, Brown quotes a portion of the text in which Jesus is said to often “kiss” Mary Magdalene “on the mouth” and thereby invoke the jealousy of Peter.

Teabing goes on to point out that Mary is described as Jesus’s “companion,” and this is supposedly troubling for the canonical Gospel view. Is it? Brown has Teabing say little about this gospel of Philip, and for good reason.

Scholarship has utterly rejected this work as having any authentic historical recollections not derived from the canonical Gospels. Philip Jenkins, a Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies at Penn State University, is our Philip who debunks Teabing’s Philip.

In his book Hidden Gospels, Jenkins explodes the myth of the Gospel of Philip as a reliable or contemporary source for the life of Jesus:

Not a first century document at all, scholars date the Gospel of Philip to the third century, about 200 years after Jesus lived, and therefore no product of the disciple named Philip in Acts, unless he lived to be at least 310! This would be as far removed from us as the American Revolution, and certainly not to be preferred over the canonical Gospels, which even by later dates assigned by some scholars (80-100 AD) are far closer to their source.

The Nag Hammadi document was penned no earlier than 350 AD.

The Gospel of Philip is a Gnostic text, and Gnostic thought would have no place in first century Palestinian Judaism. A Jesus teaching Gnosticism in this setting would not have been Teabing’s influential person – he would have been ignored and shunned.

Teabing also appeals briefly to a second document titled The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

Claiming that “modern historians” have already explored the issue (and implying a positive finding), this gospel also shows Jesus treating Mary as a companion, and depicts Peter’s jealousy after Jesus gives Mary special instructions to carry out to run the Church after his crucifixion. Leading up to the idea of Mary Magdalene as the “female womb that carried Jesus’ royal bloodline,” Teabing comments:

Jesus was the original feminist. He intended for the future of His Church to be in the hands of Mary Magdalene.

This gospel, however, fares no better than Philip under critical analysis. It, too, is a Gnostic document that reflects no reality found among Palestinian Jews of the first century; the earliest fragments, Jenkins notes, are dated to the third century, and most scholars date it no earlier than 180-200 AD, as far from Jesus are we are from the Civil War.

What Brown has actually done here is uncritically accept as valid specific fringe views that sober scholars like Jenkins reject. Brown sits with those who claim that goddess worship and Mary Magdalene’s prominence was the original, which the early, evil, male-dominated church erased; but as Jenkins observes, “…the Gnostic world should rather be seen as the first of many popular reactions against the institutional structures of the existing church, of the sort that would be commonplace through the middle ages and beyond."

Put simply, the church has a better claim to have “been there first.” Their documents have the evidence of earlier composition -- in terms of manuscript evidence, internal linguistic evidence, and external attestation – and the evidence of context, for the “male dominated” society that is so despised by ideologues like Brown is better matched in the Jewish culture in which Christianity formed, while the “divinized female” ideal that they prefer is found only in much later Gnostic materials.

Stay tuned for Part 8...coming soon