But It’s Just Fiction….(Part 3)

Teabing goes on, with more specific claims:

“Jesus Christ was a historical figure of staggering influence, perhaps the most enigmatic and inspirational leader the world has ever seen….Understandably, His life was recorded by thousands of followers across the land….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.”

Was Jesus a figure of “staggering influence” about whom “thousands of followers” wrote? The answers to these questions is, “No, not exactly,” and “No, not that the evidence would allow.”

Jesus became a figure of “staggering influence” only AFTER the Christian church became a prominent force. As far as the historians of the day were concerned, Jesus was just a "blip" on the screen. Jesus was not considered to be historically significant by historians of his time. He did not address the Roman Senate, or write extensive Greek philosophical treatises; He never traveled outside of the regions of Palestine, and was not a member of any known political party. It is only because Christians later made Jesus a "celebrity" that He became known. Historian E. P. Sanders, comparing Jesus to Alexander the Great, notes that the latter "so greatly altered the political situation in a large part of the world that the main outline of his public life is very well known indeed.

Jesus did not change the social, political and economic circumstances in Palestine ..the superiority of evidence for Jesus is seen when we ask what he thought.” Jesus was also executed as a criminal, providing him with the ultimate “marginality”. He lived an offensive lifestyle and alienated many people. He associated with the despised and rejected: Tax collectors, prostitutes, and the band of fishermen He had as disciples. Finally, he was a poor,rural person in a land run by wealthy urbanites. The idea that Jesus had a ‘staggering influence” during his own life on earth is completely in error, which means that he could not have had “thousands of followers” to write authoritative biographies.

In fact, three or four biographies would be the most we should expect – especially since 90 to 95 percent of all ancient persons were illiterate and unable to write such a work to begin with!

Were there eighty Gospels out of which four were chosen? If this is so, then we are justified in asking several questions:

1) What are the dates of the manuscripts of the “excluded” Gospels?

If we are to consider any such work, we need to know how close it is to the time when Jesus lived. One way of determining this is to know what the earliest manuscript of it is. When we look at the evidence (sadly,evidence doesn’t seem to bother Brown in the least), we find that while there is near universal Christian knowledge and acceptance of the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John)
by the middle of the second century, none of the non-canonical Gospels were even close in date of composition, breadth of distribution, or proportion of acceptance. These were, for the most part, pseudo-gospels attributed to other Apostles but generally disqualified by most churches because they had no historical “chain of evidence” actually connecting them to real Apostles,and/or because they made claims that were contrary to what was already accepted in the canonical Gospels. This issue is also well known among Biblical scholars and information is easily obtainable in books written on a lay level such as Norman Geisler and William Nix’s A General
Introduction to the Bible (Chicago: Moody Press, 1986) or online in sources such documented by the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia’s documents at
http://www.reference-guides.com/isbe/B/BIBLE_THE_IV_CANONICITY/ .

2) Is there any evidence of this “excluded” Gospel being used at an earlier date?

It is also useful to find citations of a work in contemporary writers, for if they quote a work, that is evidence that it existed at the time of their writing. Although there may have been as many as 50 pseudepigraphal gospels, most are known only by name from a few isolated statements by early church writers. The most significant ones are well known and the reasons they were never accepted by the majority of the church is well known and has never been kept secret by any
hierarchy. Geisler and Nix provide lay readers with a good summary of this issue in their book referenced above (pages 297-317) saying, “the extra-canonical literature, taken as a whole,manifests a surprising poverty. The bulk of it is legendary, and bears the clear mark of a forgery. Only here and there amid a mass of worthless rubbish, do we come across a priceless jewel” (311). In fact, that “priceless jewel” in almost every instance is a mere repetition of what we find in one or more of the canonical Gospels.


3) Does the context cohere with what we would expect of the historical Jesus?

In other words,if Jesus is said to open a “refrigerator” and take out a “burrito” and put it in a “microwave oven,” then we can be fairly sure that it does not accurately report the activities of a Jesus living in the first century. For example, in the Gospel of the Ebionites we find that John the Baptist didn’t eat honey and locusts, as the canonical Gospels record, but only honey. The Ebionites were vegetarians and didn’t let the truth get in the way of their dietary agenda. The
Gospel of Peter laid the blame for the crucifixion solely at the feet of the Jews, exonerating the Romans – an anti-Semitic stance Brown should consider intolerable. The very “Gospels” Brown brings forth to undermine the consistent story of the canonical Gospels promote teachings completely contrary to the “secret” Christianity Brown says they represented! It is this sort of data that scholars take into account when deciding whether a document is an authoritative source. In this chapter Brown does not name any of the other Gospels he has in mind, but he will name two of them in a later chapter, and we will address them in our discussion of those chapters. In closing, it is worth noting that Brown’s putative historian perpetrates two enormous blunders that would be an embarrassment to any scholar:

“Fortunately for historians…some of the gospels that Constantine attempted to eradicate managed to survive. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s hidden in a cave near Qumran in the Judean desert.”

First, as I explained to the woman at the bookstore, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, not in the 1950s. (Note for those with problems: Three times I have had people write me claiming that Brown is right here because Dead Sea Scrolls continued to be discovered into the 1950s. But this is clearly not what Brown intends to report: If it were, he would have said that they were found beginning in 1947 and through the 1950s; as it is, his claim here remains a blunder. In addition, I have noted with satisfaction that two different experts in Burstein's
guidebook [see below] peg Brown for exactly the same error.)

Second, they did not contain any “gospels” or anything mentioning Jesus. They overwhelmingly predate the New Testament and are mostly copies of Old Testament books, and internal documents for the Qumran community. Brown also has his character allege that the Vatican “tried very hard to suppress the release of these Scrolls” because they contained damaging information. This is merely an obnoxious conspiracy
theory found in popular writers, with no basis in fact. Again, the evidence concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls has been written about in so many books, journals, and articles, many on a lay level, that Brown can only make his erroneous statements with a complete disregard for the facts. There is nothing in the Dead Sea Scrolls that promotes either traditional or deviant Christianity. The community at Qumran responsible for the Scrolls was not Christian, but Jewish. While the Dead Sea Scrolls say nothing directly about Christianity, they do provide two important substantiations of traditional Christianity.

First, the texts of the Old Testament preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls provide us with verification that the Old Testament preserved by Jews and Christians throughout the centuries after Christ was an accurate rendition of what was known to Jews of Jesus’ day.

Second, the community at Qumran reflects a first century Judaism much more like that depicted by the New Testament writers than it does the Judaism that developed after the destruction of the Second Temple in A. D. 70. Those who speculated in times past that the Judaism presented in the New Testament was a later invention by Christian opposers to Judaism were refuted by what we have learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Did Constantine decide the canon? How did the process work?.

Constantine was not the decider of the canon, and played in fact no role at all in its assembly; the church at large was the party responsible. The process of canonizing the New Testament was based on a model that had existed for centuries whereby various religions chose a collection of normative sacred books. It is
likely that Paul himself began the process by collecting his own letters, or that one of his friends like Luke or Timothy did so. Far from being an arbitrary process, or one decided upon by Constantine much later, the formation of the canon was the result of carefully-weighed choices over time by concerned church officials and members. Later votes on the canon were merely the most definitive steps taken at the end of a long and careful, sometimes difficult, process.

Biblical scholar Robert Grant, in The Formation of the New Testament, writes that the New Testament canon was:...not the product of official assemblies or even of the studies of a few theologians. It reflects and expresses the ideal self-understanding of a whole religious movement which, in spite of temporal, geographical, and even ideological differences, could finally be united in accepting these 27 diverse documents as expressing the meaning of God's revelation in Jesus Christ and to his church. To claim that Constantine was behind the canon, or was responsible for destroying Gospels he did not approve of, is a ludicrous distortion of history.

In fact, Constantine convened the Council at Nicea, paid the travel expenses of those who attended, and provided his summer lake palace for the site, but he had no ecclesiastical authority at all. The information we have on the Council is fascinating and in no way supports the idea of a pagan Roman’s overthrow of “early
Christianity” or any conspiracy. A good introduction to the facts about the Council is available in the Summer 1996 issue of Christian History magazine, “Heresy in the Early Church,” at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/51h/.

“The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual – the miter, the altar, the doxology, and communion, the act of “God-eating” – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.”

Stay tuned for Part 4. Coming soon......