But It's Just Fiction....(Part 10)

1. Jesus' life was not “recorded by thousands of followers across the land”. Nor is it at all clear that Jesus “inspired millions to better lives”— if by that he means (as the sentence suggests) that Jesus did so in his own lifetime. Jesus was not a cause of much comment in any contemporary ancient sources (Jewish or Roman); any historical figure who had such an impact would have left a much larger blip on the radar screen of the Roman Empire.

2. The figure “80” or “more than eighty gospels” is, as far as I know, completely fabricated. There were indeed more gospels than the canonical four (nothing new here, these have long been known and are widely available in the standard collection, The New Testament Apocrypha edited by Hennecke and Schneelmelcher [there are also other editions]). They list about 31 other “gospels,” but that number depends on which texts qualify as “gospels,” and there is a big debate about what the genre is. Some works, even the Gospel of Mary, are thought by some to be more apocalypses than gospels, etc.
Of course, we do not know what we do not know (a major principle of historiography!). So there were probably other gospels we aren’t aware of, but that just compounds the error of the factual-sounding number “80.”

3. No gospels were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, nor any other Christian documents . The author has erroneously placed the Dead Sea Scrolls within The Gnostic Gospels. The Dead Sea Scrolls are not Christian (they are Jewish); the Nag Hammadi texts are not “earliest” (by anyone's reckoning for the whole corpus; some scholars hold out for one document, The Gospel of Thomas, as not necessarily being itself so early, but as containing within it traditions that were earlier, but by no means is even this a consensus position). Hence the statement that “these” (the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea Scrolls] are ... “the earliest Christian records” (the sentence is grammatically in apposition with the one preceding) is false on two counts.

4. Of the Nag Hammadi codexes , only four in the standard edition are called “gospels” (43 other documents are letters, acts, apocalypses, and various other genres). “These documents” (i.e., the Nag Hammadi codexes), far from “speak[ing] of Christ's ministry in very human terms” , are famous for their Gnostic account of Christ as more divine than human. See, e.g., The Gospel of Truth 38: “Now the name of the Father is the Son. It is he who first gave a name to the one who came forth from him, who was himself, and he begot him as a son ...” I could cite many more examples, but the point is that the Gnostic Gospels hardly represent a lower, more human view of Christ/Jesus than the divine Christ supposedly created by Constantine .

5. To say that Mary Magdalene's marriage to Christ is “a matter of historical record” is simply false. Brown’s appeal to an “Aramaic” term to explain a word in the Gospel of Philip (usually translated “companion”) is extremely weak . GPhil is a second- or third-century Coptic translation of a Greek original. Brown is probably trying to make reference to a Syriac term (a dialect of Aramaic) that is supposedly in the mind of the Greek author, who may have written in Syria (there are other references in the document to Syriac terms, but this is not one of them). But even if the three-stage translation equivalents (from Syriac to Greek to Coptic) are allowed (with all the problems that involves), the terms in all three languages still have a range of referents, including “friend” or “companion” (but by no means restricted to “spouse”). The same text does, however, say Jesus used to kiss her often , likely to set her in competition with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” in John’s Gospel. Mary of Magdala was, however, called “a female disciple of the Lord” in the 2nd century Gospel of Peter (which accords with Mark 15:40-41); she was likely a very important early Christian, but nowhere in ancient sources said to be Jesus’ wife, let alone mother of his children.
On the general point that Jesus may have been married, that is possible, by inference from general practice , but there are also reports of first century Jewish ascetics, such as the Essenes, who are said by Philo not to marry (Hypothetica 11.14). By the way, our author also does not reckon with the fact that even the source he appeals to, the Gospel of Mary roots Mary’s special knowledge in a vision Mary had of the Lord , apparently post-resurrection, not in some special relationship with Jesus in his lifetime.

6. On Constantine's invention of the divinity of Jesus and exclusion of all but four canonical gospels: there are thousands of problems here. Perhaps the most egregious error is that in his enthusiasm, Brown has left out the rather inconvenient testimony of the letters of Paul, (historical sources dated to the 50s or early 60s CE) in which Jesus is already the Son of God, one who was the very agent of creation (see 1 Cor 8:6, and many other places). This is hardly the very human Jesus that Brown says was the only view of Jesus for three centuries until Constantine struck it down. To add another witness: Ignatius of Antioch, in letters written ca. 110 CE, refers to Jesus as God (Letter to the Romans, prescript, etc.). Way too much, in other words, is attributed to Constantine here. Also, Constantine did not make Christianity “the official religion” (p.232). He issued edicts for its toleration, and gave it institutional backing, but that did not happen until Theodosius I outlawed non-Christian religion.

7. Constantine did not invent the term “heretic” the word is Greek (it is a loan word in Latin, as Tertullian notes in de praescr. haer 6.2), and it does refer to “choice,” but was used already by Paul and Luke to refer to “divisions or factions” (1 Cor 11:19) or “schools” of thought (Acts 5:17; 26:5). It becomes technical “bad boy” language for “people not us” long before Constantine (Irenaeus in the 2nd, Clement of Alexandria and Origen in the 3rd century).